The Yaquis: A Cultural History

Edward H. Spicer's The Yaquis, A Cultural History, published by the University of Arizona Press in 1980, is the standard scholarly history of the Yaqui people, covering the Waehma Lenten and Easter ceremonies, the pascola and deer dancer traditions, and the place of the huya ania, the wilderness world, in Yaqui religious thought, across the long span from Jesuit contact through twentieth century Yaqui life on both sides of the US Mexico border. Spicer worked from decades of direct ethnographic engagement with Yaqui communities. Its strength is that long historical span combined with close attention to how Yaqui religious practice absorbed and reshaped Catholic ritual on Yaqui terms rather than simply replacing indigenous belief with it. Its limit is that it was written in 1980 from research conducted still earlier, so a claim about Yaqui religious practice today should be checked against more recent work documenting how the tradition has continued to change since.