Cosmology and Moral Community in the Lakota Sun Dance

Reconceptualizing J. R. Walker's Account

• Author(s): Fritz Detwiler,
• Publisher: Routledge
• Pages: 150
• ISBN_10: 1000536262
  ISBN_13: 9781000536263
  
• Language: en
• Categories: History / Indigenous Peoples in the Americas , Religion / General , Religion / Indigenous, Folk & Tribal , Social Science / Indigenous Studies , Social Science / Regional Studies , History / Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies) , Social Science / Sociology / General , Social Science / Anthropology / General ,

Description:...

Drawing on Indigenous methodologies, this book uses a close analysis of James R. Walker’s 1917 monograph on the Lakota Sun Dance to explore how the Sun Dance communal ritual complex – the most important Lakota ceremony – creates moral community, providing insights into the cosmology and worldview of Lakota tradition.

The book uses Walker’s primary source to conduct a reading of the Sun Dance in its nineteenth-century context through the lenses of Lakota metaphysics, cosmology, ontology, and ethics. The author argues that the Sun Dance constitutes a cosmic ethical drama in which persons of all types – human and nonhuman – come together in reciprocal actions and relationships. Drawing on contemporary animist theory and a perspectivist approach that uses Lakota worldview assumptions as the basis for analysis, the book enables a richer understanding of the Sun Dance and its role in the Lakota moral world.

Offering a nuanced understanding that centers Lakota views of the sacred, this book will be relevant to scholars of religion and animism, and all those interested in Native American cultures and lifeways.