WRPR 155 - Origin Stories: Initiations, Identities, and Indigenous Imagination (HC)

Drawing on historical, literary, and anthropological methodologies, Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World explores the meaning of an 'Atlantic community' and challenges the conventional boundaries of nation-bound inquiry in the humanities. The volume's contributors focus on European, indigenous, Creole, African, and mestiza women's interactions with shifting paradigms of Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, and syncretic beliefs throughout the Atlantic basin to highlight the unique cultural dynamics of the Atlantic.Mapping these themes with a diverse range of individual, imperial, and institutional cases, the essays include studies of a Peruvian nun's battle against a black demon, an African slave whose knowledge of the Bible stunned white men, and native American healers accused of witchcraft. Through a thoughtful consideration of the complexity of the religious landscape of the Atlantic basin, the collection provides an enriching portrayal of the intriguing interplay between religion, gender, ethnicity, and authority in the early modern Atlantic world.

Caribbean women - black, white and brown, free and enslaved, migrants and creoles, rich and poor - are assembled in this book and their lives examined as they battled both against male domination and among themselves for social advantage. Females challenged each other for monopoly access to and use of terms such as 'woman' and 'feminine' in the process widening the existing social and ethnic divisions among themselves, and thus fragmenting their collective search for autonomy. Hilary Beckles uses the method of narrative biography with its appealing sense of immediacy of women's language, script and social politics, to expose the gender order of Caribbean slave society as it determined and defined the everyday lives of women. He also seeks to explore the effectiveness of women's actions as they searched for freedom, material betterment, justice and social security. Understanding how gender is socially determined, understood and lived serves to illuminate why and how some women subscribed to the institutional culture of patriarchy while others launched discreet missions of self-empowerment and collective liberation. This book is about feminism in action, not theorized by post-modern radicals, but by women who actively sought to create spaces and build structures within self-conceived visions of social advancement.

Traditions of sacrifice exist in almost every human culture and often embody a society's most meaningful religious and symbolic acts. Ritual violence was particularly varied and enduring in the prehistoric South American Andes, where human lives, animals, and material objects were sacrificed in secular rites or as offerings to the divine. Spectacular discoveries of sacrificial sites containing the victims of violent rituals have drawn ever-increasing attention to ritual sacrifice within Andean archaeology. Responding to this interest, this volume provides the first regional overview of ritual killing on the pre-Hispanic north coast of Peru, where distinct forms and diverse trajectories of ritual violence developed during the final 1,800 years of prehistory. Presenting original research that blends empirical approaches, iconographic interpretations, and contextual analyses, the contributors address four linked themes--the historical development and regional variation of north coast sacrifice from the early first millennium AD to the European conquest; a continuum of ritual violence that spans people, animals, and objects; the broader ritual world of sacrifice, including rites both before and after violent offering; and the use of diverse scientific tools, archaeological information, and theoretical interpretations to study sacrifice. This research proposes a wide range of new questions that will shape the research agenda in the coming decades, while fostering a nuanced, scientific, and humanized approach to the archaeology of ritual violence that is applicable to archaeological contexts around the world.

Reacting to the rising numbers of mixed-blood (Spanish-Indian-Black African) people in its New Spain colony, the 18th-century Bourbon government of Spain attempted to categorize and control its colonial subjects through increasing social regulation of their bodies and the spaces they inhabited. The discourse of calidad (status) and raza (lineage) on which the regulations were based also found expression in the visual culture of New Spain, particularly in the unique genre of casta paintings, which purported to portray discrete categories of mixed-blood plebeians. religious documents of the period, this book focuses on 18th-century portraiture and casta paintings to understand how the people and spaces of New Spain were conceptualized and visualized. The author explains how these visual practices emphasized a seeming realism that constructed colonial bodies - elite and non-elite - as knowable and visible. At the same time, however, she argues that the chaotic specificity of the lives and lived conditions in 18th-century New Spain belied the illusion of social orderliness and totality narrated in its visual art. Ultimately, she concludes, the inherent ambiguity of the colonial body and its spaces brought chaos to all dreams of order.

Spaniards in the Colonial Empire traces the privileges, prejudices, and conflicts between American-born and European-born Spaniards, within the Spanish colonies in the Americas from the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries.   Covers three centuries of Spanish colonial power, beginning in the sixteenth century  Explores social tension between creole and peninsular factions, connecting this friction with later colonial bids for independence  Draws on recent research by Spanish and Spanish-American historians as well as Anglophone scholars  Includes some coverage of Brazil and British colonies