The World Below: Body and Cosmos in Otomi Indian Ritual (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780870817731)

In The World Below, Jacques Galinier surveys both traditional Otomi cosmology and colonial and contemporary Catholic rituals to illustrate the complexity of continuity and change in Mesoamerican religious ideology and practice. Galinier explores the problems of historical and family memory, models of space and time, the role of the human habitation in cosmology, shamanism and healing, and much more. He elucidates the way these realities are represented in a series of arresting oppositions - both Otomi oppositions and the duality of indigenous and Catholic ritual life - between the upper and lower human body.

Drawing upon both Freud and theories of the carnivalesque, Galinier argues that the "world below" (the lower half of the body) provides the foundation for an indigenous metapsychology that is at once very close to and very far away from the Freudian conceptual apparatus.

Author: Jacques Galinier
ISBN-10: 0870817736
ISBN-13: 9780870817731
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Language: English
Published: 11/15/2004
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.94lbs
Size: 8.94h x 6.08w x 0.64d