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Hispanic American Historical Review 83.3 (2003) 571-572



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Náyari History, Politics, and Violence: From Flowers to Ash. By PHILIP E. COYLE. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. Photographs. Illustrations. Map. Tables. Figures. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 263 pp. Cloth, $45.00.

This ethnography of the Náyari (Cora) people of the town of Santa Teresa interprets recent social discord and violence as the result of the erosion of legitimacy of traditional ceremonial systems. Coyle traces the development and breakdown of Cora costumbre, especially the annual cycle of mitote celebrations, utilizing an interdisciplinary blend of recent anthropological theory, historical documentation, and participant fieldwork. The Coras, holed up in their dispersed ranchería settlements in the craggy Sierra del Nayar of western Mexico, withstood Spanish military control until the eighteenth century and experienced only intermittent contact in the first century of the Mexican republic; until recently they have received scant attention from ethnohistorians. The book is a fine-grained analysis of Cora culture and history that explains present and past sociopolitical realities of Tereseño life.

Coyle's introductory theory chapter is mercifully brief and relatively free of jargon. He employs an updated Geertzian anthropology, articulating a thick description of Tereseño ceremonial ritual. Engaging recent semiotic theory, he clearly demonstrates that symbolic acts as innocent as eating a banana point to a complex system of meaning that defines and is redefined ceremonially. Looming large in this Cora costumbre is a concern for the return of seasonal rains, due partly to the belief that deceased ancestors will return in the form of necessary rainfall. In addition to the mitote ceremonies that plead for rain, Coyle reports participation in a ceremonial "reuniting of the waters" held at a sacred lake outside town. He deftly weaves his observations of local and community ceremonies together with mythic stories told to him by informants to construct a plausible explanation of Cora cosmology. Several characters in these folk tales, including one Hesu Kristu Tavástara, shed some light on the mysterious integration of Christianity into Cora religiosity.

While others have studied the community-based cargo system, Coyle breaks new ground in his analysis of local kin-based ceremonial traditions, in which individual identities are represented by personalized bundles of maize. The local mitote ceremonies thus "position maize-bundle group members both temporally (in relation to their ancestors) and spatially (in relation to the surrounding geography) within a symbolically constituted world" (p. 37). Coyle argues that both community and local traditions represent the fecundity of the natural world, and furthermore that they are politically related. He concludes that the town's important cargo holders tend to be selected according to their position within a localized patrilateral complex, rather than their service within the larger community system. [End Page 571]

Coyle presents the roots of Cora ceremonial traditions and their changes from the colonial period to the present; despite an uneven historical record, he demonstrates the persistence of mitote ceremonialism during the eighteenth-century missions and into the twentieth century. The political legitimacy of the cargo leaders was important during Santa Teresa's support of the nineteenth-century Lozada Rebellion, as well as during the revolution and subsequent Cristero Rebellion. Postrevolutionary documents detail Tereseño factionalism, the unsettling influence of the federal government, and a growing mestizo population. Coyle argues, reasonably, that recent problems with drug trafficking and community violence are inextricably linked to the breakdown of traditional systems of authority. Yet there is hope: although the community-level ceremonies have been marred by violence, the localized maize-bundle ceremonies continue beyond the town's limits.

This masterful synthesis deserves a wide audience both for its pathbreaking approach that unites history and anthropology and for the important insights it offers into Cora culture. The book should inspire other ethnohistorians to investigate the forces of globalization from the perspective of local traditions.

 



Rick Warner
Wabash College

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