Ritual Songs of the Cora of West Mexico and the Hopi of the American Southwest: Shared Ideas Related to Maize Agriculture
- Ritual Songs of the Cora of West Mexico and the Hopi of the American Southwest:Shared Ideas Related to Maize Agriculture
Introduction
This paper presents a comparative study of the shared ideas voiced in ritual song texts created by two Uto-Aztecan-speaking cultural groups who follow a lifeway based on maize. The texts analyzed were collected at the turn of the 20th century among the Cora (Náyari) living in scattered rancherias in the Sierra del Nayar region of northwest Mexico and the Hopi (Hópìit) living in multistoried mesa-top pueblos in northern Arizona in the American Southwest.
We focus on songs of the Cora sung by singers who accompany urraca dancers at mitote performances as well as songs of the Hopi sung by katsinas at katsina performances. The urracas and katsinas make their appearance in the communities as masked deities of rain. Our study will focus on whether and how the contents of these song texts voice a similar suite of beliefs and rituals related to rain and the growth of maize which sustain their similar corn lifeway.1 We have focused especially on native explanations of the underlying concepts and their symbolic presentation because these speakers are more attuned to the archaic and metaphoric nature of the song texts than non-native scholars (see Knab 1986:53).
We first consider the available databases of ritual song texts and why song texts are a good source of cultural tradition. We then provide a basic overview of Cora and Hopi culture as it pertains to their cosmologies and ceremonial systems, specifically to the mitote and katsina performances. [End Page 74] In the body of the article we compare, by citing extensive sections of song text, how specific beliefs are similarly conceived and voiced in the ritual songs of these two peoples. Finally we consider how this textual evidence offers insights into the relationship between the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest and the rancheria peoples of northern and western Mexico.
Song Data Sets
The texts of ritual songs have generally received less analytical attention than have other aspects of a culture's ceremonies, such as song structure (e.g., Gilman 1908, List 1985) and dance performance (e.g., Kurath 1970, Ramirez 2003). This is due largely to their oral and thus ephemeral nature. Many song texts have been lost because they were not written down but simply memorized and passed down orally through the generations. When recorded, they were made exclusively in the native languages, most of which were not accompanied by translations or explanations of their esoteric content (see Heyden 1986). Further, mostly recordings were not made as the songs were sung in performance. Instead, individual singers in recording sessions typically sang only one verse, omitting the repeats and other codas that duplicate how they are performed at ceremonials. Without these and the accompanying kinesthetic and visual aspects of performance, such fragments do not deliver the full impact and message of the song.
Another reason that relatively few "ritual" songs have been studied stems from the mistaken belief that the texts of all such songs contain secret information that should not be known by anyone outside the culture. However, many ceremonials of a ritual nature are freely open to respectful visitors. Even when songs are performed in "religious" contexts, their messages do not necessarily disclose knowledge and beliefs that are not to be known by the uninitiated. The Hopi katsina and Cora urraca songs studied here are of this latter kind. For these reasons, the two data sets studied here, while admittedly suffering some of the above problems, still offer important insights into the many ways that ritual song texts can inform not only about a culture's cosmology but also about how the ideas contained therein support the Coras and Hopis in their daily lives.
In order to assess similarities in textual content between these two groups, the optimal study would compare a lengthy continuum of texts that spans material from the past to the present. However, among the [End Page 75] southwestern Pueblos, there is a lamentable lack of song and discourse preserved...
