This semester I am wrapping up a course on Religions of Latin America. The course has covered everything from pre-Columbia Mexica sacrifice to Brazilian Millenarian movements in Canudos and navigating religion, race, power, and sexuality in Nicaragua.
Along with being a required course in my PhD track at University of Florida (Religion in the Americas), it has been a fascinating journey over time and geography, which has revealed to me different ways of studying religion & understanding Latin America as a place of long history, colonial encounter, and contemporary religious diversity in a (post)modern world.
*Read my reflection on Mexica sacrifice HERE
One of the assignments we had for this class was to do a literature review on a particular topic. I was deciding between indigenous, pre-colonial, religion and Islam in Latin America. I decided I would do both, one for the class and one on my own time. When I decided on pre-colonial religion and cosmologies I had to decide where or whom.
This summer I am headed to Puerto Rico for preliminary fieldwork for my study of Puerto Rican Islam in trans(regional), hemispheric, and global context. As a scholar, I am interested in deep cultural history, understanding the ways in which contemporary cultures and expressions are shaped, sometimes unknowingly, by ancient lifeways. Thus, in studying Puerto Rico and engaging in ethnography in the Caribbean I decided to uncover what there is to know about the Taíno people who originally inhabited Borikén (the Taíno name for Puerto Rico).
*Follow Ken for more on religion & culture
The Taíno people were the indigenous community who "greeted" Columbus and were subsequently decimated by colonial encounter, slavery, disease, suicide, and war. They had a rich matrilineal chiefdom political culture led by caciques, a social network based on kinship and complex ritual and ball games, a religious cosmology that parallels that of other Latin American peoples (specifically because of their origins in the Orinoco delta region), and practices that involved the use of entheogens (cohoba), complex statuary (zemis), and ritual vomiting.
Infamous Taíno "three-pointer" statuary.
They are a fascinating, but vastly understudied indigenous culture. However, there are those who have ventured to understand the Taíno via archaeology and (re)constructive ethnohistory. Their work is to be commended. It will also prove helpful as I begin to explore Boricua culture and religion in its historical context. With the neo-Taíno movement still in force and with Taíno culture living on in language, cultural rhythms, and the imagination, I cannot ignore the long history of a people once thought lost to the annals of time.
What I discovered in this literature review is that themes of migration, encounter, and hybridity, which defined and gave shape to the Taíno culture, are still relevant and prevalant today. I encourage you to check out the paper at Academia.edu. You will learn more not only about the Taíno, but also about reviewing literature from an academic perspective, current methodological considerations in anthropology (both physical and cultural), and also gain a greater appreciation for Caribbean studies.
Here's an excerpt:
“They are the people who first encountered Columbus. Their culture flourished in the centuries immediately preceding this ominous engagement with European explorers, conquerors, & colonizers. They were eradicated in a cruel combination of warfare, slavery, suicide, and disease. Today, they are extinct. They are the Taíno people of the Caribbean. Their narrative is one of movement and migration, one of cultural efflorescence and precipitous decline, of stunning stonework and a complex politico-religious hierarchy that was at once patriarchal and matrilineal. Though they are, effectively, no longer in existence, the Taíno influence and relevance for understanding the Caribbean (not to mention their role in the broader context of the Americas) cannot be overlooked. Building on the pioneering research of Ricardo Alegría and Irving Rouse and relying on primary documents from Spanish interlocutors such as Bartolomé de las Casas and Fr. Ramón Pané, archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnohistorians and art historians over the last twenty years have begun to shine more light on who the Taíno were, what they believed, how they lived, and what their enduring effect on the Caribbean and Latin America is.
The following is a literature review of three books on the Taíno which focused on their political, social, and religious life. This review is concerned primarily with identifying features of these works’ significance for the ethnographic study of the Caribbean today. The three books under review are Irving Rouse’s The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus, William F. Keegan’s Taíno Indian Myth and Practice: The Arrival of the Stranger King, and the collection Taíno: Pre-Columbian Art and Culture from the Caribbean edited by Fatima Bercht, Estrellita Brodsky, John Alan Farmer, and Dicey Taylor for El Museo del Barrio. The essay will proceed by presenting a brief synopsis and commentary on each book’s individual contents before putting the texts in conversation on specific themes such as methodology, migration and cultural encounter, and the relevance of the study for contemporary ethnographic work.”
*Read the rest of the review HERE.