The Zuni Enigma A Native American People's Possible Japanese Connection

by Davis, Nancy Yaw

• ISBN13: 9780393322309
• ISBN10: 0393322300
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-11-17
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Summary

The Zuni of America's Southwest occupy a special place in Native American culture and ethnography. Their language, religion, and blood type are startlingly different from all other tribes. Most puzzling, some of these Zuni attributes have much in common with the people of Japan. In a book with groundbreaking implications, Nancy Yaw Davis examines the evidence underscoring the Zuni enigma and suggests the circumstances that may have led Japanese on a religious quest -- searching for the legendary "middle world" of Buddhism -- a quest across the Pacific to the American Southwest, where they merged with the Zuni over seven hundred years ago. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Nancy Yaw Davis holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Washington. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska

Table of Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition	vii
List of Illustrations	xi
Acknowledgments	xv
Foreword	xix
Edmund J. Ladd
Shiwi
Preface	xxiii
Introduction	xxv
Portrait of a Pueblo	3	(18)
Search for the Middle of the World	21	(21)
Links across the Desert	42	(18)
Coasts and Currents	60	(24)
Ships and Shoals	84	(19)
Teeth and Bones, Blood and Disease	103	(19)
Words and Wanderers	122	(24)
Kinship and Kachinas: Cultural Consequences of Social Mergers	146	(22)
Cosmology and Religion: Kokko and Kami	168	(25)
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword Revisited	193	(20)
Afterword	213	(4)
Endnotes	217	(50)
Bibliography	267	(28)
Credits	295	(4)
Index	299