Monuments, Empires, and Resistance The Araucanian Polity and Ritual Narratives [Paperback]

This theoretically and empirically informed account examines the resistance strategies of the Araucanians to unite against the Spanish.In this book, Tom D. Dillehay examines the resistance strategies of the Araucanians and how they used mound building and other sacred monuments to reorganize their political and culture life in order to unite against the Spanish.In this book, Tom D. Dillehay examines the resistance strategies of the Araucanians and how they used mound building and other sacred monuments to reorganize their political and culture life in order to unite against the Spanish.From AD 1550 to 1850, the Araucanian polity in southern Chile was a center of political resistance to the intruding Spanish empire. In this book, Tom D. Dillehay examines the resistance strategies of the Araucanians and how they used mound building and other sacred monuments to reorganize their political and culture life in order to unite against the Spanish. Drawing on anthropological research conducted over three decades, Dillehay focuses on the development of leadership, shamanism, ritual, and power relations.Introduction; 1. Purposes, settings, and definitions; 2. Shaping analogical and conceptual perspectives; 3. Araucanian prehistory and history: old biases and new views; 4. Imbricating social, material, metaphorical, and spiritual worlds; 5. The ethnographies of kuel, narratives, and communities; 6. An archaeological view of kuel and rehuekuel; 7. Contact, fragmentation, and recruitment and the rehuekuel; 8. Recursiveness, kinship geographies, and polity; 9. Epilogue and dying mounds. ...groundbreaking book... Monuments, Empires, and Resistance is an important text for archaeologists and anthropologists interested in the social, political, ideological, and demographic processes and associated with monumentalism. --Journal of Anthropological Research