Blog Entry 4: The Delight Makers (Sessions 13-16)
Due Date: Tuesday, Mar. 24 (by midnight)
As in all your blog entries, we ask for your critical reflection on the themes discussed in lecture and in your readings. If you have strong personal reactions, critiques, or praise to offer one or more of the texts in question, please do follow your interests. Each week, however, we will be offering a suggested prompt that you may also choose to address.
As always, we are looking for an engaged and critical response to the course materials. Be bold, smart, and opinionated.
Suggested Prompt:
The Delight Makers presents us with an extraordinarily detailed image of an Ancestral Pueblo village based upon Bandelier's extensive ethnographic studies among the Keresan and Tewa Pueblos. While superficially a work of fiction, Bandelier drew liberally from indigenous accounts of life in Frijoles Canyon, and he was at pains to be true to the material culture, social dynamics and specific practices he had witnessed during his time among the Puelbos. In other words, when Bandelier wrote about the organization of the Koshare, conflicts over agricultural land, witchcraft accusations, factionalism, or the ritual labor of caciques (or high priests), his story may be taken as a viable ethnographic description—more "truth" than "fiction," as it were.
With that in mind, we are interested in hearing your analysis of the social dynamics presented in the story. How, for instance did accusations of witchcraft function within the political life of the village? How were clan affiliations drawn upon in the day-to-day negotiations of village members? To what extent were ritual societies such as the Koshare involved in the building of both religious and political power? And if you are feeling bold... how might we re-read the village described within The Delight Makers as a historically contingent social formation, one that was recognizably post-Chacoan.
