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Some Aspects of Pueblo Indian Religion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 August 2011
Extract
The Pueblo Indians are a group of native American tribes living on the dry mesas of New Mexico and Arizona. They have had a long residence in the same area, perhaps fifteen hundred years, during which time their culture has taken on its characteristic features. Under the pressure of raids by neighboring nomadic tribes who were doubtless attracted by the promise of a rich booty in harvested grain and other foods, the Pueblos developed the form of dwelling which is still typical of them. The present structures, built from one to five stories high, terraced from front to back, should be thought of rather as reminders of habits learned in the distant past when protection from such enemy attack was the chief desideratum in village-building than simply as the survival of a cliff-dwelling stage. There was no single and exclusively cliff-dwelling period.
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1941
References
1 The writer wishes to express his deep indebtedness to Professors Alfred M. Tozzer and Clyde Kluckhohn for their generous interest in the present paper and criticism of it at various stages, and to Professor Arthur D. Nock in whose Seminar its first form was read.
2 E. C. Parsons, Pueblo Indian Religion, 2 vols. (paged continuously), Univ. of Chic. Press, 1939, Map 1 and pp. ix, 1.
3 For details of the relations of the Spaniards with the Indians in this early period, cf. a series of five articles by F. V. Scholes, ‘Church and State in New Mexico’ (1610-1650), in New Mexico Historical Review, Vol. XI, No. 1-Vol. XII, No. 1.
4 There are many cultural variations between the eastern and western towns. The east has been more exposed to American and Mexican influences. Matrilineal inheritance, matrilocal residence, and ceremonial relationships based upon heredity and “trespass” are not so common in the east. For many reasons most of our material concerns the central and western groups, particularly the latter (Zuni, Hopi). For extensive treatment of the variations cf. Parsons, op. cit., pp. 945-967.
5 For a long time now the Pueblos have not been seriously threatened by foreign cultures, except perhaps that of the Ute and Comanche. Their relative security from the outside has probably been the factor which has kept their initiation rites from being more conspicuous. Such puberty rites are self-protective in the sense of widening the breach between your culture and that of your neighbors. Cf. article on ‘Initiation’ by Miller in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 8.
6 This is almost what one feels led to believe from parts of Ruth Benedict's book, Patterns of Culture, Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1934.
7 The Winnebago indeed make popular approval a necessary ethical attribute. Cf. Radin, Crashing Thunder, The Autobiography of an American Indian, Appleton and Co., N. Y., 1926, p. 65, “Be on friendly terms with everyone and then everyone will like you.”
8 Instead of entire lack of individualism among the Zunis, it might put the emphasis more correctly to say, as does Paul Radin, that every man could or was indeed forced to have a public career. Cf. his Primitive Religion, The Viking Press, N. Y., 1937, pp. 234-239.
9 Thus if a dancer is to pass a sacred stick to another participant, he may withdraw it three times and actually hand it over only on the fourth gesture. Cf. Parsons, op. cit., pp. 369, 774.
10 Win. James, in his essay on ‘The Sentiment of Rationality,’ says “Philosophers … try to attain a conception of things which shall on the whole be more rational than the rather fragmentary and chaotic one which everyone by gift of nature carries about with him. under his hat.” He recognizes the rationality of his ideas by “certain subjective marks by which it affects him. When he gets the marks he may know that he has got the rationality.” Some of these “marks of rationality” are: a strong feeling of ease, peace, and rest, and a lively relief and pleasure.
11 The question of the extent of participation in the ceremonial life is difficult to answer from the scanty literature on the subject. The only adequate treatments of the problem which I have seen concern the neighboring Navaho rather than the Pueblo group. They are by Professor Clyde Kluckhohn, ‘Participation in Ceremonials in a Navaho Community,’ American Anthropologist, Vol. 40, No. 3, 1938, and an extension of the same subject in the Harvard Theological Review, Vol. XXXII, No. 1, 1939, ‘Some Personal and Social Aspects of Navaho Ceremonial Practice.’
12 A Chinese student has given a good corrective for the eloquence of Benedict and Bunzel on the subject of non-ambition and the submersion of the individual among the Zuni. The problem of being ambitious in a face-to-face society is different from what it is with us. We may inflate our personal claims of ability and knowledge because we can remain happily unknown even to residents on our own street. There is a pattern of distinction among the Pueblos, but it is their pattern and not ours. If you are going to be one of them, you just have to do things in their way. Cf. Li-An-Che, ‘Zuni—Some Observations and Queries,’ Amer. Anthr., Vol. 39, 1937, pp. 62-76.
13 W. I. Thomas, Primitive Behavior, McGraw-Hill, N. Y., 1937. To this useful book I owe the phrase “pattern of distinction,” pp. 358-416.
14 Ibid., p. 377.
15 Cf. Kennard & Earle, Hopi Kachinas, J. J. Augustin, Publ., N. Y., 1935, for beautiful colored drawings of the Kachinas.
16 Crow-Wing, A Pueblo Indian Journal, p. 91, 1920-21 (Edit, by E. C. Parsons), Memoirs of Amer. Anthr. Assoc., No. 32, 1935.
17 The Zuni have a scalp ceremony which converts even the enemy dead into rainmakers. Cf. Parsons, op. cit., p. 171. Another trace of the ritual disposition of the enemy is in the breaking of baskets and pottery as they sing, “In this way burn the Navaho camp.” Cf. Stevenson, op. cit., p. 97.
18 Professor Kluckhohn was in general agreement with this line of thought, but he also reminded me how intensely angry the Zuni were very recently on one occasion when they were returning in procession from a rare ceremony which an unusually long dry spell had made necessary for the first time in twenty years. A thoughtless person interrupted the procession by driving right across its path in his automobile. The hot indignation of the Indians showed how seriously they considered the business of rain-making.
19 To use the phrase of Thomas, Primitive Behavior, pp. 8 ff.
20 My major sources in this section are Parsons, op. cit., and Bunzel, ‘Introduction to Zuni Ceremonialism,’ Bureau of Amer. Ethn., Ann. Report No. 47, 1929.
21 Parsons, op. cit., pp. 419-423.
22 Cf. Bunzel, op. cit., p. 489.
23 Parsons, op. cit., p. 208.
24 In the study of funeral ritual we should especially consider the way in which it serves to canalize instinctive emotions without reducing their intensity, but always trying to direct them beyond the moment of tragic despair to something like a reinforcement of the will to live. Cf. Malinowski, ‘Magic, Science, and Religion’ in Science, Religion, and Reality, ed. J. Needham, Macmillan, N. Y., 1925, p. 51.
25 When you utter a dead man's name, you call up a mental image of him. He is then in a sense still present, but in a peculiarly intractable and disconcerting way. This tenuous presence of the dead man is precisely what funeral ritual is intended to overcome. It all means, “He is not here.” Hence the tabu after death on the man's name.
26 Parsons, op. cit., p. 73.
27 Parsons, op. cit., p. 74.
28 Kroeber, ‘Disposal of the Dead,’ Amer. Anthr., Vol. 29 (1927). Cf. also Nock's article, ‘Cremation and Burial in the Roman Empire,’ Harvard Theological Review, Vol. XXV, No. 4, 1932, pp. 357 ff.
29 Van Gennep, Les Rites de Passage, Paris, 1909, p. 14. For the idea of life as a house with many rooms cf. Tozzer, Social Origins and Social Continuities, Macmillan, N. Y., 1925, p. 88.
30 Cf. L. White, ‘The Acoma Indians,’ Ann. Rep. of the Bur. of Amer. Ethn., No. 47, 1929-1930, pp. 132 ff.
31 Parsons, op. cit., p. 207.
32 Ibid., p. 216. The retribution motif is in general alien. It should not be confused with a caste-idea connected with the dead (in societies where social distinctions are strong among the living). With the Pueblos there is very little social differentiation although some are more valuable than others. Elsewhere, e.g. among certain Mexican tribes, the manner of death influences the position one will enjoy in the next world. Those who die in childbirth and those killed by lightning or by drowning go to the choicest places. Cf. Tozzer, Social Origins, p. 123.
33 At Havasupai (not Pueblo) there is an interesting rite to be performed when one dreams of the dead. On awaking a man will say, “It is bad to dream of the dead, so go away.” Then he breathes into his hands and brushes them down over his face and body. “So I brush the dream away into the night.” Parsons, op. cit., p. 423, quoted from Spier, ‘Havasupai Ethnology,’ Anthr. Papers of the Amer. Mus. of Nat. Hist., Vol. XIX, Part iii, pp. 285, 334.
34 Quoted in a relevant chapter by W. L. Sperry, Reality in Worship, Macmillan, N. Y., 1925, p. 137.
35 Cf. Parsons, op. cit., p. 941, for interesting personal notes on this “characteristic assumption of homogeneity or lack of any conception of heterogeneity.”
36 Bunzel, Introduction to Zuni Ceremonialism, p. 494. The Zuni sometimes discount the religion of the missionaries who constantly preach in the Plaza. They cannot think much of Jesus, they say, because they talk so much about him.
37 Cf. Boas, ‘The Idea of the Future Life Among Primitive Tribes’ in Race, Language, and Culture, N. Y., 1940, pp. 596-607.
38 It is probably not necessary to postulate commercial relations with Africa or India!
39 This bifurcation is dramatized at birth in some instances where the actual delivery of a child takes place on a bed of heated sand (Zuni, Aeoma, Sia). Parsons, p. 46.
40 Cf. Voth, ‘Notes on the Eagle Cult of the Hopi,’ Field Mus. of Nat. Hist., Anthr. Series, Vol. XI, 1912.
41 Voth, op. cit., pp. 109-119.