Native Religions & Cultures of North America

by Sullivan, Lawrence

• ISBN13: 9780826410849
• ISBN10: 0826410847
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-05-01
• Publisher: Continuum Intl Pub Group

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(33)
Lawrence Sullivan
Renewal as Discourse and Discourse as Renewal in Native Northwestern California	33	(20)
Thomas Buckley
Traditional Ways and Contemporary Vitality: Absaroke/Crow	53	(32)
John A. Grim
Rebalancing the World in the Contradictions of History: Creek/Muskogee	85	(19)
Joel W. Martin
Wiping the Tears: Lakota Religion in the Twenty-first Century	104	(17)
William K. Powers
The Continuous Renewal of Sacred Relations: Navajo Religion	121	(21)
Trudy Griffin-Pierce
In the Space between Earth and Sky: Contemporary Mescalero Apache Ceremonialism	142	(18)
Ines Talamantez
Synchretism, Revival, and Reinvention: Tlingit Religion, Pre- and Postcontact	160	(21)
Richard Dauenhauer
Eye of the Dance: Spiritual Life of the Central Yup'ik Eskimos	181	(27)
Ann Fienup-Riordan
Images of the Sacred in Native North American Literature	208	(31)
Franco Meli
Contributors	239	(2)
Index	241