Situado and Sabana: Spain's Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida by Amy Turner Bushnell (review)

574book reviews book on the former East Germany very effectively helps focus on the humanistic impulses that have helped shape the radical post-1989 transformation of the European scene. Donald J. Dietrich Boston College American Situado and Sabana: Spain's Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces ofFlorida. By Amy Turner Bushneil. [Anthropological Papers, American Museum of Natural History, No. 74.] (Athens: University of Georgia Press. 1995. Pp. 249. $26.95 paperback.) Amy Turner Bushneil, a distinguished Latin American historian at the College of Charleston, has written widely on Spanish colonial Florida. Situado and Sabana is the fruit of a consultancy she undertook for David Hurst Thomas, chief archaeologist for the American Museum of Natural History. Thomas sought from Bushnell the historical background for his lengthy excavations of the seventeenth-century Franciscan mission on Georgia's St. Catherine's Island. Within the short scope of this volume, Amy Bushnell more than fulfills her charge. This work, in fact, prefigures the general history of Spanish Florida which the author deems to be urgently needed. It centers around the Royal subsidy (situado) and the sabana, the cultivated Native American lands which supported Indians and Catholic missionaries alike. As David Thomas states, this book is a "rich mine of relevant detail and original assessment." Bushnell's clarity of thought and style is evident throughout, and she builds upon her earlier concepts of the "sacramental imperative," an underlying factor which she believes drove the form and location of the Florida missions, and of the "republic of Spaniards, republic of Indians," her description of the two organisms which confronted each other in Florida after European contact. There exists no better explanation of the workings of a Franciscan mission than this. Bushnell depicts the everyday functioning of vicarios, doctrinas, and visitas in Florida; how they were manned, equipped, and nourished. Her narrative is enlivened with the stories of incessant conflicts involving regular and secular clergy, Indian caciques, Spanish governors, and private merchants. Bushnell demonstrates that Spanish Florida never was a "Borderland" in the Boltonian sense of isolated mission-cww-presidio. Rather, it proceeded through phases in which private enterprise, Royal funding and government, and the Native Americans interacted in varying proportions. She shows how the entity came full circle at last, as the European rivalries and wars of the eighteenth century impacted North America. The once-extensive Spanish colony of Florida BOOK REVIEWS575 then shrank down to the vicinity of its presidios, and its Indian support vanished . It was undergirded at last, as it had been at the beginning, by private funds and Crown troops and subsidies from abroad. When the general history of Spanish Florida is written,Amy Bushnell should be its author. Until then, this work will abundantly inform the reader about a neglected century and its Franciscan missions in the provinces of Florida. Eugene Lyon Flagler College Being Religious, American Style: A History of Popular Religiosity in the United States. By Charles H. Lippy. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. 1994. Pp. x, 284. $65.00; $19.95 paperback.) This book is an ambitious attempt to trace the history of "popular" religion among the American people from the colonial period to the present. Much attention is given to European settlers in America, but pages are also devoted to native peoples and African Americans. For individuals whose understanding of American religion may lie solely on texts that tell the story of religion in America from the perspective of religious institutions, this book could be a revelation . Lippy sees "popular religiosity" as "that inchoate, unorganized, and highly syncretistic sense of the supernatural" (p. 17), and believes that the search for this sensibility about the supernatural has been "a constant in American culture " (p. 17). Lippy points out this supernatural element in a number of unrelated religious examples throughout the book, suggesting to the reader that the groups and individuals he uses as evidence all share a similar understanding or characterization of the supernatural in their lives. Indeed, the interest in the supernatural may be very significant and a common element within popular religiosity , but the specific apprehension and expression of the supernatural may vary quite considerably from one example of personal religiosity to the next. Religious...