God's Empire: Ritual, Repression, and Resistance on the Rio Grande, 1300-1848

Summary

This interdisciplinary project evaluates the relationship between Spanish and indigenous religious practices and their respective political objectives in proto-historic and colonial New Mexico. Beginning with a discussion of the emergence of a new religious idiom in the Pueblo world during the fourteenth century CE, I investigate the entanglement of political and economic forces with religion up to the conquest of the region by Anglo-Americans in the mid-1840s. In doing so, I highlight the myriad connections between what contemporary society, in the interests of sublimating the violence of ideological struggle, has sought to separate: the sacred and the secular. I demonstrate that in New Mexico, religion never operated in a vacuum, nor was this desired; rather, it was intentionally mobilized as a tool of political and economic action. To that end, I employ archival/ethnohistoric, archaeological, and ethnographic sources to deconstruct the categories of 'religion,' 'politics,' 'economics,' and 'society' themselves.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Flurry of Field Schools in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Drainages   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14912