Rainhouse and Ocean: Speeches for the Papago Year

By David López, Ruth M. Underhill, Jose Pancho, et al.

The Tohono O'odham of southern Arizona, formerly known as the Papago, have made a life in a place that many would consider uninhabitable. These desert people were converted to Catholicism by early Spanish missionaries, yet they retain much of their earlier lifeway as a means of continuing adaptation to their desert environment.

This book is a restudy of speeches and ritual information collected by anthropologist Underhill beginning in 1931 and published in her book Papago Indian Religion (1946). It describes the Native--as opposed to the Christian--side of the yearly ritual cycle of the Tohono O'odham, showing how seven rites form a system of meanings that grew from the relation between these people and their desert homeland. The rites presented focus on the summer wine feast, salt pilgrimage, hunting, war, and flood.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816517746
• ISBN13: 9780816517749
• Release Date: February 1997
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Length: 153 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.9" x 8.8"