Spiritual Encounters

by Griffiths, Nicholas; Cervantes, Fernando

• ISBN13: 9781902459011
• ISBN10: 1902459016
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-01-01
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Encounters between religions and the resulting questions pertaining to belief and faith are among the most intriguing subjects with which scholars grapple. How do people adjust, accommodate, resist, reinterpret and harmonize different systems of belief? Do religious conversions often mask more worldly concerns such as political power, economic well being, and the ability to control one's destiny? Specifically adopting a cross-hemispheric approach, this volume draws on experiences of religious change principally in hispanophone America, but also in anglophone and francophone America, in order to transcend cultural frontiers, illuminate the circumstances and conditions which determined the form that spiritual encounters took across the hemisphere, and encourage a comparative approach.
It will prove invaluable to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics interested in anthropology, ethnohistory, the social history of religion, the history of Christianity and of missions, the history of native religions and the history of colonial America.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors
Introduction	p. 1
Spreading the Word: missionaries, conversion and circulation in the northeast	p. 43
'The kindness of the blessed Virgin': faith, succour, and the cult of Mary among Christian Hurons and Iroquois in seventeenth-century New France	p. 65
'Here is another marvel': Marian miracle narratives in a Nahuatl manuscript	p. 91
Cultural boundaries between adaptation and defiance: the mission communities of northwestern New Spain	p. 116
'Telling lives': confessional autobiography and the reconstruction of the Nahua self	p. 136
Contesting the power to heal: angels, demons and plants in colonial Mexico	p. 163
Andean curanderos and their repressors: the persecution of native healing in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Peru	p. 185
El callejon de la soledad: vectors of cultural hybridity in seventeenth-century Lima	p. 198
Repression and cultural change: the 'Extirpation of Idolatry' in colonial Peru	p. 230
'Chicha in the chalice': spiritual conflict in Spanish American mission culture	p. 255
Epilogue: the middle ground	p. 276
Index	p. 286
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