Savage debauchery or sacred communion? Religion and the primitive in the Pueblo dance controversy.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation focuses on the Pueblo dance controversy of the 1920s, when competing groups of reformers battled over the Bureau of Indian Affairs' attempts to suppress the practice of many Native American ceremonial dances. By examining the networks of discourse about so-called primitive religion in this controversy, I explore the interplay between popular and scholarly discourses in the early twentieth-century development of the study of religion. Missionaries, government agents, and progressive reformers alleged that the ceremonial dances of the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico were sexually immoral and degrading paganism, while artists, anthropologists, and modernist reformers saw the Pueblos as the precious remnant of a vital primitive religion—potentially offering spiritual resources for the revitalization of modern civilization. Pueblo religion, viewed as the exemplification of primitive religion, came to represent both the savage debauchery into which progressive reformers feared American society could fall, and on the other side the ecstatic heights of sacred communion to which modernist reformers hoped it might climb. Progressives excluded the Pueblo ceremonial dances from the category of religion, which they defined with Christianity at its center. In contrast, modernists suggested that the primal beauty and communal energy of these dances defined the true heart of religion. These competing discourses both constructed a universalized category of primitive religion that was sharply opposed to modern civilization, reinscribing a colonized status for Native Americans in the twentieth-century United States. Meanwhile, Pueblo leaders challenged these colonialist discourses by refusing the category of primitive religion and redefining “religion” as a way to defend Pueblo traditions. This dissertation suggests that the category of religion itself has been shaped in part through representations of the primitive, and that understanding the history of the study of religion therefore requires examining cultural contestations over primitive religion.