Jacques Galinier

The Neo-Indians: A Religion for the Third Millenium

This is a rich ethnographic study of the emergence of the neo-Indian movement -- a new form of Indian identity based on largely reinvented pre-colonial cultures and comprising a diverse group of people attempting to re-create purified pre-colonial indigenous beliefs and ritual practices without the contaminating influences of modern society. There is no full-time neo-Indian. Both indigenous and non-indigenous practitioners assume Indian identities only when deemed spiritually significant. In their daily lives, they are average members of modern society, dressing in Western clothing, working at middle-class jobs, and retaining their traditional religious identities. As a result of this part-time status the neo-Indians are often overlooked as a subject of study, making this book the first anthropological analysis of the movement. Galinier and Molinie present and analyse four decades of ethnographic research focusing on Mexico and Peru, the two major areas of the movements genesis. They examine the use of public space, describe the neo-Indian ceremonies, provide analysis of the ceremonies symbolism, and explore the close relationship between the neo-Indian religion and tourism. The Neo-Indians will be of great interest to ethnographers, anthropologists, and scholars of Latin American history, religion, and cultural studies.

Culture et cognition : Les premières anthropologies de l'Aufklärung

Le retour de Kant dans l’histoire de l’anthropologie est une bonne nouvelle pour une epistemologie en crise. Il l’est aussi pour des figures mal connues parmi ses contemporains, qui temoignent de l’effervescence intellectuelle de cette epoque, comme par exemple les discussions autour de questions aussi fondamentales, dirions-nous aujourd’hui, que celle des chaines causales reliant affects et cognition, percepts et concepts, physiologie et psychologie, sciences de la vie et sciences de la soci...

From the savage to the imperial Indian: Identity quests in contemporary Mexico

This article explores some of the major themes through which a specific quest of identity in contemporary Mexico is undertaken. This quest of “mexicanhood” is based on a constant demand for symbols and shows the importance of Aztec culture as a pool of concepts from which a new philosophy keeps emerging. The increasing resurrection of the “Imperial Indian” has been supported by the arrival of messiahs, guides and interpreters of “pre‐hispanic thought”. The use of Zocaló (Mexico City Centre) plays a crucial part in this quest.

Superficially, the Sacred The Otomi Indians before the Stranger

ature when it drew, before our eyes, upon the Aztec and Mayan cosmologies. But, alas, while blurring, in selective manner, the internal order of the religions among these societies, colonization emerged as making the postulated analogies more problematic. The cultural response of the Otomi of the Sierra Madre to the impact of Catholicism has been to compress the universe into an elevated, celestial sphere that is put under the guidance of the Christian God, called Santisimo (identified by sun light), on the