Ceremonial Life Research Articles

“What Do They Say in Mosques? Islamic Discourse on Limiting Ritual Expenses”

This article examines the changes in religious policy, Islamic beliefs, religious life, national values, and family rituals in Uzbekistan during the years of independence. Particularly, it analyzes a series of fatwas, guidelines, and theses on Friday prayer topics published by the Office of Muslims of Uzbekistan in recent years. The author substantiates the amalgamation of religious and national perspectives in Uzbek family rituals, encompassing childbirth, marriage, and mourning ceremonies, drawing on ethnographic materials. Furthermore, it delves into the views of Islamic scholars and imams concerning the reduction of specific expenses and extravagances in these rituals, citing examples from Friday prayers and various social networks. Through anthropological observations of modern Uzbek society, including Muslims' public activities, Friday prayers, neighborhoods, and community events, as well as through various TV talk shows and radio broadcasts, the article explores "Aqiqa" ceremonies, circumcision weddings, marriages, and mourning rituals conducted by Uzbek imams in matters of family and marriage. The author highlights the discussions of "Amru Ma'ruf" topics during ceremonies, widely debated on mosque websites, imams' pages, and social media platforms (Telegram, Facebook, Instagram). The article underscores the impact of Islamic scholars' and imams' ongoing efforts, noting changes in the balance of expenses in the ceremonial life of the Uzbek people, particularly evident in marriage ceremonies. Moreover, it analyzes changes and transformative processes in Uzbek family rituals from the perspective of ritual economy.

Occasional Commemorative Rituals in Udmurt Culture

Abstract This article takes as its focus an examination of instances of occasional commemoration of the dead in Udmurt culture. Descriptions of such commemorations are based on sources drawn from published research literature as well as the author’s own field materials collected between 2007 and 2022. It should be noted that, to date, no specific research has been conducted on this issue, most probably due to its irregularity and, to some extent, its intimate nature. The material shows that cases of occasional commemoration within Udmurt culture cover a fairly wide range of social, ceremonial and magical aspects of life. Faith in the power and strength of ancestors has built up an entire system of relationships and behavioural strategies that vividly characterise a traditional worldview that is actualised in extraordinary life circumstances. It can be said that today examples of occasional commemorations are quite diverse, and are commonplace in the everyday and ceremonial life of the Udmurt.

Psychoactive and other ceremonial plants from a 2,000-year-old Maya ritual deposit at Yaxnohcah, Mexico.

For millennia, healing and psychoactive plants have been part of the medicinal and ceremonial fabric of elaborate rituals and everyday religious practices throughout Mesoamerica. Despite the essential nature of these ritual practices to the societal framework of past cultures, a clear understanding of the ceremonial life of the ancient Maya remains stubbornly elusive. Here we record the discovery of a special ritual deposit, likely wrapped in a bundle, located beneath the end field of a Late Preclassic ballcourt in the Helena complex of the Maya city of Yaxnohcah. This discovery was made possible by the application of environmental DNA technology. Plants identified through this analytical process included Ipomoea corymbosa (xtabentun in Mayan), Capsicum sp. (chili pepper or ic in Mayan), Hampea trilobata (jool), and Oxandra lanceolata (chilcahuite). All four plants have recognized medicinal properties. Two of the plants, jool and chilcahuite, are involved in artifact manufacture that have ceremonial connections while chili peppers and xtabentun have been associated with divination rituals. Xtabentun (known to the Aztecs as ololiuhqui) produces highly efficacious hallucinogenic compounds and is reported here from Maya archaeological contexts for the first time.

Indigenous Stewardship: Religious Praxis and “Unsettling” Settler Ecologies

ABSTRACT Settler colonialism has been described as a structure, not an event, meaning it is sustained over time through discursive and material means. As settlers began to monopolize lands, new ecologies were built from Indigenous ones, transforming the landscape but also human relations with lands. I expand on Kyle Whyte’s concept of settler ecologies to understand these ecologies as drawing from a metaphysic, a Christian cosmo-logic of divine hierarchy that positions some humans as having ontological superiority over the natural world and other humans. I draw from decolonial, Indigenous, and settler colonial theory to explore how settler ecologies reterritorialize the land through racial-religious formations, what Aboriginal scholar, Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls the white possessive, and become naturalized in a modern context through secular, biopolitical discourses of development. I argue that these settler ecologies are “unsettled” through the sacred directive of stewardship movements that emerge from the unifying, intersubjective relations of ceremonial life.

Religion in Sixteenth-Century Mexico: A Guide to Aztec and Catholic Beliefs and Practices

Cheryl Claassen and Laura Ammon have produced a wonderful encyclopedia with an introductory study about religion in New Spain during the first century of colonization. The work is accessible, divided into 118 alphabetically organized entries that are each broken into sections for fifteenth-century Mexico, fifteenth-century Spain, and sixteenth-century Mexico. The topics chosen include the more obvious (such as human sacrifice and omens), but some of the most exciting entries discuss less predictable themes (such as the color blue or bees).Though many readers may want to immediately turn to the reference section, they would miss the skillful narrative summary of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as a thoughtful analysis of the historiography on religion in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Mexico and Spain. For instance, Claassen and Ammon are influenced by David Chidester's definition of religion as a sphere of “the transcendent, the sacred, the ultimate,” through which humans attempt to understand “what it means to be human” (p. 1). Their study of the Aztecs was greatly influenced by Davíd Carrasco's work on religiosity and ceremonial life, which focuses on the activities and institutions meant to constantly reinforce the Indigenous people's relationship with what they considered sacred (p. 2). For the study of the Spanish, they rely on Walter Mignolo's work on how scholarship has generally viewed early modern Catholicism as obscure and cultlike, producing primarily negative portrayals of the church, and Stafford Poole's work on Spain's unique situation as a site of convivencia where religious worldviews coexisted as a complex network of relationships (p. 3). Finally, Claassen and Ammon are influenced by how Poole's and Mignolo's work on the Catholic Church in Spain shows how there was a strong basis of flexibility in the Catholic Church that ultimately allowed for a new mestizo/Creole religiosity in sixteenth-century Mexico. Claassen and Ammon rely on Gruzinski's work on mestizo/Creole religiosity to understand much of this process while also acknowledging that it is not the authors' responsibility to judge what is “a valid expression of Christianity” and what is not (p. 5). The rest of the introduction is a brief but well-written and informative summary of the history of religion and religious institutions in both Mesoamerica and Spain and how they began to intertwine during the first century of Spanish colonialism.Claassen and Ammon's most valuable contribution is the alphabetically organized section on key terms, which comprises the majority of the work. This resource is useful to both students and scholars due to its organization as a reference work. This is not only useful for the unfamiliar but especially important for how we understand Catholicism, which has changed and adapted a number of traditions over the last 500 years. The book will be very useful for teachers to direct their students to, since one of the more challenging issues in teaching twenty-first-century students is just how much has changed in the Catholic worldview and practices since the sixteenth century. In fact, continual change in how humans interact with nature plays an important role in why Claassen and Ammon wrote and organized the book as they did: “We believe that the keyword approach lays bare the creative blending of modern Catholicism in Mexico, a blending greatly facilitated by the shared organization of religious practice into cults. These cults are fading away in the 21st century as modern life is increasingly experienced in cities, away from nature, and in non-agricultural pursuits” (p. 64).However, there are a number of small issues with Religion in Sixteenth-Century Mexico that will require readers to cross-check the information made available. Sometimes the secondary sources that Claassen and Ammon rely on are themselves the subject of debate, and those debates do not always appear clearly in some of the entries. For instance, in the discussion of the precolonial Aztec concept of the soul, and specifically the term yolia, the authors accept that scholarship on the Aztec soul is established fact. However, recent scholarship challenges the basis of some of these long-accepted arguments. For instance, Justyna Olko and Julia Madajczak argue that yolia is actually a neologism created in the early colonial period and not a precolonial Indigenous belief as Claassen and Ammon present it. More clarity on some of the debates surrounding complicated and controversial ideas such as this would have been a welcome addition to this impressive work.Ultimately, this work is an extremely useful resource for scholars and students of Mexico during the colonial period and beyond. Both scholars and students will find themselves frequently looking at this work for reference as an accessible starting point in what is the complicated and controversial topic of religion in the first century of colonization in Mexico.

Aboriginal Worlds and Australian Capitalism

Australia has a fairly established literature that seeks to explain, on one hand, the pre-colonial Aboriginal society and economy and, on the other, the relationship that emerged between the First Peoples’ economic system and society, and the settler economy. Most of this relies on theoretical frameworks that narrate traditional worlds dissolving. At best, these narratives see First Peoples subsumed into the workforce, retaining minimal cultural residue. In this paper, I argue against these narratives, showing the ways Aboriginal people have disrupted, or implicitly questioned and challenged dominant forms of Australian capitalism. I have sought to write not within the earlier framework of what is called Aboriginal History that often concentrated on the governance of Aborigines rather than responses to governance. In doing this, I seek to bring into view a history of Aboriginal strategies within a capitalist world that sought to maintain the most treasured elements of social life - generosity, equality, relatedness, minimal possessions, and a rich and pervasive ceremonial life.

‘Awakening the Stones’: The Nieri Performance, Gardens and Regeneration in Tanna, Vanuatu

ABSTRACT In 2017, islanders from six villages on the southern island of Tanna, in the archipelago of Vanuatu, sculpted more than 50,000 taro into a large ship for the nieri, the premier Tannese exchange based on mythic injunctions to feed allies and protect land. Ships, canoes and stones are generative forms in Tanna and are woven into the interstices of daily life, gardens and ritual. This ritual, planned after the category 5 2015 Cyclone Pam destroyed gardens in Tanna, was also designed to ‘awaken the stones’ which ensure the fertility of gardens. The nieri reasserts the material and spiritual primacy of gardens through the exchange of food that engenders a particular kind of sociality and person in Tanna. During the performance, taro were swapped for yam from six coastal villages. Closely allied, taro and yam are gendered beings whose lives are entangled in the relational worlds of humans and other non-human beings. The fluid and ephemeral art forms that characterise Tannese ceremonial life are dependent upon and attuned to the cycle of the yam and taro garden. I explore how the ‘taro ship’ gathers the multiple relations and diversities that emanate from gardens. The nieri and the spectacle of taro ‘becoming’ ship, makes visible social, cosmological and ecological relations through the aesthetic forms that connect the everyday and myth.

Papuan Gulf spirit boards and detecting social boundaries: a preliminary investigation. In From Field to Museum—Studies from Melanesia in Honour of Robin Torrence, ed. Jim Specht, Val Attenbrow, and Jim Allen

This paper is an exploratory investigation of Papuan Gulf spirit boards. These ceremonial items and their designs were owned by clans and other patrilineal groups and comprised an important aspect of traditional ceremonial life. During the early contact period, they were intensively collected by Europeans and now appear among world-wide museum holdings of Papua New Guinea material culture. The Australian Museum has an extensive collection of spirit boards that provide the primary data for this study. Here spirit board design elements are analysed to understand how they are distributed between or only retained within cultural groups living in the east-central Papuan Gulf. The paper also examines ways to analyse spirit board designs.

Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West

American Religion 2, no. 2 (Spring 2021), pp. 151–153 Copyright © 2021, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.2.13 Book Review Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) Natalie Avalos University of Colorado, Boulder, USA For Native peoples on the southern plains, ceremonial life was the place where they formed political alliances based on a shared sacred understanding of the world. Jennifer Graber’s The Gods of Indian Country notes that with the arrival of settlers in what would soon be known as “Indian Territory,” religion remained a connection point—not to consecrate political agreements with Native nations but as a rationale and means to dispossess them. This book narrates the activities of Protestant and Catholic “friends of the Indian” in the nineteenth-centurylong struggle to settle the West through their missionary and reform work with Indians in the southern Plains, specifically the Kiowa. Through careful use of government, denominational, and Kiowa sources, such as calendars and ledger drawings, Graber makes the case that these “friends of the Indian” operationalized a particular kind of white Christian civility to help materialize the structural foundations of US settler colonialism. The book is organized into three sections—open lands, closed lands, and divided lands—in order to convey the distinct shifts in ideology and practice of nineteenth-century US expansion. Beginning with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, chapters one and two outline the debates around Indian removal during the first half of the century in response to settler demands for land. Religious American Religion 2:2 152 actors, initially resistant to policies of removal, sought a moral solution to the “Indian problem,” arguing that Indians could be civilized and eventually assimilated through religious conversion. Graber contrasts these debates with a detailed contextualization of Kiowa life on the open plains as one of the region’s central power brokers—their relationship to nearby tribes as well as to the unseen world. As settlers and reformers trickled into the region, the Kiowa were pathologized as the fiercest of “wild” Indians due to their frequent raids into the Southwestern US and Mexico and their yearly observance of the Sun Dance. After skirmishes with US troops, who carried out a series of Indian massacres in the region, the Kiowa were confined to reservation lands. Here, the historical discourse involving Indian agents, federal representatives, and Kiowas demonstrates the breathtaking level of racist paternalism and deceit that operated together to facilitate land dispossession. Food provisions were promised but always fell short. Farming was encouraged yet poor instruction led to failed crops. While their Quaker reservation agent implored the federal government to act on good faith, noting that deprivations would only demoralize the Kiowas, the federal body’s uneven response communicated their long game—Indian elimination. Chapters three through five, covering the period from 1868–1881, chronicle the consolidation of Indian territory into an open-air prison that experimented with compulsory forms of social engineering aimed at civilizing Indians: changes in dress, food, and complete re-education programs via missionization and boarding schools. Pacifist reservations agents, frustrated by Kiowas who continued dancing, hunting, and raiding, became despots, invited US troops to occupy Kiowa lands, and withheld food as a form of coercion. The Kiowa were incredulous—why would they give up their lifeways on their sovereign lands? As they contemplated revolt, they took refuge in the Sun Dance and religious life, supplicating spiritual power to empower them in their duress. Kiowa assertions of autonomy in the face of this coercion are salient here. As one Kiowa leader noted, it would take the white men many years to kill all Indians, but if all Indians die, “then the world will turn to water or burn up. [The world] can’t live when the Indians are all dead” (108). It is in the aftermath of the Kiowa’s armed resistance in the Red River War—the imprisonment of Kiowa warriors and spike in public support for Indian elimination—that the Kiowa realized they had very little choice but to tolerate this social engineering or starve. In chapters six and seven, Graber links the...

Orientalism poetics: story by Leonid Solovyov “The Nomad”

The article deals with the problem of orientalism in literature, narrowed to the question of Russian orientalism and its Soviet derivation. The names of Nikolai Karazin and Andrey Platonov are mentioned among Russian literary Orientalists. The researchers identify the differences between Soviet Orientalism and the Orientalism of the XIX century. The analytical paradigm presented in the article outlines the prospects for the scientific study of Uzbek impressions. Salir-Gul (1933) by Sigismund Krzyzanowski and Pavel Zaltzman's novel Central Asia in the Middle Ages (1930s). For the first time, the novel The nomad (Kochevye) by the Russian writer of the twentieth century Leonid Solovyov written in 1929 and published in 1932 is analyzed in detail. Appeal to the folklore, ceremonial, and ritual life of the peoples of Central Asia becomes one of the main techniques of Leonid Solovyov's Oriental poetics. Solovyov's narrator is not a traditional orientalist observer of an alien, and therefore exotic, picture of the world. In Solovyov's poetics, the subject of the story merges with its object and represents a single whole: Russian literature spoke in the voice of a stranger. The material of the article corresponds to the intentions outlined in modern postcolonial studies.

L’Enfant’s Washington: the figure of the President in the capital of the Republic

ABSTRACT Pierre L’Enfant’s plan for the permanent seat of government on the banks of the Potomac River was completed in 1791. Evidence of L’Enfant’s intentions is limited and the documentation of the debate surrounding its organisation, surprisingly small. However, an examination of the plan, and its correlation with the existing topography and surrounding landscape yields new evidence related to the structure of the most significant axes of the new city. This paper demonstrates the central role of the figure of the President to the location of key buildings and the orientation of avenues. It examines the creation of the persona of George Washington as part of a republican tradition of heroic virtue and explores the extent to which the adoption of a symbolic structure associated with kingship was reconciled with the republican ideals of the new nation. This work questions received ideas as to the distribution of and location of significant institutions and the sequence of design ideas that informed the 1791 plan. More importantly, it embeds Washington, D.C. in a wider history of urbanism as a key location for the early embodiment of American ceremonial life and an early example of structured civic space.

Ana-Ethnographic Representation: Early Modern Pueblo Painters, Scientific Colonialism, and Tactics of Refusal

In 1918, San Ildefonso Pueblo artist Crescencio Martinez completed two commissions for the anthropologist Edgar L. Hewett: A set of paintings and a series of tiles. The paintings, called the Crescencio Set, mark a formative moment in the development of a new genre of art, modern Pueblo painting. Before Crescencio and his San Ildefonso peers began creating images of ceremonial and daily life for sale to outsiders, they were hired as day laborers at archaeological excavations. While Pueblo laborers benefited financially from working with anthropologists, they nevertheless understood anthropology as a threat to their communities, as scientists disrupted sacred sites and the dead, collected sensitive material, and pushed informants for esoteric information. In countering this new colonial threat, Pueblo communities deployed long-developed tactics of resistance. Among the most powerful of these tactics is what Audra Simpson calls “refusal”. Many Pueblo laborers refused to share esoteric knowledge with anthropologists, a tactic adopted by those laborers who became artists. Early Pueblo paintings can, thus, be understood as “ana-ethnographic”, a representational mode through which the artists worked both through and against ethnographic norms in order to simultaneously benefit from, manipulate, and resist scientific colonialism. Crescencio’s paintings and tiles are paradigmatically ana-ethnographic. In creating these objects, Crescencio benefited from the ethnographic desire to know and record Pueblo life, and yet he only represented aspects of his culture appropriate for outsider consumption, refusing to share protected knowledge.

Memorate despre câteva obiceiuri din satul Mărișel, jud. Cluj. Note de teren

The field research in this rural community, Mărișel village, Cluj county, took place between 2013-2015, using visual means and structured transgenerational interviews, thus observing the process of oral transmission of narratives. I did not propose the identification of some other meanings to the researched facts, other than those attributed by the interviewed subjects. I should mention that the historical-oral presentation of the life facts told by the people interviewed from the few hamlets of Mărișel village was made from the perspective of our interlocutors, being followed by autobiographical narratives. Thus, I paid attention to narratives articulated in an oral history of the area, stories about customs such as the carols of the young men, the "juni", the wedding or their meetings (“sezatoarea”), as perceived by people of the generation that lived in the interwar period or immediately after the war. The exploration of ceremonial, calendar and family life was done from a multiple methodological perspective, both ethnographic-anthropological and of oral history, so that "the ethno-anthropological analysis of the ceremonial life of a village can also function as a socio-anthropological diagnosis for understanding the deep transformations and mutations in the life of that community ”.(Neagota, 2016) The memorates that are the research object of this work are the result of interviews with village people, elders, in whose house I had the privilege of residing as their grandchildren’s teacher.

The Persian community in Vladikavkaz: preserving ethnic identity in an alien cultural environment

On the basis of archival sources and materials taken from periodical press, the authors investigate the history of the Persian diaspora in Ossetia. The article discusses the causes of Persian migration to Ossetia, which began in the second half of the 19th century; their settlement and adaptation processes; and mechanisms of intra-ethnic consolidation. The authors identify the means Persians used to adapt to the economy of the host society, in particular by fi nding economic niches in industry, craft, trade, and domestic services, and analyze their integration into new economic forms of urban lifestyle. Ethnic entrepreneurship emerges as the foundation of Persian community life. The article investigates the diaspora’s infrastructure, including the Persian Consulate, a Shiite mosque, the Persian school Navruz , the charitable society Himmat , and several other institutions. In general, for most minority communities the place of worship becomes the focus point of intraethnic consolidation and preservation of national identity, especially when the community is not simply ethnic but rather ethno-confessional. In the Persian community, however, the main regulatory and communicative functions were performed by the Consulate. The authors argue that the prominence of the Consulate resulted from the uncertain status of the mosque, from the fact that Shiite worshippers came from various nationalities, and from the confl icts among them. The authors examine the degree of preservation of traditional Persian culture in festive and ceremonial life, community behavior, and relations with the motherland. They identify how the Persian community integrated into the socio-cultural environment of poly-ethnic Vladikavkaz through trade relations, everyday contacts, and other means.

Traditions and innovations in the ceremonial life of the German diaspora of Tashkent (the example of weddings)

This paper makes investigations on the Traditions and innovations in the ceremonial life of the German diaspora of Tashkent. It takes the example of weddings to mak theoritical analyses as the whole. Finally, research concludes with major points of the German diaspora of Tashkent.

Traditions and innovations in the ceremonial life of the German diaspora of Tashkent (the example of weddings)

This paper makes investigations on the Traditions and innovations in the ceremonial life of the German diaspora of Tashkent. It takes the example of weddings to mak theoritical analyses as the whole. Finally, research concludes with major points of the German diaspora of Tashkent.

易學的 사유에서 본 처용무의 儀式的 세계,意識的 경지 및 中和의 생명미학-神道와 藝道의 지평을 중심으로-

易學的 사유에서 본 처용무의 儀式的 세계,意識的 경지 및 中和의 생명미학-神道와 藝道의 지평을 중심으로-

TRADITIONAL OUTBUILDINGS OF THE MORDOVIANS

Introduction. The article deals with the main traditional outbuildings of the Mordvinians, reported on their functional purpose in economic activity. The forms and types of outbuildings, as well as the main building materials used by Mordvinians are described in details. Their significance in the religious and ceremonial life of the ethnic group is shown. Materials and Methods. The research is based on traditional methods of ethnographic science, such as field observation, survey and interviews, and a comprehensive approach. Among the methods of historical science comparative-historical, historical-genetic, problem-chronological, structural-system were used. Among the general scientific methods of research logical, descriptive, narrative, generalization, classification and systematization were involved. To achieve the results of the study, the materials collected by the authors in the course of field surveys conducted in the Mordovian villages were mainly used. Results and Discussion. Traditional outbuildings were of great importance in the economic activity of the Mordovian ethnic group. According to their functional purpose, they can be divided into the following groups: for livestock and poultry (stable, chicken coop, stable, kalda), sanitary and hygienic (bath), warehouse buildings for storage of food, utensils, firewood, animal feed (barn, cellar, woodshed, hayloft), for processing of grain (sheep, riga, mill). Depending on the welfare and financial capacity of the family, the number of outbuildings was different. As a rule, the wealthier families had more outbuildings than the less wealthier ones. The main building material for the construction of these buildings was wood. Conclusion. Thus, the traditional outbuildings of the Mordvinians occupied an important place in its economic activities. At the same time, each of them had its own purpose and performed certain functions. Some buildings, such as a bath and a barn, had not only economic purpose, but also were the venue for a number of prayers and ceremonies. It is now ordinarily they have banya (bath-house), outdoor courtyard with standing in different places sheds, barn and cellar.

The Transformation of Hierarchy Following Christian Conversion in Vanuatu

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I use pig-killings as an entry for understanding the transformation that has taken place with respect to hierarchy and egalitarianism in Vanuatu. In the early twentieth century accounts by John Layard there is a thorough description of the cosmological and spiritual meaning of pig-killings in the manly hierarchy of these islands. The entire society was consumed in a sacrificial cycle that each lasted for six years and involved the killing of many hundreds of pigs, the most valuable acting as substitutes for human beings. At the peak of the ritual, the greatest of men stood up on a stone platform and announced their increased status and thereby joined the ranks of the society of ancestors. Comparing this with the situation today, there is absolutely no build-up of super-human status in ceremonies. On the contrary, I argue that today, pigs are being killed, cows are being butchered and cooked, yams and taro are displayed and distributed in great quantities, and huge sums of money figure in bride price and ceremonial payments, but not for the purpose of gaining spiritual power. They instead express bilateral connections, and form a redistributive system of production. In a development linked to the introduction of Christianity, monetary value and colonial labour regimes, ceremonial life has made an almost unnoticeable turn against the former hierarchical order.

Karl von den Steinen’s Ethnographic Research among Indigenous Peoples in Brazil, 1884-1888

This article analyses and contextualizes the life and work of the German ethnologist Karl von den Steinen (1855-1929), who conducted ethnographic research in Brazil in 1884 and 1887-88. With a solid education in sciences and the humanities, von den Steinen, a physician and psychiatrist, set out to study social institutions, material and spiritual culture among “stone age” tribal societies along the Amazon. Arriving in Brazil in 1884 he studied the Upper Xingu and the Bororo Indians in the Mato Grosso province. In the Upper Xingu area he obtained a rich ethnographic collection and gathered detailed ethnographic data that continue to be useful for modern-day anthropologists. From a theoretical point of view, von den Steinen endorsed the theory of multilineal development proposed by his mentor Adolf Bastian (1826-1905). Despite many difficulties during his stay among the Bororo Indians, he was able to acquire valuable data to be used by those interested in Bororo social institutions and ceremonial life.