Ritual Ground: Bent's Old Fort, World Formation, and the Annexation of the Southwest

Abstract

Ritual Ground: Bents Old Fort, World Formation, and the Annexation of the Southwest. By Douglas C. Comer. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. xiii + 329, photographs, drawings, maps, notes, index. $45.00 cloth) Headquarters of the Southern Rockies fur trade and southern plains Indian trade and itself a major presence in the Santa Fe trade, Bent's Fort has surprisingly received little scholarly attention from students of the West since the 1954 publication of David Lavender's historical narrative, Bent's Fort. Now, Douglas C. Comer, an archaeologist with the U. S. National Park Service, revisits the site in Ritual Ground: Bents Old Fort, World Formation, and the Annexation of the Southwest. Drawing on philosophical, historical, anthropological, and archaeological sources, Comer seeks to demonstrate the fort's role in forming a common ground upon which Mexican, Anglo-American, and Indian interacted and constructed social relationships through the mechanism of ritual. Rituals of exchange, feasting, gaming, and the calcified ritual of the architecture of the fort itself sustained, Comer argues, this new world until the end of the fur trade and the aftermath of the Mexican-American War led to its collapse. Ironically, Comer implicates the fort itself, as an outpost of the culture of modernity, in its own demise, swept aside as a world order, led by an expansionist United States, established itself over the Southwest and ritual interaction among its peoples at this site disappeared. The first three chapters of Comer's work establish the theoretical foundations for the discussion to follow: ritual as the primary means of cultural creation, ritual's fugitive existence in the culture of modernity, and ritual behavior and its meaning. Subsequent chapters in turn examine the ritual meanings assigned to trade goods, the ritual significance of the fort's architecture, and the webs of kinship that intertwined the trade's participants. Finally, in an epilogue, Comer casts a contemporary eye on the modern ritual enacted at the reconstructed Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site. With its clear interdisciplinary focus, Ritual Ground stands as a work with a seemingly wide appeal. Its discussions of cultural geography, material culture, and ritual, for example, invite the attention of folklorists, anthropologists, and archaeologists, whereas its focus on Native American, Anglo, and Mexican interactions at one particular site attracts the scrutiny of ethnohistorians and social anthropologists. Moreover, its philosophical pretensions-evoking Nietzche, Eliade, Geertz, Foucault, and Gramsci among others-are in themselves provocative. …