Dive Into Book Of The Hopi Conceived By Frank Waters Published As Leaflet

I had stopped reading before the last part, which is lots of history, I would have rated it lower than five, because a couple hundred pages is given to details of the many ceremonies, and I felt overwhelmed by all the information.
However, once the historical part puts the ceremonial stuff in the context of the history and current at the time the book was written condition of the Hopi people, I was glad I had struggled through all the ceremonial detail, because it gave me a perspective about how important the religion is to the culture, at least to the traditionalists.
These are heroic people, who have since time immemorial disdained violence and believed that if they lived in accord with their creator they would be rewarded by their creator.
Learning about the Hopi experience and attitude could be giant step in the redemption of our world, Utterly fascinating book. I knew virtually nothing about the Hopi Indians before I read this, and I was amazed to learn about the rich spiritualism of Hopi ceremonies, beliefs, and world view that are described and explained here.
I don't think the word "primitive" applies at all, Reading this book is just not enlightening, either, It's thought provoking, and I might even say transformative, Hopi traditional culture, as I learned, is mostly a peaceful one, rather unlike the rational, materialistic culture in which most of us live, An often fascinating book, but its chaotic arrangement betrays its underlying problems, Waters argues that previous studies of Hopi religion had been written from a hostile rationalist position: I can't argue for the trajectories of American anthropology, but there's no need for an author to accept a belief system as true for them to represent its truth to its practitioners seriously and sympathetically.


Waters is careful to begin with the most universalised view of Hopi belief practice, through sections that are littered with promises that the material under discussion will finally be explained properly at a later point in the text.
The religious universalising goes too far, to the point where Waters is all but arguing identity with far eastern religious practices he'd introduced as analogies while simultaneously downplaying actual historical assessments of the other potential influences.
However, when we reach the useful final historical section, it becomes clear that even his proposed universalism throughout all the Hopi communities is somewhat overstated.


It's fascinating, and the area's not one I'm overfamiliar with, but the ethnography here seems insecure and not

entirely reliable, We very rarely hear his informants directly in their own words, and they disappear anonymously into Waters's construction of a synthetic whole that turns out not to reflect the reality of his informants' actual lives.
I'll read further. It is easy to get lost in the detailed descriptions of the overwhelming number of symbols and spirits that form the basis of the Hopi culture that Frank Waters lays out.
It is a monumental effort and much too rich to read in a month or two, In my opinion this research takes more of a life long commitment to read and understand, This is my second time through the book and it is just as fascinating as my previous effort, A very complex culture indeed, Reading a sacred text such as this book takes time and focus, Do not attempt to read this book unless you are prepared to study the Hopis tedious rituals amp ceremonies, I chose to study this book because of my fascination with Ancient Pueblo Culture, My family has land in Williamson Valley,AZ so we have visited some of the ancient ruins in the area, I found out about this book from reading about Jimi Hendrix, He loved this book. This is book is a treasure that feels like you are reading the mysteries and truths of the human existence, Kachina theory is through and the costumes are beautifully precise, The history part of this book ties together the meaning of the ceremonies amp rituals of the Hopi, Like all Indigenous history this one is unjust and sad, I read this as a teenager, and the world view of the Hopi's affected me deeply enough at the time to consider running away from home.
It was probably one of the major catalyst's to me to think about other cultures in a way that wasn't presented to us in the western world at the time via the media.
which was typically racist and demeaning, A classic title dealing with native American religion, I've worked my way through it two or three times over the years, Don't know why it wasn't on my list of books read,

An amazing read one to be savored and thought about rather than sped through, I read this book to cap off all I've learned about the Ancestral Pueblo Native Americans, The Hopi are thought to be their descendants, The book takes you inside the Kiva to observe a bewildering array of ceremonies, rites and performances, The religion is complex and focused on natural events, not the least of which is rain, It also provides a backdrop of the Hopi's own creation story, flood story and ancient migrations and the formation of the many different clans.
Clan symbols are often left in the petroglyphs and pictographs on the canyon walls, After considerable volunteer work in Hopi, and making many friends on First amp Second Mesas, I thought I'd read this "popular guide" to Hopi to see if and how it may actually align with the people.
I have misgivings but we'll see,

I wish, though, that so many would worry just a quarter as much about how Hopi, a small tribe, struggles to maintain their rich culture and identity as they do about Hopi prophecy and mythology.
This work explores the culture and traditions of the Hopi Indians, It includes their creation legends, The ceremonials and the picture writings are discussed, A really beautiful book with some excellent illustrations and photographs, however, I found the writing style to be extremely dry and tedious, The first two sections on Hopi creation myths and migrations were fascinating, then it just went downhill from there, The section on their annual ceremonies was a tough trudge, even though the material was interesting, and the last section concerning their history with Europeans and Americans was one of the worst most oversimplified accounts of Western History I have read in a while.
I do understand that this book was written in the early's and the discourse/conversations about indigenous people are much different now, but I would say buy this book for the awesome cover, illustrations, and photographs and get your historical information from another source.
It is gives some interesting looks at the religion of the Hopi's and also gives a written history of the Hopi that had been oral before.
The writing seems to be from a viewpoint that reflects the beliefs of a faction of the Hopi, This was written in thes and I wonder how things have changed with the passage of time, This is not your normal history, It is very important history but it is not a viewpoint neutral history, I generally liked it, but I did not buy it all, The first three parts of the book are wellresearched with lots of photos and illustrations, It sounds like things came together so that this level of completeness could happen,

The fourth part, with more modern history, suffers a little from being so without conclusion and things we have learned since then.
It might be worth revisiting to see if things have come any closer to the ended recommendations, Is witchcraft still a problem

I also can't help but know that the Navajo would probably have a different perspective on their conflict with the Hopi.


So I know that the book has shortcomings, but it still has a lot that is fascinating,

true and sad account of what magnificent culture is lost forever, the Hopi, the first Americans, As problematic as it is dry, It's a book that should make you ask the question "Can this possibly be accurate" because the likely answer is "no, "

I got about a third of the way into the book before I felt compelled to put it down,

I highly encourage folks to look deeper into the history of this Book of the Hopi's creation, In my view it is extremely suspect,

Geertz, A Book of the Hopi: The Hopi's Book Anthropos,/,, Retrieved September,, from sitelink jstor. org/stable/ A book like this one is a rare thing a work that truly takes one inside the folkways and mindset of a community that is different from ones own.
Writing with a painstaking level of attention to detail, and in a strong spirit of respect, Frank Waters introduces the reader to the ways of the Hopi Nation of Native Americans in hisBook of the Hopi.


Waters, the author of overbooks, spent most of his life in the American Southwest he was part Cheyenne, and lived among the Navajo and Ute people at various points in his life.
His interests in Native American life and culture, and in the history of the Southwestern United States, are defining parts of his literary sensibility and while his novel The Man Who Killed the Deeris widely regarded as his masterpiece, Book of the Hopi is probably his most widely read work nowadays.


For this book The First Revelation of the Hopis Historical and Religious Worldview of Life, as the books cover subtitle has it Waters consulted withHopi elders, hoping to set forth the Hopi worldview in a manner that would not be mediated by EuroAmerican cultural assumptions.


Waters organizes his study of the Hopi Nation around four key themes:Hopi myths, including the belief that we currently live in the fourth of nine worlds that constitute the cycle of existenceHopi legends regarding the process by which the Hopi people made their way to their homeland in what is now the state of Arizonathe ceremonial cycle of mystery plays around which the Hopi organize the life of their community andthe often difficult history of Hopi interaction with the European and EuroAmerican cultures of Spain, Mexico, and finally the United States of America.


Waterss fascination with Hopi culture is clear throughout Book of the Hopi, His interest in a creation cycle in which the world becomes corrupt, comes to an end, and then renews itself around the cultural integrity and religious devotion of the Hopi people makes sense in terms of the Cold War context within which Book of the Hopi was published ina time when it seemed all too possible that the people of a corrupt world would use nuclear weapons to bring the world to a premature end.
Interest in the Hopi concept of the Nine Worlds persists both in scholarship e, g. , folklorist Harold Courlandersbook The Fourth World of the Hopis and in popular culture as with novelist Martin Cruz Smithsthriller Nightwing.


Waters seems particularly interested in the cycle of Hopi ceremonialism, writing that

The entire course of the Hopi Road of Life is unfolded every year in an annual cycle of nine great religious ceremonies that dramatize the universal laws of life.
No other “folk art” in all America remotely compares with these profound mystery plays, They wheel slowly and majestically through the seasonal cycles, like the constellations which time their courses and imbue their patterns with meaning, Ancient and alien to modern ears, they take on for us the dimensions of the mystical unreal, Even their names seem derived from an ancient and cryptic mythology known only to the mirroring above: Wúwuchim, Soyál, Powamu, Lakón, Owaqlt words unknown to us, perhaps, but great names for great things, old names, as old as the shape of America itself.
p.

Waterss appreciation for Hopi culture is clear throughout, though sometimes his choice of language betrays his status as an outside observer elsewhere in this same passage of otherwise glowing description, he refers to the cycle of Hopi ceremonialism as being “Barbarically beautiful”.
“Barbarically” Really

The “Mystery Plays” section of Book of the Hopi takes up more space than any other single section of the bookpages, out of apage book and readers may find some of this part of the book heavy going, simply because of the sheer conscientiousness with which Waters seeks to set down every single significant aspect of every single ceremony.
But the depth of Waterss fascination with the Hopi mystery plays often calls forth the most poetic aspects of his writing, as when he considers the role of a captured eagle in the Hopi Home Dance:

Over and over through the years one sees it, and it is never less beautiful: the still, flocculent dawn the wonder and the mystery in the eyes of the villagers crowding the housetops and, down below, the two spruce, male and female, standing in the empty plaza.
Nothing breaks the silence save the great, proud bird tethered by one leg to his platform nearby, No living being has soared alone so high as this lord of the air, None is so proud too proud to pick at the leash that tethers him, He simply flaps his great wings to soar aloft, only to be jerked down once more, p.

There are times for poetry, and occasions that are more prosaic in nature and the section “The History: The Lost White Brother” sets down a difficult history that does not lend itself to a poetic rendering.
The sections subtitle refers to the longstanding belief that the Hopi would one day be visited by the pahána, a “lost white brother” from the east whose arrival would usher in a utopian new age of intercultural harmony and shared prosperity.


Unfortunately, however, what the Hopi got instead was the Spaniards, and then the Mexicans, and then the Americans a grim, centurieslong tableau of conquest, forced religious conversion, and the imposition of alien cultural norms.
This long sad history fostered divisions among the Hopi, as when Waters considers the situation of the traditionalist leader Yukioma when a split occurred among the Hopi at the village of Oraibi inand:

The Oraibi split was more than a social schism between two factions.
It was a psychological wound no Hopi can forget, that bleeds afresh whenever he talks, In Yukiomas avowed retreat back into the prehistoric ruins of the past, back into mythology, we read the retrogression of a living tradition unable to confront the future.
And even this retrogression was a failure, p.

To say that the Hopi have faced many challenges would be an understatement, Encroachments upon their land by the more numerous Navajo whose much larger Navajo Nation completely surrounds the Hopi Nation have been a regular problem in Hopi life.
And the U. S. government has all too often exacerbated the problems it has claimed to want to solve, Hopi children, like Native American children from other nations under U, S. sovereignty, were taken away from their homes, forced into “Indian schools,” made to dress like white children, punished for speaking their own language, And during the Second World War, Hopi men who told U, S. Army authorities that the Hopi religion forbade them to kill were arrested, convicted, and sent to prison, Would the same thing have happened to white conscientious objectors

Against the backdrop of that difficult history, Waters closes by asking hisHopi informants a key question: how can the Hopi, and the rest of the world, move forward into an uncertain future Their recommendations, against the books backdrop of Cold War tension, remind us how the large nations of the time, like the U.
S. A. and the U. S. S. R. , could have learned much from small nations like the Hopi,

Illustrated with helpful photographs and a glossary of Hopi terms, Book of the Hopi remains a valuable introduction to Hopi ways.
While some contemporary observers may find the book dated, Waterss work, in the context of a time when Native Americans across the U, S. A. were still fighting for recognition and respect for their culture, should be appreciated as a work that invited readers from the dominant culture to respect the Hopi people and Hopi ways.
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