A Spanish conquistador who posed as a sorcerer and cured native Americans as he trekked across an unknown wilderness; a French Jesuit who conjured rain clouds in order to impress his indigenous flock with the potency of Christian magic; a Puritan minister who healed a native chief in order to win him for God; a Mexican noble who was burned at the stake for resisting the gentle Franciscan friars; an Andean chief who was haunted by nightmares in which his native gods did battle with the Christian Father; a Huron magician who vied with French missionaries over spirits of the night in a shaking tent ceremony. These are a few of the individuals whose struggles are brought to life in the pages of this book. Their experiences, among others, reveal what happened when Christianity came into contact with Native American religions in three distinct regions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonial America: Spanish, French and British.
Spiritual Encounters is a comparative and theoretically informed look at the religious interactions between Native and colonial European cultures throughout the Americas. Religion was one of the most contentious, dramatic, and complex arenas of confrontation between Natives and Europeans during the colonial era. This volume fully explores the significance of colonial religious encounters. Case studies, organized by theme, showcase previously unexamined sources and offer interpretations that shed new light on Native-European religious encounters in the New World. One group of studies examines the extent to which Native peoples internalized Christianity and the cultural mechanisms that enabled them to do so. Other chapters assess in detail the often uneasy relationship between Christianity and coexisting indigenous religious practices involving sorcery and healing. A third set of essays looks at the broader political and economic forces underlying Native-colonial religious encounters. An introduction and epilogue by the editors provide valuable summaries of the broad patterns characterizing the religious interactions between the West and the Other in the colonial Americas.
"This book debunks the so-called apotheosis myth that Indigenous peoples across the Americas worshipped Europeans as gods during the early modern period. This accessible synthesis will interest students and scholars of European expansion and colonialism, Native American history, the history of myths, and shamanism"--
The First Great Awakening was a time of heightened religious activity in the colonial New England. Among those whom the English settlers tried to convert to Christianity were the region's native peoples. In this book, Linford Fisher tells the gripping story of American Indians' attempts to wrestle with the ongoing realities of colonialism between the 1670s and 1820. In particular, he looks at how some members of previously unevangelized Indian communities in Connecticut, Rhode Island, western Massachusetts, and Long Island adopted Christian practices, often joining local Congregational churches and receiving baptism. Far from passively sliding into the cultural and physical landscape after King Philip's War, he argues, Native individuals and communities actively tapped into transatlantic structures of power to protect their land rights, welcomed educational opportunities for their children, and joined local white churches. Religion repeatedly stood at the center of these points of cultural engagement, often in hotly contested ways. Although these Native groups had successfully resisted evangelization in the seventeenth century, by the eighteenth century they showed an increasing interest in education and religion. Their sporadic participation in the First Great Awakening marked a continuation of prior forms of cultural engagement. More surprisingly, however, in the decades after the Awakening, Native individuals and sub-groups asserted their religious and cultural autonomy to even greater degrees by leaving English churches and forming their own Indian Separate churches. In the realm of education, too, Natives increasingly took control, preferring local reservation schools and demanding Indian teachers whenever possible. In the 1780s, two small groups of Christian Indians moved to New York and founded new Christian Indian settlements. But the majority of New England Natives-even those who affiliated with Christianity-chose to remain in New England, continuing to assert their own autonomous existence through leasing land, farming, and working on and off the reservations. While Indian involvement in the Great Awakening has often been seen as total and complete conversion, Fisher's analysis of church records, court documents, and correspondence reveals a more complex reality. Placing the Awakening in context of land loss and the ongoing struggle for cultural autonomy in the eighteenth century casts it as another step in the ongoing, tentative engagement of native peoples with Christian ideas and institutions in the colonial world. Charting this untold story of the Great Awakening and the resultant rise of an Indian Separatism and its effects on Indian cultures as a whole, this gracefully written book challenges long-held notions about religion and Native-Anglo-American interaction
The role of the religious specialist in Andean cultures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was a complicated one, balanced between local traditions and the culture of the Spanish. In The Power of Huacas, Claudia Brosseder reconstructs the dynamic interaction between religious specialists and the colonial world that unfolded around them, considering how the discourse about religion shifted on both sides of the Spanish and Andean relationship in complex and unexpected ways. In The Power of Huacas, Brosseder examines evidence of transcultural exchange through religious history, anthropology, and cultural studies. Taking Andean religious specialists—or hechizeros (sorcerers) in colonial Spanish terminology—as a starting point, she considers the different ways in which Andeans and Spaniards thought about key cultural and religious concepts. Unlike previous studies, this important book fully outlines both sides of the colonial relationship; Brosseder uses extensive archival research in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Spain, Italy, and the United States, as well as careful analysis of archaeological and art historical objects, to present the Andean religious worldview of the period on equal footing with that of the Spanish. Throughout the colonial period, she argues, Andean religious specialists retained their own unique logic, which encompassed specific ideas about holiness, nature, sickness, and social harmony. The Power of Huacas deepens our understanding of the complexities of assimilation, showing that, within the maelstrom of transcultural exchange in the Spanish Americas, European paradigms ultimately changed more than Andean ones.
Over the course of some two centuries following the conquests and consolidations of Spanish rule in the Americas during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—the period designated as the Baroque—new cultural forms sprang from the cross-fertilization of Spanish, Amerindian, and African traditions. This dynamism of motion, relocation, and mutation changed things not only in Spanish America, but also in Spain, creating a transatlantic Hispanic world with new understandings of personhood, place, foodstuffs, music, animals, ownership, money and objects of value, beauty, human nature, divinity and the sacred, cultural proclivities—a whole lexikon of things in motion, variation, and relation to one another. Featuring the most creative thinking by the foremost scholars across a number of disciplines, the Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque is a uniquely wide-ranging and sustained exploration of the profound cultural transfers and transformations that define the transatlantic Spanish world in the Baroque era. Pairs of authors—one treating the peninsular Spanish kingdoms, the other those of the Americas—provocatively investigate over forty key concepts, ranging from material objects to metaphysical notions. Illuminating difference as much as complementarity, departure as much as continuity, the book captures a dynamic universe of meanings in the various midst of its own re-creations. The Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque joins leading work in a number of intersecting fields and will fire new research—it is the indispensible starting point for all serious scholars of the early modern Spanish world.
A study into how native Amazonians experienced and shaped life in missions in its different facets. The book focuses on the missions of Maynas during the Jesuit administration, from 1638 to 1768.
Introduction: A Royal Visit -- 1:Lorenz Heidenreich (1480-1557), Oswald Pergener (1490s-1546) and the Many Faces of the Lusatian Reformation -- 2:Johannes Hass (c. 1476-1544): History Writing and Divine Intervention in the Early Reformation -- 3:Andreas Günther (1502-1570): Religion, Politics and Power in the Lusatian League -- 4:Bartholomäus Scultetus (1540-1614): Learning, Teaching and Remembering in the Towns of the Lusatian League -- 5:Johann Leisentrit (1527-1586): Redefining Catholicism in a Lutheran Region -- 6:Sigismund Suevus (1526-1596): Sharing Spaces and Objects -- 7:Martin Moller (1547-1606): Possibilities and Limits of Toleration -- 8:Friedrich Fischer (1558-1623): Repositioning Lutheranism and Negotiating Ways Forward -- Conclusion: The Lusatian Reformation.
In Moravian Soundscapes, Sarah Eyerly contends that the study of sound is integral to understanding the interactions between German Moravian missionaries and Native communities in early Pennsylvania. In the mid-18th century, when the frontier between settler and Native communities was a shifting spatial and cultural borderland, sound mattered. People listened carefully to each other and the world around them. In Moravian communities, cultures of hearing and listening encompassed and also superseded musical traditions such as song and hymnody. Complex biophonic, geophonic, and anthrophonic acoustic environments—or soundscapes—characterized daily life in Moravian settlements such as Bethlehem, Nain, Gnadenhütten, and Friedenshütten. Through detailed analyses and historically informed recreations of Moravian communal, environmental, and religious soundscapes and their attendant hymn traditions, Moravian Soundscapes explores how sounds—musical and nonmusical, human and nonhuman—shaped the Moravians' religious culture. Combined with access to an interactive website that immerses the reader in mid-18th century Pennsylvania, and framed with an autobiographical narrative, Moravian Soundscapes recovers the roles of sound and music in Moravian communities and provides a road map for similar studies of other places and religious traditions in the future.
A cutting-edge introduction to contemporary religious studies theory, connecting theory to data. This innovative coursebook introduces students to interdisciplinary theoretical tools for understanding contemporary religiously diverse societies—both Western and non-Western. Using a case-study model, the text considers: A wide and diverse array of contemporary issues, questions, and critical approaches to the study of religion relevant to students and scholars A variety of theoretical approaches, including decolonial, feminist, hermeneutical, poststructuralist, and phenomenological analyses Current debates on whether the term "religion" is meaningful Many key issues about the study of religion, including the insider-outsider debate, material religion, and lived religion Plural and religiously diverse societies, including the theological ideas of traditions and the political and social questions that arise for those living alongside adherents of other religions Understanding Religion is designed to provide a strong foundation for instructors to explore the ideas presented in each chapter in multiple ways, engage students in meaningful activities in the classroom, and integrate additional material into their lectures. Students will gain the tools to apply specific methods from a variety of disciplines to analyze the social, political, spiritual, and cultural aspects of religions. Its unique pedagogical design means it can be used from undergraduate- to postgraduate-level courses.
