system. Examples of this approach are the monographs of
William W. Stein (1961) on the Peruvian Andes, Allan R.
Holmberg (1950) on the Siriono of lowland Bolivia, and Ir-
ving Goldman (1963) on the Cubeo of Brazil. In several
cases more detailed monographs were written that focused
specifically on the role of religion in indigenous social orga-
nization; these include works by Robert Murphy on the Bra-
zilian Mundurucú, Segundo Bernal on the Paez of Colom-
bia, David Maybury-Lewis on the Akwe-Xavante, and Louis
C. Faron on the Mapuche, or Araucanians, of coastal Chile.
One variant of this functionalist approach brought out
the role of religion as a means of achieving or maintaining
balance between social and ecological systems. Prime exam-
ples of this approach are Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff’s bril-
liant, Freudian-influenced treatments of mythology, sha-
manism, and cosmology among the Koghi Indians of
Colombia’s Sierra Nevada highlands and the Desána (Tu-
cano) of the Northwest Amazon. Other studies of shaman-
ism, cosmology, and hallucinogens have been carried out by
the anthropologists Douglas Sharon in coastal Peru and Mi-
chael Harner in eastern Ecuador.
STRUCTURALIST STUDIES. During the 1960s and 1970s
scholars began to question the passively reflective, or “super-
structural,” role to which much of functionalist anthropolo-
gy had relegated religion as well as the simplistic and ulti-
mately evolutionist dichotomies between the Andean and
tropical forest cultures. The major theoretical impetus for
this new approach came from structuralism, which proposed
to analyze the affinities connecting mythologies and ritual
practices and the societies in which they occurred by refer-
ring all to a pervasive symbolic or cognitive structure based
on dual oppositions and on diverse forms of hierarchical or-
ganization. The pioneering works of this tradition were Cl-
aude Lévi-Strauss’s studies of social organization and my-
thology in the Amazon basin and his four-volume
Mythologiques (1964–1971), which presented a system for
analyzing mythic narratives as isolated variants of an organi-
zational logic whose standardized structure he invoked to ex-
plain the commonality of all North and South American
modes of religious expression and social organization.
The structuralist approach has been particularly impor-
tant for the study of religion. For the first time a mode of
thinking—evidenced by religion and mythology—was not
only taken as the principal index of cultural identity but was
also seen to influence and even partly to determine the orga-
nization of other spheres of social and economic life. In its
renewed focus on religion, structuralism inspired myriad
studies of lowland ritual and mythology, including those by
Jean-Paul Dumont, Michel Perrin, Terence Turner, Jacques
Lizot, Anthony Seeger, Stephen Hugh-Jones, and Christine
Hugh-Jones. These structuralist studies of mythology and
social organization were completed—and often preceded—
by collections of mythologies and descriptions of cosmolo-
gies (or “worldviews”) by ethnographers such as Johannes
Wilbert, Marc de Civrieux, Darcy Ribiero, Roberto DaMat-
ta, Egon Schaden, Neils Fock, and Gerald Weiss. Though
departing from the structuralists’ methodologies, these an-
thropologists shared with the structuralists an interest in
studying religion as an expression of social organization, soci-
ety-nature classifications, and broad cultural identities.
In the Andes, where mythologies and religion were
judged to be less pristine and less divorced from the ravages
of historical, social, and economic change, Lévi-Strauss’s the-
ories generated interest in the study of social continuity
through examination of structural forms. These studies of
underlying structural continuity were based on extensive
fieldwork by ethnographers and ethnohistorians such as Bil-
lie Jean Isbell, Juan Ossio, Henrique Urbano, Gary Urton,
John Earls, and Alejandro Ortíz Rescaniere. These scholars
have argued for the existence of a constant and culturally spe-
cific religious (as well as mythological and astronomical)
structure by means of which indigenous groups have retained
their cultural identity over time. Their studies of postcon-
quest religious continuity drew on ethnohistorical models of
Andean social organization, in particular R. Tom Zuidema’s
complex structural model of Inca social relations and ritual
geographies and María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco’s
studies of pre-Hispanic coastal societies. Both of these ethno-
historians have emphasized the role of mythology, ritual, and
religious ideology in the shaping of Andean economic and
political history.Structuralist methodology also motivated a new type of
comparative study focusing on the similarities linking Ande-
an and Amazonian religions. For example, Zuidema’s struc-
tural model for Inca socioreligious organization pointed out
the important similarities between this elaborate highland
state system and the equally complex modes of ritual and so-
cial organization found among the Ge and Boróro Indians
of Brazil. D. W. Lathrap’s archaeological model for the evo-
lution of South American social organization used similar
comparative techniques to establish a common heritage of
lowland and highland cosmologies. By combining this com-
parative insight with the historical dynamics of archaeology
and ethnohistory and by assigning to religion a determinative
role in the evolution of social systems, such models not only
questioned but in many ways actually reversed the prevailing
stereotypic dichotomy between “primitive” Amazon and
“civilized” Andes.
HISTORICAL AND POSTSTRUCTURALIST VIEWS. In the final
decades of the twentieth century anthropologists and other
students of religion began increasingly to question the no-
tions of unity, coherence, and continuity that had character-
ized much earlier work on indigenous religion. Structuralists
had intepreted myth as the partial expression or transforma-
tion of mental structures that endured over time and ritual
as the symbolic performance of the formal, structural princi-
ples that lent meaning to a particular culture’s cosmology or
worldview. Through such forms of analysis, structuralists
emphasized the coherency and mobility of the structural
principles expressed in the many different domains of social8596 SOUTH AMERICAN INDIAN RELIGIONS: HISTORY OF STUDY