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104 CHAPTER FOUR Commoner Men and Women Alternative Paths to Power In chapters 2 and 3 of this book, I discussed the ways in which Spanish state making impacted both the political and economic spheres in Pueblo communities. In both spheres, men’s and women’s responsibilities increased even as elite men, commoner men, and women continued to carry out traditional economic and political roles. In the political sphere, women and commoner men continued to act as consultants to political elites much as they had done in the pre-contact era, while political elites spent increasing amounts of time managing the political fallout of Spanish domination and state-making efforts within their communities. In the economic sphere, Pueblo women and men continued to produce and exchange crafts in much the same way that they had before Spanish contact . However, the amount of labor and crafts that they were required to provide or produce increased due to Spanish demands, and Pueblo elites took over the management of labor and craft production for Spaniards. As I have discussed at length in the previous two chapters, the Pueblo documentation is dominated by the voices of Pueblo male elites and, to a lesser degree, commoner men. This makes it very difficult to know how commoner men, and especially Pueblo women, felt about the changes to their lives and communities that occurred after Spanish contact. There is, however, one group of documents where Pueblo women and commoner men appear and are interviewed regularly: the documentation on sorcery and healing. Women and commoner men are not just spoken about by Pueblo elites; they are interviewed and given voice in these records (albeit in a context in which they were being investigated for what was considered to be criminal activity in the eyes of Spanish authorities). In this Commoner Men and Women 105 chapter, I first analyze sorcery and healing simply to shed light on Pueblo women’s and commoner men’s daily lives. Second, I compare and contrast Pueblo men’s and women’s sorcery and healing to demonstrate that such practices varied in predictable ways along the lines of gender. I argue that the “hardening” of gender and class distinctions in the political and economic spheres—caused by the combining of Spanish and Pueblo beliefs and practices—led Pueblo women to seek out alternative paths to empowerment in the ritual sphere outside of their home communities with a new group of outsiders (Spanish women). Commoner (as well as elite) men, on the other hand, used sorcery and healing to empower themselves in the political sphere—a traditional arena of activity—or to even resist Spanish domination within their home communities. I argue that this pattern exists in the documentation because, as I demonstrated in chapters 2 and 3, men had ways to be powerful in the political and economic spheres in their home communities, while women generally did not. Women, therefore, sought out opportunities to gain power, authority, and prestige outside of their home communities—particularly with Spanish women. Thus, while colonization imposed burdens upon Pueblo communities , it also provided opportunities to engage in status-seeking activities. At the end of the chapter, I analyze a second, much smaller set of documents that contain information about several Pueblo women and men that appear to have attained some level of power outside of formal political channels in their home communities. However, as is the case with sorcery and healing, they appear to have done this in different ways: women acquired power and authority due to the accumulation of wealth, ties to powerful men, or mixed ethnic heritage, while there were some commoner men who appear to have used sorcery to empower themselves in the political sphere in very similar ways to elite men. They even sometimes used their power to resist Spanish domination, as I will discuss below. By looking at both types of documentation (representing sorcery and healing done by both powerful Pueblo women and commoner men), it is possible to begin to get a sense of the ways in which Pueblo individuals responded to and negotiated changes to their lives after Spanish contact. Pueblo Sorcery and Healing Much has been written about the fact that Spaniards brought their own brand of “witchcraft” to the New World, and that this belief system collided with indigenous practices already in place.1 In New Mexico, sorcerers—defined at Zuni as “people whose nature it is to plot the deaths of those who arouse their jealousy or resentment...

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