CONCLUSION. Taken together historical and poststructural-
ist approaches have had the singular effect of undermining
the integrity and coherency of the very categories “religion”
and “indigenous” that animated so much earlier anthropolo-
gy in the region. For a majority of the anthropologists and
historians working in South America, it is no longer possible
to speak of indigenous communities, practices, identities, or
beliefs without situating them in broader regional and na-
tional histories. As the notion of indigenous religion becomes
unhinged from its original location in the pristine, or sup-
posedly pristine, life of the “Indian community,” it has be-
come possible for scholars to think critically and historically
about the place of different Christian belief systems in South
American indigenous life. Anthropologists have begun to
study the Protestant evangelical and Catholic charismatic
sects that have become so prominent in many indigenous
communities of South America. Wachtel, Antoinette
Fioravanti-Molinié, and others have analyzed the persistence
of indigenous religious beliefs regarding threatening ñakaqs,
or spirits who extract body fat, in contexts of uncertainty and
change, including among urban indigenous groups. Similar-
ly the category of “popular Catholicism” that was first intro-
duced by Liberation theologists in the aftermth of Vactican
II has become a stable of anthropological writing about in-
digenous religion, allowing for a similar extension of the cat-
egory of indigenous religion to encompass a broader array of
ritual practices and beliefs that are more consonant with the
actual experiences of modern indigenous people living in na-
tion states.
An important inspiration for studies focused on subal-
tern or indigenous groups is the new work by historians such
as Sabine MacCormack on the philosophical and theological
origins of South American notions of idolatry, redemption,
and the miracle and Kenneth Mills on the complex political
and religious forces behind the sixteenth-century campaigns
against indigenous “idolatry.” Through such works it be-
comes possible to appreciate the long route that has been tra-
versed from early scholarly obsessions with locating a pure
indigenous religion to the more historically grounded schol-
arship in which religious practices are at once seen as fully,
even paradigmatically modern, without for that reason ceas-
ing to be any less “indigenous.”
SEE ALSO Ge Mythology; Jensen, Adolf E.; Preuss, Konrad
T.; Structuralism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Catherine J. The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity
in an Andean Community. Washington, D.C., 1988. A sensi-
tive ethnography of daily life in the Peruvian Andes, focused
on the ritualized use of coca. It highlights the pervasive pres-
ence of the religious ideals and attachment to landscape that
shape social interaction.
Duviols, Pierre. La lutte contre les religions autochtones dans le Pérou
colonial: “L’extirpation de l’idolâtrie,” entre 1532 et 1660.
Lima, Peru, 1971. A historical study of the Catholic
Church’s campaign against Andean religions. It contains ar-
chival materials that describe religious practices of the time
as well as an analysis of the Spaniards’ motives for initiating
the campaign.
Krickeberg, Walter, et al. Pre-Columbian American Religions.
Translated by Stanley Davis. London, 1968. Contains survey
articles by Hermann Trimborn and Otto Zerries. Informa-
tive for its breadth of material, it has a sample of the types
of analyses used by historians of religion in the German tra-
dition.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Mythologiques. 4 vols. Paris, 1964–1971.
Translated into English by John Weightman and Doreen
Weightman as Introduction to a Science of Mythology. 3 vols.
New York, 1969. A collection and analysis of myths from the
Western Hemisphere by the originator of structuralist meth-
od in anthropology. It is best read along with Lévi-Strauss’s
earlier works, Tristes Tropiques (New York, 1974) and Struc-
tural Anthropology, 2 vols. (New York, 1963).
MacCormack, Sabine. Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagina-
tion in Early Colonial Peru. Princeton, N.J., 1991.
Métraux, Alfred. Religions et magies indiennes d’Amérique du Sud:
Édition posthume établie par Simone Dreyfus. Paris, 1967.
Métraux was one of the founding figures of Americanist
studies. This collection of his articles covers nearly all the
areas in which he did fieldwork, including Peru (Quechua),
Bolivia (Uro-Chipaya and Aymara), the Argentinian Chaco
(Guaraní), Chile (Mapuche), and Brazil (Tupi).
Mills, Kenneth. Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion
and Extirpation, 1640–1750. Princeton, N.J., 1997.
Nimuendajú, Curt. The Eastern Timbira. Translated and edited
by Robert H. Lowie. Berkeley, Calif., 1946. One of several
detailed descriptive monographs of lowland social organiza-
tion and religion produced by Nimuendajú, a German field-
worker who lived most of his life among the indigenous peo-
ples of south-central Brazil and who adopted an indigenous
surname.
Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo. Amazonian Cosmos: The Sexual and
Religious Symbolism of the Tukano Indians. Chicago, 1971. A
Freudian and ecological analysis of the lowland cosmology
(Tucano or Desána of the Vaupés River, Colombia) by one
of Colombia’s leading anthropologists. His other books, Los
Kogi: Una tribu de la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colom-
bia, 2 vols. (Bogotá, Colombia, 1950–1951), and The Sha-
man and the Jaguar: A Study of Narcotic Drugs among the In-
dians of Columbia (Philadelphia, 1975) are also considered
classics in South American religious studies.
Steward, Julian H., ed. The Handbook of South American Indians.
7 vols. Washington, D.C., 1946–1959. A compilation of ar-
ticles by archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists that
provides the best overall introduction to the variety of reli-
gious forms in South America as well as to the theoretical ap-
proaches that had, up until the time of the Handbook’s publi-
cation, informed their study. Its seven volumes are divided
by geographic area, with two volumes devoted to compara-
tive studies.
Sullivan, Lawrence E. Icanchu’s Drum: An Orientation to Meaning
in South American Religions. New York, 1988. A wide-
reaching survey of the religions of South America from the
perspective of a historical of religions. It contains an unprece-
dentedly thorough bibliography.8598 SOUTH AMERICAN INDIAN RELIGIONS: HISTORY OF STUDY