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Ethnohistory 51.1 (2004) 217-219



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Náyari History, Politics, and Violence: From Flowers to Ash. By Philip Edward Coyle. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. xiv + 263 pp., notes, bibliography, index, maps. $45.00 cloth.)

Philip Coyle's research in Santa Teresa (Cueimaruse'e), the northernmost of the Cora communities of Mexico, was carried out following long-established ethnographic canons. He witnessed the ritual cycle at least two complete times, and his anthropological fieldwork extended over nine years. In addition to participant-observation, interviews, and field recordings, the author consulted in detail the few religious and civil archives relevant to the subject. His approach to the past is decidedly ethnohistorical, although his point of departure is direct study of living Cora society.

As Coyle explains it, during the middle of the nineteenth century—the period of Manuel Lozada's rule of 1856 to 1873—elements of the indigenous mitote tradition were recombined with elements derived from Catholic [End Page 217] ritual in such a way that public ceremonies became centered in sovereign and politically autonomous pueblos. This reconstituted ritual tradition created the symbolic foundation for local men to act as legitimate authorities of the Cora pueblos within a larger military confederacy headed by the agrarian leader, Lozada (1828–73).

This internal pueblo-level political structure has weakened since the 1960s as a result of the extension of municipal and national bureaucracies into the region, thereby unseating the religious practices of el costumbre. The lack of integrated moral authority has led to the political fragmentation of the community into family groups that at times have been antagonistic or irreconcilable.

Thus, the legitimacy of the traditional indigenous authorities should not be taken as a given, or as a residual superstitious belief. To the contrary, this legitimacy is sustained and renewed through the reproduction of ancestral religious customs. The potential sanctity of local authorities is the result of the careful and sincere practice of the rituals that confer their power. Consequently, family groups are able to retreat from community participation, although the system of community cargos opposes this retreat in that it seeks to integrate family groups.

Rancherías in Santa Teresa consist for the most part in what Coyle calls patrilateral group segments that are linked to other similar groups within a complicated and extensive cognatic system. This system does not reproduce itself through mere consanguinity, but through an affiliation to "maize-bundle groups" headed by the elder of each patrilateral group. Patrilateral segments are hierarchically organized; only the eldest son inherits ceremonial responsibilities from his father. This son's family then becomes the segment in charge of organizing the maize-bundle group's mitote ceremony, although other dispersed family groups assist and collaborate in carrying out the ritual. In addition, there is a framework of localized patrilateral groups that each control a territory within which they conduct their agrarian livelihood. These groups are linked together by women as a result of exogamic marriages that transfer the possibility of participating in the wife's family's mitotes to their "matrilateral" progeny.

In his analysis of Cora ceremonies, Coyle proposes that culture may be interpreted through the description of explicit public signs and the referential and connotational significations produced by the juxtaposition of these signs when deployed in specific ceremonies. In this way, rituals provide consistent connotations, but their significance emerges gradually during the annual ceremonial cycle. No interpretive authority outside of the ritual can provide its definite meaning. Each person obtains his personal and unique comprehension of collective meanings to the degree that these[End Page 218] meanings are expressed in the ceremonies. Emic interpretations are thus relativized in that the relationship between individuals and the unifying symbolic force of the ceremony is implicit and not verbalized. For this reason there is a fundamental need to follow the different tropes (metonomies and indexes, principally) used to give sense to objects and people in distinct ceremonial contexts.

The study of public rituals in Santa Teresa presented by Coyle is comprehensive, though pilgrimages to neighboring towns, domestic rituals, and healing and funerary...

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