ual, and mythologies of the Indians, these men were interest-
ed in classifying the cultures and religions they found by
tracing their interrelationships and linguistic affiliations. In
their writings therefore a detailed account of religion is often
subordinated to an overriding interest in linguistic data and
material culture. For example, detailed studies of shamanism
were produced by the Scandinavian ethnographers Rafael
Karsten, Henri Wassen, and Erland Nordenskiöld as part of
a broader comparative examination of the material culture
of South America. Of these early ethnographers, the German
anthropologist Curt Nimuendajú stands out both for the ex-
tent of his fieldwork among the Ge, Boróro, Apinagé, Tu-
cano, and Tupi tribes and for the degree to which his inter-
ests in describing these groups focused on their religious and
ritual life. Other important sources on religious practices
during this period are provided in the accounts of missiona-
ries and priests, such as Bernadino de Nino (1912) in Bolivia,
Gaspar de Pinelli (1924) in Colombia, and Antonio Colbac-
chini and Cesar Albisetti (1907–1942) in Brazil.
A second group that influenced early Americanist ap-
proaches to religion was composed of ethnohistorians and ar-
chaeologists. Often hailed as the first true Americanists to
work in the Southern Hemisphere, the archaeologists left a
distinctive imprint on South American studies by the nature
of their specialty: the study of the pre-Spanish Andean past.
Excavations, surveys, and analyses of previously unstudied
sites in both coastal and highland Peru by Max Uhle and Ad-
olph Bandelier were followed by the more detailed chrono-
logical studies of Alfred Kroeber, Junius Bird, Wendell Ben-
nett, and John Rowe. Although the chronologies and site
inventories constructed by these archaeologists did not focus
on religion per se, the temple structures, burials, offerings,
textiles, ceramics, and other ritual paraphernalia they un-
earthed provided new data on the importance of religion in
pre-Columbian social organization and political evolution.
Interpretation of this material was facilitated by the work of
ethnohistorians such as Hermann Trimborn and Paul Kirch-
off. Their historical investigations of both highland and low-
land religions contributed inmeasurably to an overall work-
ing definition of South American religious systems and their
relation to systems of social stratification, state rule, and eth-
nicity.
A third and final group that helped shape Americanist
studies was composed of South American folklorists, indi-
genists, and anthropologists. In attempting to resurrect in-
digenous culture and religion, indigenista writers of the
1930s and 1940s differed from the foreign ethnologists of
these formative Americanist years. Their work was motivated
largely by an explicit desire to record South American life-
ways and religions before such practices—and the people
who practiced them—disappeared completely. The emphasis
of the indigenista studies on the vitality of living religious sys-
tems also served as an important counter to the archaeolo-
gists’ initial influence on Americanist thinking. The prodi-
gious group of national writers influenced by indigenismo
subsequently compiled a vast archive of oral traditions, “cus-
toms,” and ritual practices. Notable among these folklorists
and anthropologists are Antonio Paredes Candia and En-
rique Oblitas Poblete of Bolivia, Roberto Lehmann-Nitsche
of Argentina, Gregorio Hernández de Alba of Colombia, and
Jose-María Arguedas, Jorge Lira, and Oscar Nuñez del Prado
of Peru. Unique among them was the Peruvian archaeolo-
gist-anthropologist Julio C. Tello. One of the most creative
archaeologists working in Peru, Tello was also the only one
interested in exploring the relation of the religious data he
unearthed to modern-day Quechua beliefs and practices. His
ethnographic publications of the 1920s are landmarks in the
study of Andean religion, and his archaeological investiga-
tions of the 1930s and 1940s extended knowledge of the An-
dean religious mind into a comparative framework interrelat-
ing highland and lowland cosmologies and religions.
The major work to appear out of the formative period
of Americanist studies is the seven-volume Handbook of
South American Indians edited by Julian H. Steward (1946–
1959). Though somewhat outdated, the Handbook’s articles,
which cover aspects of prehistory, material culture, social or-
ganization, and ecology, still provide what is perhaps the
most useful and accessible comparative source for beginning
study of South American religions. Its interest for a history
of religious studies, however, also lies in what it reveals about
the biases informing Americanists’ treatment of religion.
These are (1) a preoccupation with relative historical or evo-
lutionary classifications and the description of religious sys-
tems in terms of their similarity to, or degeneration from, a
pre-Columbian standard, (2) a lowland-highland dichotomy
informed by this evolutionary mode and according to which
tropical forest religions are judged to be less “complex” than
the pre-Hispanic prototypes formulated for the Andes by ar-
chaeologists and ethnohistorians, and (3) the comparative
framework used by scholars who were more interested in dis-
covering the cultural affinities and evolutionary links that
connected different religious practices than they were in de-
scribing and analyzing the function and meaning of religious
practices on a local level. The shortcomings of this dispersed
and comparative focus are intimated by many of the Hand-
book’s authors, who lament the inadequacy of their data on
specific religious systems.
FUNCTIONALIST AND FUNCTIONALIST-INFLUENCED
STUDIES. The next group of scholars to address religious is-
sues set out specifically to remedy this situation by studying
indigenous religion in its social context. The manner in
which local religious systems were treated was, however, once
again tempered by the theoretical orientations of their ob-
servers. Thus the first group of anthropologists to follow the
Handbook’s lead during the 1950s and early 1960s was influ-
enced by the functionalist school of British anthropology.
According to this theory, society is an organic whole whose
various parts may be analyzed or explained in terms of their
integrative function in maintaining the stability or equilibri-
um of a local group. Religion was considered to be a more
or less passive reflection of the organic unity of a total socialSOUTH AMERICAN INDIAN RELIGIONS: HISTORY OF STUDY 8595