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"Indians of Mexico Rites and ceremonies."
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Red Medicine
Patrisia Gonzales addresses \"Red Medicine\" as a system of healing that includes birthing practices, dreaming, and purification rites to re-establish personal and social equilibrium. The book explores Indigenous medicine across North America, with a special emphasis on how Indigenous knowledge has endured and persisted among peoples with a legacy to Mexico. Gonzales combines her lived experience inRed Medicineas an herbalist and traditional birth attendant ith in-depth research into oral traditions, storytelling, and the meanings of symbols to uncover how Indigenous knowledge endures over time. And she shows how this knowledge is now being reclaimed by Chicanos, Mexican Americans and Mexican Indigenous peoples.For Gonzales, a central guiding force in Red Medicine is the principal of regeneration as it is manifested in Spiderwoman. Dating to Pre-Columbian times, the Mesoamerican Weaver/Spiderwoman--the guardian of birth, medicine, and purification rites such as the Nahua sweat bath--exemplifies the interconnected process of rebalancing that transpires throughout life in mental, spiritual and physical manifestations. Gonzales also explains how dreaming is a form of diagnosing in traditional Indigenous medicine and how Indigenous concepts of the body provide insight into healing various kinds of trauma.Gonzales links pre-Columbian thought to contemporary healing practices by examining ancient symbols and their relation to current curative knowledges among Indigenous peoples.Red Medicinesuggests that Indigenous healing systems can usefully point contemporary people back to ancestral teachings and help them reconnect to the dynamics of the natural world.
eBook
Indigenous Mexico engages the 21st century : a multimedia-enabled text
\"This innovative, interactive ethnography employs a range of media to explore the lives of the residents of a village set in the rugged mountains overlooking Mexico City, focusing on how these villagers react and adapt to a rapidly globalized world. Students can view the evolving life of San Jerâonimo Amanalco and its region over the past four decades through print, web-embedded, and e-reader enabled resources. This book -offers a multimedia approach, including archival images and documents, original photographs, audio recordings, and extensive video; -incorporates ethnographic information gathered during the author's four decades of research in the region; -includes community members' responses to the author's research through social media, email, and video-taped comments\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Invisible War
After the conquest of Mexico, colonial authorities attempted to enforce Christian beliefs among indigenous peoples-a project they envisioned as spiritual warfare.The Invisible War assesses this immense but dislocated project by examining all known efforts in Central Mexico to obliterate native devotions of Mesoamerican origin between the 1530s and the late eighteenth century.
The author's innovative interpretation of these efforts is punctuated by three events: the creation of an Inquisition tribunal in Mexico in 1571; the native rebellion of Tehuantepec in 1660; and the emergence of eerily modern strategies for isolating idolaters, teaching Spanish to natives, and obtaining medical proof of sorcery from the 1720s onwards. Rather than depicting native devotions solely from the viewpoint of their colonial codifiers, this book rescues indigenous perspectives on their own beliefs. This is achieved by an analysis of previously unknown or rare ritual texts that circulated in secrecy in Nahua and Zapotec communities through an astute appropriation of European literacy. Tavárez contends that native responses gave rise to a colonial archipelago of faith in which local cosmologies merged insights from Mesoamerican and European beliefs. In the end, idolatry eradication inspired distinct reactions: while Nahua responses focused on epistemological dissent against Christianity, Zapotec strategies privileged confrontations in defense of native cosmologies.
eBook
Commoner Ritual and Ideology in Ancient Mesoamerica
Were most commoners in ancient Mesoamerica poor? In a material sense, yes, probably so. Were they poor in their beliefs and culture? Certainly not, as Commoner Ritual and Ideology in Ancient Mesoamerica demonstrates. This volume explores the ritual life of Mesoamerica's common citizens, inside and outside of the domestic sphere, from Formative through Postclassic periods. Building from the premise that ritual and ideological expression inhered at all levels of society in Mesoamerica, the contributors demonstrate that ideology did not emanate solely from exalted individuals and that commoner ritual expression was not limited to household contexts. Taking an empirical approach to this under-studied and under-theorized area, contributors use material evidence to discover how commoner status conditioned the expression of ideas and values. Revealing complex social hierarchies that varied across time and region, this volume offers theoretical approaches to commoner ideology, religious practice, and sociopolitical organization and builds a framework for future study of the correlation of ritual and ideological expression with social position for Mesoamericanists and archaeologists worldwide.
eBook
Mesoamerican healers
Healing practices in Mesoamerica span a wide range, from traditional folk medicine with roots reaching back into the prehispanic era to westernized biomedicine. These sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing practices have attracted attention from researchers and the public alike, as interest in alternative medicine and holistic healing continues to grow. Responding to this interest, the essays in this book offer a comprehensive, state-of-the-art survey of Mesoamerican healers and medical practices in Mexico and Guatemala. The first two essays describe the work of prehispanic and colonial healers and show how their roles changed over time. The remaining essays look at contemporary healers, including bonesetters, curers, midwives, nurses, physicians, social workers, and spiritualists. Using a variety of theoretical approaches, the authors examine such topics as the intersection of gender and curing, the recruitment of healers and their training, healers’ compensation and workload, types of illnesses treated and recommended treatments, conceptual models used in diagnosis and treatment, and the relationships among healers and between indigenous healers and medical and political authorities.
eBook
Mesoamerican Healers
Healing practices in Mesoamerica span a wide range, from traditional folk medicine with roots reaching back into the prehispanic era to westernized biomedicine. These sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing practices have attracted attention from researchers and the public alike, as interest in alternative medicine and holistic healing continues to grow.
Responding to this interest, the essays in this book offer a comprehensive, state-of-the-art survey of Mesoamerican healers and medical practices in Mexico and Guatemala. The first two essays describe the work of prehispanic and colonial healers and show how their roles changed over time. The remaining essays look at contemporary healers, including bonesetters, curers, midwives, nurses, physicians, social workers, and spiritualists. Using a variety of theoretical approaches, the authors examine such topics as the intersection of gender and curing, the recruitment of healers and their training, healers' compensation and workload, types of illnesses treated and recommended treatments, conceptual models used in diagnosis and treatment, and the relationships among healers and between indigenous healers and medical and political authorities.
eBook
In the Maw of the Earth Monster
As portals to the supernatural realm that creates and animates
the universe, caves have always been held sacred by the peoples of
Mesoamerica. From ancient times to the present, Mesoamericans have
made pilgrimages to caves for ceremonies ranging from rituals of
passage to petitions for rain and a plentiful harvest. So important
were caves to the pre-Hispanic peoples that they are mentioned in
Maya hieroglyphic writing and portrayed in the Central Mexican and
Oaxacan pictorial codices. Many ancient settlements were located in
proximity to caves.
This volume gathers papers from twenty prominent Mesoamerican
archaeologists, linguists, and ethnographers to present a
state-of-the-art survey of ritual cave use in Mesoamerica from
Pre-Columbian times to the present. Organized geographically, the
book examines cave use in Central Mexico, Oaxaca, and the Maya
region. Some reports present detailed site studies, while others
offer new theoretical understandings of cave rituals. As a whole,
the collection validates cave study as the cutting edge of
scientific investigation of indigenous ritual and belief. It
confirms that the indigenous religious system of Mesoamerica was
and still is much more terrestrially focused that has been
generally appreciated.
eBook
Taken from the lips : gender and eros in Mesoamerican religions
This epistemological study, which is based on ancient chronicles and stories, hymns and ritual discourses,epics and poetics, as well as contemporary ethnographic studies of Mesoamerica, has as its salient issues: gender fluidity, eroticism linked to religion, permeable corporeality, embodied thought and the amblings of oral thought.
eBook
The Sun God and the Savior
The first English translation ofGuy Stresser-Péan'stour-de-force presents two decades of fieldwork in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico, where native pre-Hispanic pagan beliefs blended with traditional Catholic evangelization from the sixteenth century and the more recent intrusion of modernism.The Indians of the Sierra Norte de Puebla are deeply devoted to Christianity, but their devotion is seamlessly combined with pagan customs, resulting in a hybrid belief system that is not wholly indigenous, yet not wholly Christian. The syncretism practiced here has led the Totonac and Nahua people to identify Christ with the Sun God, a belief expressed symbolically in ritual practices such as the Dance of the Voladores.Spanning the four centuries from the earliest systematic campaign against Nahua ritual practices - Zumárraga's idolatry trials of 1536-1540 - to the twentieth century, Stresser-Péan contextualizes Nahua and Totonac ritual practices as a series of responses to Christian evangelization and the social reproduction of traditional ritual practices.The Sun God and the Savioris a monumental work on the ethnographic and historical knowledge of the peoples of the Sierra Norte.
eBook