Religious Subjects and Gendered Transformations at the Native American City of Cahokia

Summary

Though processes of subjectification are continuously ongoing, there are moments when powers coalesce in particular persons, places, or objects and bring about pervasive transformations. We explore these moments through gendered divisions of key religious spaces, objects, and practices at the Native American city of Cahokia and other early Mississippian places. Through cosmological oppositions, these spaces, objects and practices both created balance and fomented politico-religious transformation. In particular, we locate subjectification in practices of smoking tobacco with flint-clay pipes, sweating in circular lodges, corn ceremonialism, and the gathering of human and other-than-human persons in the specific ritual contexts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries CE. We recognize a continuum of power relationships and argue that religious subjects (people, spirits, and ancestors) were created through relationships mediated in particular places and can transcend, change or reify gender divisions. Subjectification at Cahokia was contingent upon accessibility and experiences where gendered persons came to embody place and ceremony in particular moments. Through deeply involved relationships with the dead, naturally powerful elements/forces, and divinely inspired designs, certain Cahokians may have been transformed along this shifting continuum of power relationships, from religious subjects to authorities.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Archaeological Approaches to Subjectification

Keywords

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