Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
34. Why does it matter how we translate religious concepts in Indigenous traditions?
Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry [+]
University of Texas at Austin, PhD candidate
Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His focus is on Religions in the Americas with an interest in Late Postclassic and colonial Mesoamerica. His dissertation, They Give the Sun to Drink: the Life and Labor of Aztec Ritual Specialists, is an account of Aztec ritual specialists using material culture and Nahuatl language sources. The project argues that household ritual specialists helped sustain temple religion by crafting ceramic, stonework, regalia, and food staples.
Description
This chapter considers how Indigenous and European grammarians aligned religious terms and concepts when creating bilingual dictionaries. It signals to ritual education, concepts like “religion,” and terms like “minister” and “priest.” The chapter argues that Eurocentric language conceals the semantics of an Indigenous worldview.