Archaeology of Doings
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A01=Severin M. Fowles
American Southwest
Ancestral Pueblo
Archaeology
Author_Severin M. Fowles
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=NHK
Category=NL-HB
COP=United States
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Format_Paperback
IMPN=SAR Press
ISBN13=9781934691564
PA=Available
PD=20130430
POP=Santa Fe
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
PUB=SAR Press
Religion
Ritual
Subject=History
Product details
- ISBN 9781934691564
- Format: Paperback
- Weight: 647g
- Dimensions: 177 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 30 Apr 2013
- Publisher: SAR Press
- Publication City/Country: Santa Fe, US
- Product Form: Paperback
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There is an unsettling paradox in the anthropology of religion. A large body of scholarship now questions the universality of “religion” as an analytical category in ethnographic and historical studies. Modern understandings of religion emerged out of a specifically Western genealogy, and noting this, many have grown suspicious of any claim that such understandings can be applied with fidelity to premodern or non-Western contexts. Contemporary archaeologists, in contrast, now use the terms “religion” and “ritual” with greater ease than ever, even though their deeply premodern and fully non-Western objects of study would seem to present the greatest challenges to universal definitions of religion as a distinct sphere of human belief and practice.
In this probing study, Severin Fowles undertakes a sustained critique of religion as an analytical category in archaeological research. Building from a careful dissection of the relationship between secularism, premodernity, and archaeology, Fowles explores just what is at stake in our reconstructions of an enchanted past. In doing so, he offers a detailed examination of the case of Ancestral Pueblo society in the American Southwest, widely regarded in the anthropological literature as a native tradition that was consumed with religious ritual. Moving against this orthodoxy, Fowles provocatively argues that—prior to Catholic missionization during the colonial era—the Pueblo people did not, in fact, have a religion at all. They had, he suggests, something else, something that cannot be easily translated into Western categories. Drawing upon the indigenous vernacular, Fowles concludes that Pueblo “doings” were this something else, and he charts a course toward a new archaeology of doings that moves us far beyond the familiar terrain of premodern religion.
In this probing study, Severin Fowles undertakes a sustained critique of religion as an analytical category in archaeological research. Building from a careful dissection of the relationship between secularism, premodernity, and archaeology, Fowles explores just what is at stake in our reconstructions of an enchanted past. In doing so, he offers a detailed examination of the case of Ancestral Pueblo society in the American Southwest, widely regarded in the anthropological literature as a native tradition that was consumed with religious ritual. Moving against this orthodoxy, Fowles provocatively argues that—prior to Catholic missionization during the colonial era—the Pueblo people did not, in fact, have a religion at all. They had, he suggests, something else, something that cannot be easily translated into Western categories. Drawing upon the indigenous vernacular, Fowles concludes that Pueblo “doings” were this something else, and he charts a course toward a new archaeology of doings that moves us far beyond the familiar terrain of premodern religion.
