Native Religions and Cultures of North America : Anthropology of the Sacred

This volume contains insightful essays on significant spiritual moments in eight different Native American cultures: Absaroke/Crow, Creek/Muskogee, Lakota, Mescalero Apache Navajo, Tlingit, Yup'ik, and Yurok. For more than a century, the sacred has been the subject of study. Associated with the names of Emile Durkheim, Rudolf Otto, and Mircea Eliade, religious anthropology, or anthropology of the sacred, today comprises many disciplines: among them, pre-history, cultural history, history of religions, ethnology, sociology, paleoanthropology, and linguistics. It is united in its focus on the human being as the acting subject of the experience of the sacred. Analyzing the terminology of the sacred in cultures around the world, religious anthropology shows how homo religiosus has created distinctive vocabularies suited to the lived experience of the sacred in diverse ecological, historical, and social settings. These vocabularies have disclosed remarkable differences among them but also striking patterns of similarity. They also reveal the deeply religious nature of so many of the key expressions of culture, whether in art, music, performance, life passage, social transformation, or calendrical transition.Using the perspectives and methods of religious anthropology, Native Religions and Cultures of North America provides a comprehensive summary of the indigenous religions anti cultures of North America. In ten chapters, it describes the modalities or the sacred among the Absaroke/Crow, Mohawk/Iroquois, Creek (Muskogee), Abenaki, Oglala, Navajo, Apache, Inuit, Kwakiutl, and the natives or Northwestern California. Introduction / Lawrence Sullivan -- Renewal as discourse and discourse as renewal in Native northwestern California / Thomas Buckley -- Traditional ways and contemporary vitality: Absaroke/Crow / John A. Grim -- Rebalancing the world in the contradictions of history: Creek/Muskogee / Joel W. Martin -- Wiping the tears: Lakota religion in the twenty-first century / William K. Powers -- The continuous renewal of sacred relations: Navajo religion / Trudy Griffin-Pierce -- In the space between earth and sky: contemporary Mescalero Apache ceremonialism / Ines Talamantez -- Synchretism, revival, and reinvention: Tlingit religion, Pre- and Postcontact / Richard Dauenhauer -- Eye of the dance: spiritual life of the Central Yup’ik Eskimos / Ann Fienup-Riordan -- Images of the sacred in Native North American literature / Franco Meli.