Spiritual Encounters

by Griffiths, Nicholas; Cervantes, Fernando

• ISBN13: 9780803270817
• ISBN10: 080327081X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-02-01
• Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr

Summary

Spiritual Encountersis 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.

Author Biography

Nicholas Griffiths is the deputy department head of Hispanic studies at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of The Cross and the Serpent: Religious Repression and Resurgence in Colonial Peru. Fernando Cervantes is a lecturer in the department of Hispanic, Portuguese, and Latin American studies at the University of Bristol. He is the author of The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	ix
Introduction	1	(42)
Nicholas Griffiths
1 Spreading the Word: missionaries, conversion and circulation in the northeast	43	(22)
David Murray
2 `The kindness of the blessed Virgin': faith, succour, and the cult of Mary among Christian Hurons and Iroquois in seventeenth-century New France	65	(26)
William B. Hart
3 `Here is another marvel': Marian miracle narratives in a Nahuatl manuscript	91	(25)
Louise M. Burkhart
4 Cultural boundaries between adaptation and defiance: the mission communities of northwestern New Spain	116	(20)
Cynthia Radding
5 `Telling lives': confessional autobiography and the reconstruction of the Nahua self	136	(27)
J. Jorge Klor de Alva
6 Contesting the power to heal: angels, demons and plants in colonial Mexico	163	(22)
Osvaldo F. Pardo
7 Andean curanderos and their repressors: the persecution of native healing in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Peru	185	(13)
Nicholas Griffiths
8 El callejon de la soledad: vectors of cultural hybridity in seventeenth-century Lima	198	(32)
Alejandra B. Osorio
9 Repression and cultural change: the `Extirpation of Idolatry' in colonial Peru	230	(25)
Iris Gareis
10 `Chicha in the chalice': spiritual conflict in Spanish American mission culture	255	(21)
Lance Grahn
Epilogue: the middle ground	276	(10)
Fernando Cervantes
Index	286