Popular and Organized Religion in Modern and Contemporary Mexico

The books under review here represent the continued dynamic study of religion from the view of historical sociology. While only one of these books is strictly speaking a historical monograph (Death and Dying in New Mexico) and the other three anthropological studies, all four share an abiding interest in the longue durée of Mesoamerican religion and spirituality. Simultaneously, as a whole, they place religious mentality, spirituality, or religious ritual at the center of their analyses, although none is a throwback to studies of pure ideas stripped of social context. Although ideas—about death, death rituals, cosmology, ancestor worship, spiritual phenomenology—take center stage, the authors place them within the social contexts in which they developed and in turn discuss how structural, political, and economic developments shaped these belief systems, or how these spiritualities outlasted and endured political and social change. As a group, these studies reject stripped-down epistemological assessments of religious values and of functionalist religious anthropology.

Death is the explicit theme of two of these books, which therefore take part in a venerable historiographical tradition in early modern European studies, and certainly Mexican studies—one thinks of the works of Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos Fuentes. Will de Chaparro's focus is consonant with those of the other three authors: ancestor worship and the line between the worlds of the living and the dead, which Oaxacans, New Mexicans, and Mayas all viewed as tenuous or nonexistent. Likewise, her book fits closely with that by Norget, as both discuss death rituals and ceremonies. The other two books are linked by their examination of Maya religion. But whereas Molesky-Poz principally offers a participant-observer study, Early employs both his own fieldwork and a broad historical sociology to explain the seeming discontinuity between the persistence of Mayan forms of cosmology and religious epistemology, and the importance that Mayas place on the performance of the mass by ordained priests.

Overall, these works contribute to a growing literature that questions assumptions about the spiritual conquest of Mesoamerica. They demonstrate the deep continuities with very old Mesoamerican religious forms and their adaptation to new historical circumstances. At the same time, they show that, while some practices seem constant—ancestor worship or veneration, for example—their form varies considerably.

There are relatively few studies of death ritual and dying in colonial Latin America—Pamela Voekel's Alone before God (2002) is one—yet this is a veritable cottage industry among early modern Europeanists. Will de Chaparro's book is therefore a welcome addition to classics such as John McManner's Death and the Enlightenment (1981), Gaby and Michel Vovelle's still-untranslated Vision de la mort et de l'au-delà en Provence (1970), Phillipe Ariès's Hour of Our Death (1981), and Carlos Eire's From Madrid to Purgatory (1995). Will de Chaparro also adds to the vibrant literature on colonial New Mexico from practitioners such as Ramón Gutiérrez, Fray Angélico Chávez, and Marc Simmons. Nevertheless, as studies of pre-1821 (or for that matter pre-1848) New Mexico are fairly few and far between, her book offers a fine compliment to Chávez's classic My Penitente Land (1974), as well as to the more recent study by Michael P. Carroll, The Penitente Brotherhood (2002).¹

Death and Dying in New Mexico is a study of religious and social attitudes toward death, death rituals and practices, and baroque sensibilities on the northern frontier of New Spain. Like most historical studies concerning death and...