life. In so doing they also made important claims concerning
the pervasive character of “religion” and the impossibility of
drawing a definite boundary between religious and secular
activities in indigenous societies.
Poststructuralist work has built on and expanded this
methodological and theoretical claim that “religion” must be
studied in many different and overlapping domains of social
life. At the same time scholars working in the 1980s and
1990s used historical methodologies to question structural-
ism’s claims regarding the coherency and stability of mental
and symbolic structures. Because the study of indigenous so-
cieties often depended on the use of documentary sources
written by Spaniards and other nonindigenous authors, his-
tory or ethnohistory has been a foundational methodology
for many South Americanists. For example, Zuidema and
other structualists built their models of pristine Inca and An-
dean religious systems through the creative, critical use of
Spanish chronicles and archives. The new historical work on
religion by Tristan Platt, Thomas A. Abercrombie, Joanne
Rappaport, and others has drawn on ethnohistorical meth-
ods in their search for an indigenous “voice” in the colonial
archive. Unlike the earlier structuralists, however, their goal
was not to reconstruct the elements of a precontact society
but to understand the complex role played by religion in the
political worlds formed through the interaction of indige-
nous and European societies.
In part because of their heavy debt to structualist meth-
odologies and perspectives, early historical anthropologies
tended to approach religion as an inherently conservative do-
main of belief whose persistence in colonial times could be
read as a form of resistance to colonial rule. Of particular im-
portance in this respect were the studies of messianic move-
ments as forms of religious conservatism coupled with situa-
tions of social resistance or even revolution. In the Andes
such work was stimulated largely by ethnohistorical studies
of colonial messianisms by the Peruvian anthropologists Juan
Ossio, Franklin Pease, and Luis Millones. Other studies in-
terpreted indigenous religious beliefs and practices as strate-
gies for consolidating ethnic identities threatened by the en-
croachment of “modern” national societies. These include
studies by Norman E. Whitten Jr. in Amazonian Ecuador,
the mythology collections of Orlando Villas Boas and Clau-
dio Villas Boas in the Brazilian Xingu River area, Miguel
Chase-Sardi’s studies of ethnicity and oral literatures in Para-
guay, and William Crocker and Cezar L. Melatti in the Bra-
zilian Amazon.
Through its emphasis on contingency, political com-
plexity, and intrigue, subsequent work has tended to compli-
cate the category of resistance itself, along with the dual-
society models that were often implied by the concept of re-
sistance. Stefano Varese’s groundbreaking work on the
Peruvian Campa or Ashaninka, based on fieldwork conduct-
ed during the late 1960s and early 1970s, provides an early
example of a political anthropology of religion that empha-
sized the political economic contexts in which messianic
movements and indigenous political resistance took shape.
Other examples include the work of anthropologists Robin
M. Wright and Jonathan Hill on northern Amazonian reli-
gious movements and political organization; Xavier Albó,
Platt, Olivia Harris, Abercrombie, and Roger Rasnake on the
colonial origins and rationality of the sacred landscapes, so-
cial practices, and authority structures through which Ayma-
ra religious practices engage issues of politics and power; and
Jean Jackson and Alcida Ramos on ethnic relations and in-
digenous politics in the Colombian and Brazilian Amazon.
Although the concept of a religious syncretism between colo-
nial (usually Catholic) and indigenous belief systems has long
been a central issue in anthropological treatments of religion,
these new historical studies move well beyond the notion of
syncretism to paint a more complex picture of how individu-
als, groups, and political movements strategically manipulate
and conceptualize the semantic and epistemic divides that
ideally differentiate “native” and “colonial,” Indian and mes-
tizo, resistance and accommodation.
Ethnographers have also begun to question the models
of culture and meaning through which early anthropologists
once defended the unity of indigenous cultural systems and
the interpretation of ritual and myth. Rather than looking
for the inner “meaning” hidden within religious words and
practices, these ethnographies build on poststructuralist
models of language and practice to explore how meaning ac-
crues to words and practices as they unfold in time. Though
focused on different areas of social production, these ethnog-
raphies hold in common the idea that “religion” is best stud-
ied across different domains of social practice rather than as
a discrete symbolic system that functions to give “meaning”
to other domains of indigenous experience. Thus ethno-
graphers such as Catherine J. Allen in the Peruvian Andes
have examined etiquette and sociality as lived domains in
which religious belief takes hold not as an extant symbolic
system but as the moral and ethical perspective that is played
out through the many small routines and interactions of
daily life.
Studies of Andean spatial practices and aesthetics by
Urton, Nathan Wachtel, and Rappaport among others em-
phasized how “religious” meanings are woven into such col-
lective material practices as wall construction and territorial
boundary maintenance. Other anthropologists, such as Greg
Urban and Jackson, have looked at the linguistic practices
through which myths are recounted and interpreted in local
social life. Finally, Michael T. Taussig’s important work on
the Colombian Putumayo and modern Venezuela has ex-
plored shamanism as a lens on the working of power, fear,
and memory in the shaping of Colombian modernity. Taus-
sig’s work has been particularly important in that it takes the
claims of indigenous religious belief and historical narrative
seriously as a force in the shaping of modern Latin America.
Taussig thus succeeds in questioning the spurious distinction
between magical and rational thought and with it the catego-
ries of myth and history that permeated so much earlier work
on South American religion.SOUTH AMERICAN INDIAN RELIGIONS: HISTORY OF STUDY 8597