RITUAL GROUND: Bent's Old Fort, World Formation, And The Annexation Of The Southwest

Comer, Douglas C.

ISBN 10: 0520204298 / ISBN 13: 9780520204294

Edité par Berkeley etc~. 1996. Univ. Of California Press, 1996

A propos de cet article

tan & red 1/2 cloth hardcover 8vo. (octavo). no dustwrapper. very fine cond. mint cond. looks new. like new. as new. binding square & tight. covers clean. edges clean. contents free of markings. nice clean copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking, underlining, remainder markings etc~. first edition. first printing (#1 in # line). xiii+321p.+ colophon. 24 b&w maps & illustrations. notes. index. archaeology. american history. american indian history. mexican history. religion. history of colorado. santa fe trail. ~"The construction of Bent's Old Fort cast the beliefs and values of the modern world into material form. It became a kind of "medicine lodge" for the ritual behaviors~and the material symbols associated with these rituals~that served to established the new ideology in the Southwest. We can see in Bent's Old Fort the "calcified ritual" of Yi~Fu Tuan and in the history of the fort the results of that ritual. One result was the very definite class hierarchy that arose with the construction of the fort: company owners at the top, other free traders next, then trappers, then Mexican laborers, and, at the bottom, the Native Americans. Among the Native Americans, though, the Cheyenne and the Arapaho held by far the highest status, evidenced in part by the fact that they were sometimes admitted inside the fort. Other Native Americans were never permitted inside the boundaries of the fort's walls. The fort served as a "model," if you will, of the new systems of control introduced by the Anglos, but it also functioned to implement those controls. It provided a paradigm for what amounted to the industrialization of the southwestern Plains and, later, of the Southwest.".

N° de réf. du vendeur 7162202

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: RITUAL GROUND: Bent's Old Fort, World Formation, And The Annexation Of The Southwest
• Éditeur: Berkeley etc~. 1996. Univ. Of California Press
• Date de parution: 1996
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0520204298
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780520204294
• Reliure: Couverture rigide
• Édition: Edition originale
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • american indian history
  • american history
  • mexican history

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

From about 1830 to 1849, Bent's Old Fort, located in present-day Colorado on the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail, was the largest trading post in the Southwest and the mountain-plains region. Although the raw enterprise and improvisation that characterized the American westward movement seem to have little to do with ritual, Douglas Comer argues that the fort grew and prospered because of ritual and that ritual shaped the subsequent history of the region to an astonishing extent.At Bent's Old Fort, rituals of trade, feasting, gaming, marriage, secret societies, and war, as well as the 'calcified ritual' provided by the fort itself, brought together and restructured Anglo, Hispanic, and American Indian cultures. Comer sheds new light on this heretofore poorly understood period in American history, building at the same time a powerfully convincing case to demonstrate that the human world is made through ritual. Comer gives his narrative an anthropological and philosophical framework; the events at Bent's Old Fort provide a compelling example not only of 'world formation' but of a world's tragic collapse, culminating in the Sand Creek massacre. He also calls attention to the reconstructed Bent's Old Fort on the site of the original. Here visitors reenact history, staff work out personal identities, and groups lobby for special versions of history by ritual recasting of the past as the present.

À propos de l'auteur

Douglas C. Comer serves the U.S. National Park Service as Manager of the Applied Archaeology Center at Silver Springs, Maryland.