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Summary

Chapter 1 explores the contours of the religious practices of the Muisca in the early decades after the European invasion. To do so it unravels a series of overlapping assumptions and stereotypes about the functioning of their religious practices, social organisation, and political economy. While much of the historiography continues to take for granted that these people constituted a pagan laity led in the worship of a transcendental religion by a hierarchy of priests who performed sacrifices in temples, this chapter shows that these long-held narratives are fictions originating in the earliest descriptions of the region, later embellished and developed by seventeenth-century chroniclers. Instead, drawing a large corpus of colonial observations, it reveals a highly localised series of immanentist religous practices, centred on the maintenance of lineage deities that Spaniards called santuarios and a sophisticated ritual economy of reciprocal exchange, that were intimately connected to the workings of political power and economic production.

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1 - The Muisca and the Problem of Religion

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1 - The Muisca and the Problem of Religion

Summary