Cosmology and Moral Community in the Lakota Sun Dance: Reconceptualizing J. R. Walker's Account


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Description

Drawing on Indigenous methodologies, this book uses a close analysis of James R. Walker's 1917 monograph on the Lakota Sun Dance to explore how the Sun Dance communal ritual complex - the most important Lakota ceremony - creates moral community, providing insights into the cosmology and worldview of Lakota tradition.

The book uses Walker's primary source to conduct a reading of the Sun Dance in its nineteenth-century context through the lenses of Lakota metaphysics, cosmology, ontology, and ethics. The author argues that the Sun Dance constitutes a cosmic ethical drama in which persons of all types - human and nonhuman - come together in reciprocal actions and relationships. Drawing on contemporary animist theory and a perspectivist approach that uses Lakota worldview assumptions as the basis for analysis, the book enables a richer understanding of the Sun Dance and its role in the Lakota moral world.

Offering a nuanced understanding that centers Lakota views of the sacred, this book will be relevant to scholars of religion and animism, and all those interested in Native American cultures and lifeways.



Author: Fritz Detwiler
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 09/25/2023
Pages: 144
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.49lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.33d
ISBN13: 9780367748807
ISBN10: 0367748800
BISAC Categories:
- History | Indigenous Peoples in the Americas
- Religion | Indigenous, Folk & Tribal
- Social Science | Indigenous Studies

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