Washo Religion

Downs, James F., 1923-1999Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.3
Word count
129K words
Chapters
13

Tags

English Originals Religion Anthropological ResearchFieldworkLiturgical PracticeNorth American TribesIndigenous BeliefsOral TraditionReligious RitualEthnic MemoryCeremonial RitesMysterious World

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Washo Religion by James F. DownsAuthor: Downs, James F., 1923-1999,Language: English, Class: E011: History: America: America, Release Date: Feb 27, 2010

Editor's review

This is an ethnographic record of the religion of the Washo, a Native North American people, in which the author, James F. Downs, examines the group's belief system, ritual practices, and sacred concepts from an anthropological perspective. As a free electronic text from Project Gutenberg, it preserves the original form of mid-twentieth-century ethnographic writing and has documentary value for the anthropology of religion and Native North American studies. Based on field observation and interviews, the descriptions present the interweaving of ritual, myth, and daily life, and the book is suitable as supplementary material for specialized research or as a companion text for classroom discussion. Readers should note the expressive conventions of its period and should not treat it as the whole of Washo religion or as a direct portrait of contemporary practice. The book is concise, suitable for readers interested in comparative religion or cultural anthropology to complete a focused reading in a short time, and convenient for researchers to extract relevant passages by topic.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the introduction and conclusion first to grasp the author's central questions, then move to the chapters on specific rituals.
  2. Read alongside general histories of Native North American religion to avoid understanding it in isolation.
  3. Mark the boundary between ethnographic description and the author's interpretation as you read, maintaining a critical distance.
  4. For classroom use, select passages on ritual and myth as discussion material, with background notes.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13

FAQ

Is this book a complete record of Washo religion? No. It is an ethnographic text from a particular period, focusing on the beliefs and rituals the author was able to observe and discuss in interviews. Limited by the scope of fieldwork, the period of writing, and the author's perspective, it cannot be regarded as the whole of Washo religion or a complete picture of contemporary practice.
Can I understand it without a background in anthropology? Yes, but it requires some patience. The text is mainly descriptive ethnography, and the terminology is not dense, so general readers can grasp the basics; understanding will be smoother if paired with introductory material on Native North American history and the anthropology of religion.
Is this book suitable as a source for citation in academic papers? It can serve as a reference for mid-twentieth-century ethnographic records, but it should not be the only or most recent source. It is best cited within the context of the history of the discipline and read against later research and contemporary Indigenous self-representations.
What should I note when reading the electronic edition? This is a free English electronic text from Project Gutenberg with plain formatting and no modern notes or index. Readers may mark chapters and keywords themselves for easy reference; for research use, it is advisable to check against a print edition or an academic database version.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Downs, James F., 1923-1999 Author · American · 1923–1999

James F. Downs (1923–1999) was an American anthropologist known for his research on Navajo pastoralism and pastoral societies. He focused on the social organization, livelihoods, and religious life of Native North Americans. His representative work, Washo Religion, examines the religious belief system of the Washo people and offers a careful description of rituals, ideas, and their cultural context. Only one of his works is held in this collection, and publicly available information is limited, so a full picture of his academic career and writings cannot be drawn. Overall, Downs's research centers on indigenous pastoral economies and religious culture, and his writing emphasizes ethnographic observation and the organization of empirical material, providing useful case records for the study of these communities.