Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T14:18:38.621Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Play, Role Reversal and Humor: Symbolic Elements of a Tewa Pueblo Navajo Dance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Jill Drayson Sweet
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The Tewa Indians of the San Ildefonso Pueblo perform the Navajo Dance which is a parody of their Navajo neighbors. This dance event involves ritual play, humor, and sex role reversals; it also dramatizes the Pueblo Indian's stereotype of the Navajo. In this paper, I will first describe the dance event as performed on April 28, 1974, and analyze some of the symbolic elements of the event. I will then argue that the Navajo Dance is one way that Pueblo Indians deal with their ambivalent and contradictory friend/enemy relationships with the Navajo.

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , Fall/Winter 1979 , pp. 3 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1979

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES CITED

Bailey, L.R. 1973 Indian Slave Trade in the Southwest. Los Angeles: Westernlore Press.Google Scholar
Beidelman, Thomas O. 1966 “Swazi Royal Ritual,” Africa 36:1, 373–405.Google Scholar
Bricker, Victoria R. 1973 Ritual Humor in Highland Chiapas. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Brugge, David M. 1969 “Pueblo Factionalism and External Relations,” Ethnohistory 16:2, 191–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cox, Harvey 1969 The Feast of Fools. New York: Harper and Row.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly and Bennett, Stith 1971 “An Exploration Model of Play,” American Anthropologist 73:1, 45–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dell, Cecily 1970 A Primer for Movement Description. New York: Dance Notation Bureau.Google Scholar
Douglas, Mary 1966 Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Gluckman, Max 1963 Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa. London: The Free Press of Glencoe.Google Scholar
Gluckman, Max 1965 Custom and Conflict in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hester, James J. 1962 Early Navajo Migrations and Acculturation. Museum of New Mexico Papers in Anthropology No. 6. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Huezinga, Johan 1955 Homo Ludens. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Hutchinson, Ann 1970 Labanotation. New York: Theatre Arts Books.Google Scholar
Jones, Oakah L. Jr., 1966 Pueblo Warriors and Spanish Conquest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Kluckhohn, Clyde and Leighton, Dorothea 1956 The Navaho. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kurath, Gertrude P. 1969 Music and Dance of the Tewa Pueblos. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Lange, Charles and Riley, Carroll L. (eds.) 1966 The Southwestern Journals of Adloph F. Bandelier 1880–1882. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Leach, Edmund 1964 “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse.” In New Directions in the Study of Language, Eric Lenneber, H. (ed.), Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, pp. 23–63.Google Scholar
Loizos, Caroline 1967 “Play Behavior in Higher Primates: A Review.” In Primate Ethnology, Morris, Desmond (ed.). Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 176–218.Google Scholar
McNitt, Frank 1972 Navajo Wars: Military Campaigns, Slave Raids and Reprisals. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Miller, Stephen 1973 “Ends, Means, and Galumphing: Some Leitmotifs of Play,” American Anthropologist, 75:1, 87–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norbeck, Edward 1963 “African Rituals of Conflict,” American Anthropologist 65:6, 1254–79.Google Scholar
Oritz, Alfonso 1972 “Ritual Drama and the Pueblo World View.” In New Perspectives on the Pueblos, Ortiz, Alfonso (ed.), pp. 135–61.Google Scholar
Reeve, Frank D. n.d. The Navajo Indians. Unpublished manuscript, University of New Mexico.Google Scholar
Rigby, Peter 1968 “Some Gogo Rituals of Purification: An Essay on Social and Moral Categories.” In Dialectic in Practical Religion, Leach, Edmund (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 153–78.Google Scholar
Sando, Joe S. 1976 The Pueblo Indian. San Francisco: The Indian Historical Press.Google Scholar
Schechner, Richard 1973 “Drama, Script, Theatre, and Performance,” The Drama Review, 17:3, 5–36.Google Scholar
Spicer, Edward M. 1962 Cycles of Conquest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Google Scholar
Spicer, Edward M. 1972 “Plural Society in the Southwest.” In Plural Society in the Southwest, Spicer, Edward M. and Thompson, Raymond H. (eds.), Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, pp. 21–76.Google Scholar
Sutton-Smith, Brian 1977 “Play as Adaptive Potentiation.” In Studies in the Anthropology of Play, Stevens, Phillips (ed.), West Point, New York: Leisure Press, 222–32.Google Scholar
Thomas, Alfred Barnaby 1940 The Plains Indians and New Mexico, 1751–1778, Coronado Cuarto Centennial Publications. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Underhill, Ruth M. 1956 The Navahos. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Van Valkenburg, Richard F. 1974 A Short History of the Navajo People. New York: Garland Publishing Inc. Google Scholar
Vogt, Evon Z. 1955 “A Study of the Southwestern Fiesta System as Exemplified by the Laguna Fiesta,” American Anthropologist 57: 820–38.Google Scholar
Whitman, William 1947 The Pueblo Indians of San Ildefonso, A Changing Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar