Zuni Law, Zuni Religion, and the Priests of the Bow Society

 

 

Cushing also cited an incidence where he showed a pole that accompanies a theodolite to an old Zuni man and asked him what he thought the name of it was.  In response the old man inquired as to the use of the item.  After briefly describing the implementation of the device the old man provided a rather lengthy sentence-word that Cushing translated as "heights of the world progressively measuring stick".  The next day Cushing took the pole to the extreme corner of the pueblo and began "to flourish it around" until a middle-aged man relented to curiosity and asked what it was.  Cushing then provided the Zuni name he had learned the day before and the man promptly requested, "Can they actually tell how far up and down journeying the world is?"[105].

When a Zuni is planting his field and performs the ceremonious prayer and ritual of planting prayer sticks, offering cornmeal and reciting to the six directions, changing the words only to correspond to the direction he is facing, it not likely that he is distinguishing between his religion and the agra-science he has learned.  Samarin remarked that "as one level of scientia there is knowing how to perform a task or knowing the effects that natural and supernatural forces perform.  That is primitive science or- depending on what we are looking at or what our prejudices may be- prescientific thinking"[106].

In this regard there is no distinction between religious and secular language as the logic of scientific language.  There does however appear to be an underlying theme where non-verbal expression and the prospect of a deviant utterance distinguishes between the secular and religious in contradistinction to Young's remark.

In Zuni Law, Smith and Roberts state, "In manifest cultural content, Zuni law appears less highly elaborated than Zuni religion. It is also true that Zuni law is less important in Zuni values than Zuni religion...In the institutional field of religion, direct association between high cultural elaboration and high evaluation is present" and while there is a an obvious disparity in elaboration of the religious and legal fields "the differential between religion and law in cultural evaluation appears to be less striking", with the Zuni community possessing a high evaluation of law and the Tribal Council as a legal body[107].

In reports of litigation in both religious and legal trials "there is little expression...of an awareness of values pertaining to beauty"[108] and upon examination the most notable instance of any reference remotely related to aesthetic expression was case 62 where it was stated "Although in a dance it was desirable that one of the dancers wore jewelry, it should not have been stolen jewelry"[109].  In fact, most references were in regard to attanni, such as, "the woman should not have become a coyote at night"[110], or "the woman should not have brought a plague of grasshoppers into the valley", or "it was undesirable that a man could send a centipede into the side of a woman".  All of these references are related to violations of observances and are considered as acts of witchcraft.

The duties of the Bow Society, and latter the Tribal Council, was enforcement as a secular institution despite religious evaluations.  It would not do to punish or fend witchcraft through religious rite and ceremony, for to do so the canonical rite would paradoxically expose itself to the dangerous simply by reference to it, and would be akin to fighting fire with fire, a very undesirable prospect to the Zuni.  Thus, attanni is negated by observance (teshkwi) and violations are reflections upon the individual, and dealt with by secular enforcement, which collectively, may include gossip, criticism, and public ridicule[111].

The underlying dialectic of the beautiful and the dangerous is evident in distinct dialogues, even in the absence of aesthetic expression, for attanni is proper to secular dialogue and is pertinent to religious dialogue only in the sense of observance where "if you have been living rightly, then attanni is not an issue" (Ko'na to' tewanan ateyaye).  Non-verbal expression is not meaningless nor is a deviant utterance meaningless where the objective is the immersion of the subject into the social structure in order to eliminate causes of behavior conducive to the anti-structure of a social hierarchy where the collective consciousness of the people is to "pray to become one"[112].

Chet Staley-Amerindian Arts

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Notes