In this innovative, performative approach to the expressive culture of the Yaqui (Yoeme) peoples of the Sonora and Arizona borderlands, David Delgado Shorter provides an altogether fresh understanding of Yoeme worldviews. Based on extensive field study, Shorter’s interpretation of the community’s ceremonies and oral traditions as forms of “historical inscription” reveals new meanings of their legends of the Talking Tree, their narrative of myth-and-history known as the Testamento, their fabled deer dances, funerary rites, and church processions.

 

Working collaboratively with Yoeme communities, Shorter’s scrupulous investigation challenges received wisdom from both anthropological and New Age perspectives, demonstrates how Yoeme performances provide a counter-discourse to earlier understandings of colonialism and conquest, and updates our knowledge of contemporary Yoeme society. Through Shorter’s vivid descriptions and penetrating analyses we see for ourselves how today’s Yoeme peoples navigate the tribulations and opportunities of the twenty-first century.

David Delgado Shorter is an associate professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"While the work is centrally about the Yoeme of Potam . . . it is also about how we might conduct anthropological work with indigenous peoples who are concerned more than ever that whatever we write be of use to them."—Kathleen Fine-Dare, Journal of Anthropological Research

"Shorter breaks new ground in relating history and ethnography, in contributing to the study of Native American religions, and in emphasizing the significance of spatial relationships to cultural realities. The book will be appreciated as a contribution to Yoeme ethnography, but also for its general importance in religious studies, performance theory, ethnicity, and ethnohistory. Shorter's interests cross many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences; this is a book worth reading."—Raymond J. Demallie, Journal of Folklore Research

"This work is a major contribution to the body of Yoeme study."—Margaret Loghry, Pima County Library

Winner of the 2010 Chicago Folklore Prize, sponsored by the American Folklore Society and the University of Chicago.

 

Named one of the 2010 Southwest Books of the Year by the Pima County Public Library.