An artist’s statement accompanying the photographic project Qoyllur rit’i: The Lord of the Snow Star. Translated from the original Spanish by Emily C. Floyd. Versión en español disponible aquí.

The festival of the Lord of Qoyllur rit’i, the “Lord of the Snow Star” in Quechua, is an important pilgrimage in the southern Peruvian Andes to the sanctuary of the same name at the base of the snow-capped mountain Sinakara, more than 4600 meters above sea level in the Cuzco region. Every year in the months of May and June, depending on the date of Lent, thousands of pilgrims from the most remote regions of the southern Peruvian Andes congregate at the site. Fortified by their devotion and faith, they confront high altitudes and extreme temperatures in a steep upward climb of more than eight kilometers.

The origins of the festival may extend back to before the arrival of Europeans in the region, but it is with the coming of the Spaniards and syncretic Catholicism that Qoyllur rit’i acquired the form and scale of today’s event. In the pilgrimage, ancestral rites converge and often overlap with Catholic traditions centered on a rock displaying a miraculous painting of the crucified Christ. The festival and sanctuary were declared Patrimonio Cultural de la Nación (National Cultural Heritage) in 2004 by the Peruvian state. In 2011 UNESCO listed the pilgrimage as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The first time I went to the sanctuary was in 2001, when the paved highway that now connects the Cuzco region with the Peruvian jungle was not yet in existence. My memory is of a long, cold, and dusty journey by truck with a group of dancers who sang songs in Quechua and Spanish throughout the trip. Back then I was part of the Catholic school that organized the excursion, and I didn’t understand much of what was going on. On my second visit in 2006, I went with devout family members, a few days after the main festival. I found the route and sanctuary practically empty and for the first time I had the opportunity to approach the miraculous rock. From then on, until 2018, I returned to the sanctuary on various occasions. On each trip, I was fascinated by the spectacle, the rituals, and everything related to this festival, a festival which I was only beginning to understand.

In 2012, I began to make a graphic record of the pilgrimage, which little by little evolved into a photographic project. In this project, my interest in the complexity of the festival, beyond its veil of Christianity, increased, and I began to investigate beyond what my Catholic beliefs had taught me. In attempting to comprehend the syncretic world of the festival, photography allowed me to capture and narrate what I saw.

In 2018 I made my most recent visit to the sanctuary, a visit which in some ways represented the culmination of my modest photographic project. On this occasion, I traveled with “Hermanos Qapac Qolla del Cusco,” a comparsa or group of dancers who wear regional costumes and dance as a form of devotion in honor of a specific image of the Virgin, Christ, or a saint. In contrast to my previous trips, I was able to experience the traditional three days of the pilgrimage together with the comparsa, as just another member of the group. The photographs I took on this pilgrimage accompany this text. These written reflections convey what I have learned and observed in my repeated visits to the Sanctuary of the Lord of Qoyllur rit’i.

The tradition as it is known today has its origins in a miraculous story, which the more experienced pilgrims relay to the newer ones, a story based in accounts from the mid-twentieth century, but with the earliest sources dating the miracle to between 1780 and 1783.1 A mysterious “white” child appeared to Marianito Mayta, the young son of a shepherd from the town of Mahuayani, near the present location of the sanctuary of Qoyllur rit’i, and the starting point for the modern pilgrimage. The child played with Marianito and helped him care for the flock he was herding in the valley of Sinakara. After days of playing together, Marianito grew curious about his friend’s clothing, which never aged or got dirty, only to have his friend appear the next day with his clothing threadbare and torn. Marianito offered to travel to Cuzco to look for the necessary fabric to repair his new friend’s tunic, but when he went to the city he discovered that the cloth was of a kind reserved for the exclusive use of bishops. As such, according to the story, Marianito sought out the then bishop, Juan Manuel Moscoso y Peralta (1723-1811), to beg him for some fabric for his friend’s tunic. This petition caught the prelate’s attention. He accepted the child’s petition and sent a letter to the parish priest of the neighboring town of Ocongate asking him to investigate the matter.

According to the accounts, on June 12, 1783 the parish priest of Ocongate convinced Marianito to bring him to meet his friend. On reaching the valley, the priest was startled to see a child dressed in a tunic tending to the flock, but when he tried to approach him, the child began to emit a radiant light, hiding the child and forcing the priest to desist in his efforts. A few days later, this time accompanied by communal authorities, the priest returned to the place and tried again to approach the mysterious child, who once again emitted the radiant light. This time, however, the parish priest did not desist in his effort to capture the child, leading the child to flee to a pinnacle of rock, pursued by the priest and his party. Reaching the rock, they found that the light and the child had disappeared. In their place, the priest and the communal authorities discovered, in a tayanka bush, a shrub that grows at high altitude and is used for firewood by local inhabitants, a figure of the crucified Christ with blood in his wounds. According to the story, Marianito collapsed and died in the resulting commotion and was buried at the base of the rock. Later, the priest ordered that the miraculous apparition be excised from the tayanka bush and sent to the Church of Tayankani.2 A chapel was built around the pinnacle of rock where the child disappeared, upon which, according to the miracle accounts, an image of Christ Crucified had also appeared, which the parish priest subsequently contracted a painter from Cuzco to “touch up.” As the news of the miraculous apparition of the image spread, the first pilgrims began to come to the site. This chapel would become what we know today as the Temple of the Lord of Qoyllur rit’i, a holy place and central focal point of the pilgrimage.

• 1
  Imelda Vega-Centeno B., “Relatos sobre el origen de los cultos del período interequinoccial en la región del Cuzco,” Revista andina 47 (2018): 83-115.
• 2
  In the church of Tayankani, close to the town of Ocongate, and itself the starting point of “the 24-Hour Procession” that forms part of the pilgrimage, there is a carving of the crucified Christ. According to the faithful, this image is a copy of the one that the parish priest found. The mobile image of the Lord of Qoyllur rit’i that goes out in processions from the sanctuary is likewise understood to be a copy of the original found in the tayanka bush. The legend says that the bishop sent the image of Christ found in the tayanka bush to Spain to a king generally identified (anachronistically) as Charles V in order to verify the miracle, but that the tayanka image was never returned to the Andes, and so a copy was made for the church. The name of the church, Tayankani, is Quechua for “I am from tayanka.”

Like many sacred spaces in the Andes, the sanctuary is situated near one of the Apus or sacred mountains of the city of Cuzco, in this case Mt. Ausangate. The sanctuary is located in a narrow glacial valley at the foot of the snow-capped peak called Sinakara. The modern construction that houses the rock of the apparition is located at 4700 meters above sea level; nothing remains of the original building. The modern building is a cement structure with a tin roof. An enormous stairway at its entrance leads to an atrium of generous dimensions, in which various comparsas dance day and night for the three days of the celebration. In the surrounding area of the valley, pilgrims set up plastic tents to pass the night, although the majority prefer to sleep in the open air, wrapped in sleeping bags or traditional regional woven blankets, just as the generations that preceded them did. At the entrance of the sanctuary and in the lower part of the temple, vendors in multicolored plastic stalls offer a wide range of religious products together with alasitas, miniature objects whose ritual purpose is to convert wishes in reality. It is also possible to find stands where all kinds of food and beverage are sold, with the exception of alcoholic beverages, which are not offered, at least officially.

There are two pilgrimage routes: the first, which may preserve traces of a pre-contact route predecessor to the modern Catholic one, is called the “24-Hour Procession.” It begins at the Church of Tayankani, in Ocongate, and winds along a path of gullies and plateaus. According to Constanza Ceruti, there is evident syncretism in the rituals practiced at specific geographic points.1 The second route, which is shorter and more trafficked in the present day, is the route I took in all my visits to the sanctuary. This route begins at the town of Mahuayani, following a steep road of more than 8 kilometers divided into a via crucis of fourteen stops, which are used as places of rest and prayer. The route starts out narrow at the beginning and widens as it enters the valley, following the sinuous curve of the stream that emerges from the glacier. This path can be taken on foot or by horse, although in recent years, as I was able to observe in my last visit, the horses are being replaced by motorcycles. The two potential starting points can be reached via bus and truck from the city of Cuzco, a 150-kilometer trip that lasts 5-6 hours along the interoceanic highway that unites the region of Cuzco with the Peruvian jungle.

• 1
  María Constanza Ceruti, “Qoyllur Riti: etnografia de un peregrinaje ritual de raiz incaica por las altas montañas del Sur de Peru,” Scripta Ethnologica 29 (2007): 9-35.

The pilgrims hail from many places, but the majority are Indigenous Quechuas and mestizos from the valleys of the region of Cuzco, although there is also an important presence of Aymara peoples from the Lake Titicaca basin, as well as residents of the city of Lima. More recently, there has also been a confluence of foreign pilgrims coming from Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, as well as a smaller number of Europeans and North Americans motivated by adventure and “mystic” tourism. Mystic and adventure tours to Qollyur rit’i are marketed in Cuzco as packages to tourists.

The vast majority of the pilgrims are part of a comparsa, which can be small or large. These comparsas are integrated into the eight “nations” of the Lord of Qoyllur rit’i. The word “nation” refers to groupings of comparsas representing one of the regions of Cuzco. The comparsa Hermanos Qhapaq Qolla del Cusco (Brothers Qhapaq Qolla of Cuzco), for instance, belongs to the nation of Tahuantisuyo, representing the city of Cuzco. Each comparsa has a carguyoq, called “mayordomos” in Spanish, who are the organizers and managers responsible for all the preparations for the pilgrimage, as well as the comfort and well-being of the pilgrims during the festival. They cover the costs demanded by the pilgrimage in exchange for celestial favors, and generally march at the front of their respective groups carrying the apuyaya, a kind of relic or standard with the image of the Lord of Qoyllur rit’i. The election of the carguyoc takes place annually from among the most influential of the pilgrims in a solemn ceremony at the base of Sinakara. Additionally, each comparsa has a quimichu or guardian of traditions. In the comparsa that I accompanied, our quimichu was responsible for making the stops and offerings along the path. One of the rituals that the quimichu oversaw consisted of carrying a rock of the size that we considered equivalent to our sins from one station of the via crucis to the next, until we reached Cruzpata, the last station of the via crucis. This final station is a very emotional, because it is from there that one can first see the sanctuary.

The social status of the pilgrims is very diverse, but the majority are low- and middle-class peasants, businesspeople, and entrepreneurs. Such was the case with the comparsa Hermanos Qhapaq Qolla del Cusco, the majority of whom were businesspeople from the city of Cuzco.1 Members of comparsas are easy to recognize at the site as, in contrast with spontaneous pilgrims, or “visitors” as they are called, members of comparsas wear traditional regional costumes, and make the ascent carrying everything the need for the three days of the celebration on their backs, including blankets, foodstuffs, and firewood. In my case, I helped out by carrying some pieces of firewood.

• 1
  The name of the comparsa also alludes to the occupation of its members, because in Andean tradition the Qhapaq Qolla were businesspeople from the Andean high plateau (altiplano).

Like all the pilgrims arriving at the sanctuary, even before setting up camp we went immediately to visit the church and offer homage to the crucified Christ of the rock with a few brief songs and dances. This was the preface to three days of continual celebration whose mystic essence was the invocation of the Christ of brilliant snow, pagos (payments) or offerings to the Apus, various signs of respect towards the sacred rock in the church, and processions to a small chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary. All of these rituals are accompanied by the continuous dances performed by the comparsas of the various nations.

At daybreak, in a ritual thought to preserve some link to the pre-contact sun cult of the Incas, the comparsas form lines, waiting for the emergence of the sun.1 The quimichu, lifting his arms towards the east, makes supplication in Quechua and Spanish, a mix of Christian prayers and petitions to the Apus, while the rest of the members of the comparsa kneel as a sign of respect. This act tends to be accompanied by the playing of pututus, large marine conch shells known as “Andean trumpets.” As our comparsa was small we did not have pututus in our ceremony, but we heard the sound of the Andean trumpets of the other comparsas. Following the prayers of the quimichu, we paused silently out of respect for those who are no longer among us, before wishing each other mutually “Wataskama” (“until next year”).

• 1
  The sun was one of the Incas’ principal deities, to whom they particularly dedicated rituals at the time of year coinciding with the winter equinox in the southern hemisphere, the same period as the festival of Qoyllur rit’i.

Once the sun begins to radiate across the sanctuary, the unending dances begin, as do the processions to various religious objects and sites scattered throughout the sacred space, including crosses, niches, altars, or spaces that house a devotional object. But the principle place for offering devotion is always the temple, where the comparsas, including Hermanos Qhapaq Qolla del Cusco take turns parading and dancing before the sacred image of the rock. From what I observed, and later confirmed in research, dance is the principal form of devotion that the devotees offer, alongside ritual flagellation and exhaustion.1

• 1
  Ceruti, “Qoyllur Riti.” This pattern mirrors that of other Christian devotions in the Andes.

The sacred space of the Lord of Qoyllur rit’i is also the setting for offerings or pagos made to the Apus or mountain spirits. Within Andean cosmovision, nature, and runas, or people, are complementary and constitute a whole. Entities like the Pachamama (mother earth) are considered ensouled and spirited living beings. Andean people do not dominate the natural environment, but rather live and coexist with her. The ritual of the pago symbolically returns in an act of reciprocity all that has been produced in collaboration with the earth, invoking at the same time blessings for future harvests.

As a photographer, I normally prefer to present my photographs in color, but, on this occasion, I chose to have the final images printed in black and white when the project was exhibited in 2020-2021 as part of the Religion in the Andes exhibition at the Institute of Sacred Music, Yale University. In addition to honoring the solemnity that is part of the traditional photographic process, I also wanted to convey the sacred atmosphere that is pervasive in everything that surrounds this festival and in the physical space of the pilgrimage, without the distraction of color. From my perspective, the colors of the original images intoxicate the gaze, pulling the viewer’s attention away from the sense of the sacred that draws thousands of people each year from the most diverse regions of the Andes, to brave the high altitudes and extreme temperatures in a pilgrimage as unique as the landscapes that serve as its backdrop.

Through the photographic project, as well as this text that now accompanies it, I wish to leave a testimony of my lived experience and of the small changes I have witnessed over time. I hope I have conveyed what I have learned and come to understand in visits to the Sanctuary of the Lord of Qoyllur rit’i over the past decade.

The implications for non-Western societies and for subaltern and excluded subjects around the world would be quite different if colonialism, imperialism, racism, and sexism were thought of not as regretful by-products of modern Europe, but as part of the conditions that made the modern West possible. 

Edgardo Lander, “Eurocentrism and Colonialism in Latin American Thought”1

For without exception, the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents of those who created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. And just as such a document is not free of barbarisms, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from owner to owner.

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

• 1
  Edgardo Lander, “Eurocentrism and Colonialism in Latin American Thought,” Nepantla. Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000): 525.

While scholarship on the historical extraction and working of silver in the so-called “New World” is anthropologically informed, politically attuned, and attentive to historical and ecological issues, when it comes to silver artifacts in Europe, scholarship and gallery displays are overwhelmingly connoisseurial, drily technical, narrowly specialist, and aridly drained of political engagement (Fig. 4).1  In a parallel and related bifurcation, while scholars have engaged energetically with the politics of colonialism in Andean silver production, they have all but ignored the politics of colonialism in Europe, especially in the Italian peninsula, whose way was paved in silver. These bifurcations are not the result of mere oversight. Issues that are materially and politically conjoined have been kept apart by European scholarship overwhelmingly driven by a point of view over-identified with the European elites.2  While scholars have been alert to silver’s economic role in Spanish rule, they have been slow to recognize its cultural role as an intrinsic part of imperialism­­­­—especially within Europe. Existing art historical studies fall prey to or collude in the glamor (at once superficial, material, profound) of colonialist effects. This is particularly marked with regard to the study of precious metals, although it extends way beyond them. Jennifer Montagu, one of the few art historians to engage with silver baroque artifacts, approaches them as “objects for the display of virtuoso silversmithing” and “symbols of their owners’ wealth.”3  What is now urgently required is art historical analysis that goes beyond conjugating colonial history and the isolated study of fine objects.

• 1
  For a range of positions, see L. David Boylan, Spanish Colonial Silver (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1974); Jason Moore, “‘Amsterdam is standing on Norway,’ Part I: The Alchemy of Capital, Empire and Nature in the Diaspora of Silver, 1545-1648,” Journal of Agrarian Change 10, no. 1 (2010): 33-68; Jason Moore, “‘This lofty mountain of silver could conquer the whole world’: Potosí and the political ecology of underdevelopment, 1545-1800,” Journal of Philosophical Economics 4, no. 1 (2010): 58-103; Allison M. Bigelow, “Women, Men, and the Legal Language of Mining in the Colonial Andes,” Ethnohistory 63, no. 2 (2016), 351-365; Rossana Barragán, “Working Silver for the World: Mining Labor and Popular Economy in Colonial Potosí,” Hispanic American Historical Review 97, no. 2 (2017): 193-210.
• 2
  In its persistently empiricist—­even positivist—approach, reliant on archival documents without subjecting the archive itself to critical scrutiny, too much art history tends uncritically to echo the voices of the powerful.
• 3
  These claims occur in a single sentence in Jennifer Montagu’s Gold, Silver and Bronze: Metal Sculpture of the Roman Baroque (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 94. The two claims are bundled together, although their relationship is far from straightforward.

By thinking of silver in relation to coloniality, its peculiar capacities to interfuse discourses of exploitation and redemption, refinement and salvation come into focus, which in turn helps us to see silver otherwise.1  Walter Mignolo argues that coloniality refers to the logic of domination and exploitation veiled under the language of redemption, and the idioms of modernization and progress. This is not to be confused with colonialism, which refers to specific historical periods of imperial domination, whereas coloniality refers to the logical structure of colonial domination and emerges in the discovery and conquest of the Americas by Europeans.2  To date, decolonial critique focuses on a critique of eurocentricism in relation to subalternized and silenced knowledges. This model occludes recognition that colonization took places also within Europe and—crucially—the degree to which elite culture in Europe was constructed directly or indirectly through discourses of coloniality.3

What interests me here is silver’s enmeshment in the double helix of power systems of court and colonialism on both sides of the Atlantic and the ways in which silver was wrought to endow rich Europeans with glittering allure and shiny irreproachability beyond the display of something already given or simple economic value. In other words, the culturaleffects of silver.4

Baroque silver held peculiar significance as material of sacred and liturgical objects, marker of social niceties and refinement, as engine of the commodity frontier of the Spanish empire, and as justification for calculated exploitation and cruelty.5  If early modern silver was marked materially by trauma, how, if at all, did it efface its own traumatic history through discourses of holiness, brightness, and refinement? Hence is there a material affect, a materiality of trauma, or its effacement? This essay considers specific objects made in colonial Naples in relation to the atrocities of empire, not in order to expose one literally represented in the other—in a sense, their relationship depends on a refusal of any direct representation or acknowledgement—but to discern traces, draw connections, and see one in light of the other. 

• 1
  “What are the differences between existing critical projects and de-colonization of knowledge?” Walter D. Mignolo, “Introduction: Coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking,” Cultural Studies 21 nos. 2-3 (2007): 155. See also Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity / Rationality.”
• 2
  Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, 6-8. Aníbal Quijano locates the coloniality of power as emerging in discussions about whether or not Indians had souls. See Aníbal Quijano, “Raza, etnia y naciòn: cuestiones abiertas,” in José Carlos Maritegui y Europa: la otra cara del descubrimiento, ed. Roland Forgues (Lima, Peru: Amauta, 1992), np.
• 3
  “Spanish dominion” has, however, been long recognized: a series of distinguished historians, including Geoffrey Parker, C. R. Boxer, Anthony Pagden, has plotted its course. But “Spanish dominion” is a polite way to miss the point when territory was governed by military occupation. That is colonialism and that occurred within Europe by Spain.
• 4
  Strikingly neglected is a critical address of the role of art and culture as part of the nexus of coloniality and Spanish rule across its dominions particularly within Europe. A more or less Spenglerian model dependent on a homogenizing view of “Europe” dotted across with specialist studies of specific localities remains the default. The challenge is to forge critical interpretations of the wider dynamics without resorting to mere periodization or outworn formulae, such as “Counter Reformation” and “centers and peripheries,” while also paying close attention to specificity and differences across those different localities. There remains within art historical practice an urgent need to be more alert to power and its operations: not to think of power as something that pre-exists subsequent representation in art and architecture, festival apparati, or processions, but rather of it as always being produced, reproduced, renegotiated and resisted and in which art and architecture play a central role. Those operations of visual culture demand careful analysis in relation to the complex currents of Spanish monarchical dominion and empire, and to what Enrique Dussel calls “geopolitics of knowledge” and what Fanon and Anzaldúa term “body politics of knowledge.” Enrique Dussel, Filosofía de Liberación (México: Edicol, 1977); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987).
• 5
  Spaniards were also concerned with the just basis for governing their overseas territory and with the nature of the Indians whom they were attempting to Christianize. Francisco de Vitoria, Dominican professor at the University of Salamanca remarked in his treatise Concerning the Indies, “The Indians are stupid only because they are uneducated and, if they live like beasts, so for the same reason do many Spanish peasants.” The determination of the Spanish Crown and Church to Christianize the Indians together with their imperious demands for labor to exploit land and mines produced “a very remarkable complex of relations, laws, and institutions.” Lewis Hanke, “The Other Treasure from the Indies: The Histories written by Spaniards on their New World,” in Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela's History of Potosí, ed. Lewis Hanke (Providence: Brown University Press, 1965), 3, 7.

The conquest of societies and cultures of what today is called Latin America was part of a constitution of a new world order, a process in which the world’s resources were violently seized and concentrated under the control and for the benefit of a small European minority. I turn now to explore how the lustrous surfaces of silver may be seen as tarnished by the violences silver demanded, made possible, concealed, betrayed, and outshone. I ask whether in some dark way European socio-political charisma actually depended on those very brutalities and their obnubilation. What was it about silver that allowed it to foment, whet, and yet also occlude opportunistic appetites and vicious desires?1

Spanish rule was dealt in silver. Silver was mined in far greater quantities than gold. It spread further (in particular to China and the Far East) and was more widely used in a greater variety of commodities than gold. While gold was king of metals and most prized, the vast bulk of treasure from the Spanish Americas came to Europe in the form of silver. Indeed, the expressions “vale un Perú” (“it’s worth a Peru”) and “vale un Potosí” (“it’s worth a Potosi”) demonstrate that entire histories and geographies of the Indies were reduced to silver. 

Early modern silver was saturated in the politics of conquest, but it was acclaimed as a reward to the Spanish monarchy for its defense of Christianity. In his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590), Father José de Acosta claimed the discovery of Potosí, “the greatest treasure known to exist in the world,” was destined by Divine Providence for “the time when Emperor Charles V, of glorious fame, held the reins of empire and the realm of Spain and the seigniory of the Indies.”2  He calculated that Potosí produced “year after year” a million pesos for the quinto royal (the 20% tax leveled by the crown on precious metals) and in 1585 alone the fleet carried 111 million silver pesos, and that these sums allowed his readers to:

understand how great is the power that the Divine Majesty has graciously placed in the hands of the kings of Spain . . . since it has been ordained by the lord on high, who both gives and takes away kingdoms from whomever and in whatsoever way he wishes . . . we must humbly petition him to graciously favor the pious zeal of the Catholic king, granting him good fortune and victory over the enemies of his Holy Faith, for it is in this cause that he pours out the treasure of the Indies that God has given him and still has need of much more.3

The discovery of silver in Spain’s new lands and its astonishing treasures was assumed by Spain’s apologists as an indication of divine justice, providence, and fortune. Hence silver was the indelible link between divine will and Spanish worldly power. If silver was a blessing, then the ends to which it was put might also be assumed to be blessed.

• 1
  “European culture was made seductive: it gave access to power. After all, beyond repression, the main instrument of all power is its seduction. Cultural Europeanization as transformed into an aspiration. It was a way of participating and later to reach the same material benefits and the same power as the Europeans: viz, to conquer nature—in short for ‘development.’ European culture became a universal cultural model.” Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity / Rationality,” 169.
• 2
  José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, ed. Jane Mangan, trans. Frances M. López-Morillas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 175.
• 3
  “He querido dar esta relación tan particular para que se entienda la potencia que la Divin Majestad ha sido servida de dar a los reyes de España . . . Y pues el señor de los cielos que da y quita los reinos a quien quiere y como quiere así lo ha ordenado . . . debemos suplicarle con humildad, se digne de favorecer el celo tan pío del Rey Católico, dándole próspero suceso y victoria contra los enemigos de su Santa Fe, pues en esta causa gasta el tesoro de Indias que la ha dado, y aun ha menester mucho más.”

It has been estimated that the Spanish monarchy minted about 4.55 million kilograms of silver and 2,800 kilograms of gold in the years between 1600 and 1639.1  Outputs during the early-seventeenth century of the gold and silver mints owned by the Spanish monarchy were considerably greater than in the later sixteenth century and were certainly much higher than that in England or France.2  The Spanish inspector in Concolorcorvo’s late-eighteenth-century Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes confronts an Indigenous person: 

The Spaniards extracted more silver and gold from the entrails of this land in ten years than your countrymen did in the more than two thousand in which they were established here, according to the calculations of the most judicious men.3

Malleable, soft, ready to be of service, the substance from which other objects had already been made; already passed on, refashioned, reformed, and melted into liquid. It was the preferred medium of valuation and exchange. The value of coins lay in their metal, not in the mint, silver could be assayed for purity, while copper could not. Price was set in silver.4  Reales (worth one-eighth of a peso) bore the Spanish monarchy and emblems of empire as far as the silver circulated (Fig. 5). Reproductive, metamorphic, the material of value itself, silver was coins and profit, the gain of flesh through the material that it imitates. The most mobile of currencies, silver gained charisma from and was equivalent to exchange. 

• 1
  Akira Motomura, “New Data on Minting, Seigniorage, and the Money Supply in Spain (Castile) 1597-1663,” Explorations in Economic History 34 no. 3 (1997): 332. After 1624 Spanish output and market share declined sharply, partly due to the cost of Spain’s war against the Dutch Republic.
• 2
  Moore, “Amsterdam is standing on Norway,” 35. Relative, not absolute, exhaustion was what really mattered, and this relative exhaustion was a product of the contradictory relations of markets, states, and social classes in Central Europe and the capitalist world-ecology. Large-scale mining did not disappear in Central Europe; its centrality was merely displaced through global expansion. Moore, “This lofty mountain of silver,” 61.
• 3
  El Lazarillo: A Guide for Inexperienced Travelers between Buenos Aires and Lima, 1773, trans. Walter D. Kline (Bloomington; Indiana University Press, 1965), 165.
• 4
  Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571,” Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 207-208.

Thus silver, even as it shone triumphant and redemptive in the faces of the saints, even as it proclaimed the vast wealth of the Spanish Crown and Neapolitan religious institutions, dragged in its wake exploitation and destruction, human and ecological. Profit for some, silver already owed an unpayable debt, was the blood of others. Its brilliant allure, which charged up desire, was fed by loss and mourning.

More silver reliquary statues were made in Naples than anywhere else in the world.1  From the early-seventeenth century, Naples’s protector saints were concentrated in the gleaming Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in Naples Cathedral (Fig.9). I have argued elsewhere that this chapel was at once a treasury, bank, and conversion chamber for Spanish silver, and, as such, activated by the liquefying blood miracle of San Gennaro, it worked to secure Spanish domination, co-opt the local aristocracy, and deliver spiritual salvation to dutiful subjects.2

• 1
  Elio Catello and Corrado Catello, Scultura in Argento nel Sei e Settecento a Napoli (Naples: Franco Di Mauro Editore, 2000), 28.
• 2
  Hills, The Matter of Miracles.

In Naples the sumptuous silver collections of the Prince of Avellino, Marquis of Campolattaro and duke of Atripalda were particularly renowned.35 Gold and silver were complicit in producing the “refined” and graceful sheen of aristocratic habitus. Silver is the earth’s most reflective metal; its surface pools, flows, and glistens like water. One has to imagine the few objects that have survived shimmering and alive with fulguration, rather than dully imprisoned behind glass, as they are in museums today. Shimmering and glinting, the court was enchanted by its own reflection in silver mirrors on walls and ceilings, sconces, and various accoutrements. The erotic lability of the mirror, its capacity at once to desubstantialize and beglamor, its playing exchange of reflection, unveiling and revealing, are superbly exploited in a celebratory mirror of ca. 1695-98 from Andrea Fantoni’s workshop (Fig. 13). Its frame consists of thick folds of fabric, as if dressed, as fabric clung to the frames of those who gazed at the silvered glass to see themselves and their companions glitter back alluringly in the glow of candlelight. Marine creatures, flourishing flambeaux, support the mirror and its terrestrial register, above which improbably aerial spirits triumph. The mirror implies its own transformative capacity to bear aloft, to offer those reflected in its silvery surface an analogous transcendent capacity. To look in such a mirror was to be enlivened by its glittering promise to be freed from mundanity and elevated into lighter, higher unencumbered realms.

• 35
  Catello, Argenti Napoletani, 39.

Table pieces were often fantastical metamorphic creations (Fig 17).1  A silver centerpiece by Giovan Battista Buonacquisto of 1704 has cherubim supporting a lower bowl, which is punctuated by putti holding palms and flowering branches, and three shells, separated by doves, from which a pedestal soars bearing an angel with trumpet.2  In this rare survival of princely display, diverse silverwork techniques produce surfaces ranging from the bristling hair of the horse’s coat to the sheen of shells. Mermaids or sirens hold up shell-shaped bowls, articulated by dolphins and seahorses at intervals, from which emerges a pedestal supporting an equestrian statue of King Charles II. The whole stages politics and life as naturally and gracefully interconnected, with the king at its apex, in the position of the source of life-giving water, as if he were the font of life itself.

• 1
  Catello, Argenti Napoletan, 194.
• 2
  Table centerpiece silversmith “MP,” 1704, consolato Giovan Battista Buonacquisto, 25cm, gilt silver, private collection, Bari, illustrated in Catello, Argenti Napoletani, 218.

Scoppa’s ewers and candlesticks thrive on contradiction: figures straining from the edges, often in opposed directions, hold them in tension (Fig. 21). The sense of underlying meaning is an effect of a specific style. Their style here is best thought of as productive, not as external or accidental adornment of content, but the creation of affects from which speakers and messages may be discerned. 

Culturally, silver clad the court in a super, superior and supercilious shine. Nobles wore silver and gold in silver and gold thread, lace, spangles, and embroidery. Gilt silver or silver metal was drawn into wire by specialist wire drawers. The wires might be rolled to make strips (lamellae). The wire or lamella was then wound round a core thread, usually of silk to make silver-gilt and silver wire. Extravagant and brilliant technical skills invited you to stare, take a second look, to admire what thrillingly met the eye. 

In his guide book to Naples of 1692 Carlo Celano emphasized the city’s unsurpassed gold thread, lace and embroidery: “Here [in Naples] is made the most delicate lace of gold thread and of silk, which is inferior in no way to that of Venice or Flanders.”1  “Here are made the most bizarre embroideries of all sorts, that perhaps have no equal in Italy; and they are so much in use that there is no modestly comfortable house that does not have them.’’2  Celano emphasizes both the widespread manufacture and consumption of metallic lace and its marvelous capacities:

There is no festival-supplier, which we call apparatore, who doesn’t have at least seven rooms of embroidery to hire out for church festivals; in addition to which in a great many churches of nuns and regulars they abound in quantity to adorn them [the churches] entirely. There silver and gold are worked most nobly, and especially in the ligatures of jewels, forming from a quantity of small gems one single gem, that makes one marvel.3

The so-called “most noble” working transformed human beings into walking marvels. Alchemically, silver was that into which dross might be turned. Silver was a vital part in the alchemical process of court culture that raised tawdry human bodies into glittering aristocrats entitled to exploit others, make the rules, and suit themselves. All done exquisitely.

• 1
  The Eletti wore “tela d’oro cremisi con roboni di broccato giallo, all’uso senatorio, tutti adornati di ricche trine d’oro, similmente con berettoni di tela d’oro.” Carlo Celano, “Qui si fanno delicatissimi merletti di filo d'oro, e di seta, che non hanno in che cedere a quei di Venezia e di Fiandra,” in Notizie del Bello, dell'Antico e del Curioso della Città di Napoli, vol. 1, ed. G. B. Chiarini (Naples: Edizioni dell'Anticaglia, 2000), 95. 
• 2
  “Qui si fanno bizzarrissimi ricami d'ogni sorta, che forse non hanno pari in Italia; e sono in tant'uso, che non v'è casa mediocremente comoda, che non ne abbia.” Ibid.
• 3
  “Non v'è festaruolo, che noi chiamiamo apparatore, che non abbia almeno sette camere di ricamo per darle in affitto in occasione di feste di Chiese: oltre che in moltissime Chiese di Monache e di regolari ve ne sono in quantità, per adornarle tutte. Vi si lavora d'argento e d'oro nobilissimamente, e particolarmente nelle ligature delle gioie, formando d'una quantità di piccole gemme una gemma sola, che dà maraviglia: e questa ligatura chiamano al toppo.” Celano, Notizie del Bello, vol I, 97.

Out of the dark a flash here and a gleam there. Sometimes dazzling; sometimes velvety soft (Fig. 24). Like a metaphor for the nefarious plotting, internecine rivalries, and deceitful chicanery amidst the glittering wit and brilliant smiles of court politics. 

Silver’s material qualities were activated in processes that were political and social at least as much as they were technical. Tarnish is endemic to silver, unlike gold. The shine of silver is endlessly threatened by its own staining that constantly surfaces and that can be kept at bay only by repeated polishing—work that renders both tarnish and its own labor invisible. This may be thought both literally and metaphorically. Silver’s shine denoted invisible labor, a silent obscured labor force, largely female, who buffed and polished at dawn and at night to keep nobility looking effortlessly lustrous and pure. Silver’s role in securing and denoting many kinds of refinement may be thought of as part of an effacing of an originary trauma. Instead of looking at European silver in conventional terms that disassociate it from its origins, if we think of it instead in relation to its bloody origins, we perhaps can glimpse the darkness of traumatic materiality.

Generous insights and advice from Kris Lane, Dana Leibsohn, Griselda Pollock, and the anonymous readers have greatly improved this article. I am indebted to the Leverhulme Foundation for a Research Fellowship in 2018-19 that provided me with a year’s research leave and allowed me to travel to Peru and Bolivia.

This essay is part of a series that addresses the theme of “Exchanges in the Americas,” which Dana Leibsohn proposed to MAVCOR Journal.

In the shadow of Mount Kanchendzonga (Tibetan: Gangs chen mdzod lnga),1 as the winter gave way to spring and the frost thawed into warm, sunny days, the local Buddhist community that lived in the villages around Pemayangtse Monastery (Tibetan: Pad ma yang brtse dgon pa) in western Sikkim prepared for special visitors. Down the ridge from Pemayangtse, residents of the fifty-three households that made up the village of Sindrang (Bhutia: Zin da rang)2 in 2007 changed into their best clothes and congregated around the home of Yab Sonam Wangchuck and his wife Chum Pema Lhanjee. Members of Yab Sonam and Chum Pema’s household had been cleaning and preparing for this day for several weeks, making maize snacks such as byasu and kyabze and cleaning out the household shrine (Tibetan: mchod bsham). A group made up of representatives from each of the households in the village donned their best clothes and gathered in the courtyard outside, readying silk offering scarves (Tibetan: kha bdags) for their guests. Early in the morning, they began their walk up to Pemayangtse. Residents of villages on the way, including Singyang (Bhutia: Zin g.yang), Chombong (Bhutia: Gcong phung), and Pelling (Bhutia: Pad gling) made smoky offerings of tree branches and other aromatic substances (Tibetan: bsang)3 outside of their homes to purify the path. Other Sindrang residents who remained behind busied themselves burning smoky offerings and assisting Yab Sonam Wangchuck’s family with cooking.

The special guests that the community prepared to welcome were not lamas (Tibetan: bla ma), tulkus (Tibetan: sprul sku), or other exalted members of the Buddhist community in a conventional, human sense. They were, in fact, books: a selection of fourteen to seventeen volumes from the classical Tibetan language Buddhist canon, known as the Kangyur (Tibetan: bka’ ’gyur) that were carried by villagers in a procession from the monastery down to the village, and then around the fields, before moving on to the next village.4 This selection of books is known throughout Tibetan and Himalayan cultural areas as Bum (Tibetan: ’Bum), and represents a distillation of the literature of The Perfection of Wisdom (Tibetan: Shes rab kyi pha rol tu phyin pa; Sanskrit: Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra).5

• 1
  This essay will discuss examples from across a number of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist communities. These communities are united in their use of classical Tibetan language for their texts; however, they also use local languages that may not have any linguistic connection to classical Tibetan. Sikkim, the primary site I will discuss here, is a multilingual and multiethnic state in northeast India. In this essay, I will discuss a case study from west Sikkim based on interviews and observations from Sindrang village, where the inhabitants are mostly from Lepcha and Bhutia ethnic groups, and I use these terms as they are the most commonly used terms for these ethnic groups in contemporary Sikkim. My observation of the Bumkor was undertaken in a household where the primary language spoken was Bhutia. Due to this, in this essay, non-English terms in Tibetan and Bhutia (also known as Lhokyed, the language used by the Bhutia, or Lhopo, community in Sikkim) will be given in phonetic form based on pronunciation of terms in west Sikkim (for example, I have used Kangyur for bka’ ’gyur, instead of Kagyur or Kanjur). Upon their first appearance, they will be followed by full transliteration into their classical Tibetan form using the popular Wylie transliteration system. Spelling in quotations has been modified accordingly.
• 2
  Sindrang is a village in west Sikkim near Pelling. The 2011 census listed 54 households; according to the village panchayat (the local elected village representative), in 2007 the amount was roughly the same. https://www.census2011.co.in/data/village/260996-sindrang-sikkim.html [Accessed December 15, 2020].
• 3
  See Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia’s article in this issue for more on smoky offerings. Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia, “Purifying Multispecies Relations in the Valley of Abundance: The Riwo Sangchö Ritual as Environmental History and Ethics in Sikkim,” MAVCOR Journal 5, no. 2 (2021).
• 4
  In this article, I use the word “books” to refer to pecha, loose-leaf pages that are most commonly not bound. Historically, pecha contained classical Tibetan language and the term does not specify whether the texts within are handwritten, woodblock- or laser-printed. For more on book cultures in Tibet and the Himalayas, see Mark Elliot, Hildegard Diemberger, and Michela Clemente, eds., Buddha’s Word: The Life of Books in Tibet and Beyond (Cambridge: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, 2014) and Hildegard Diemberger, Franz-Karl Ehrhard and Peter Kornicki, eds., Tibetan Printing: Comparison, Continuities, and Change (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
• 5
  Forms of Vajrayāna, or Tantric, Buddhism are practiced on the Tibetan plateau and throughout the Himalayas and inner Asia in areas of a number of contemporary nation states, including China, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Mongolia, and Russia. While historically these forms have been labeled as “Indo-Tibetan” or “Tibetan” Buddhism, these categorizations do not capture the complexities of these forms or the diverse identities that Buddhist practitioners in this region are affiliated with. Some of these forms of identity are national—for example, Bhutanese people do not consider themselves Tibetan, and Bhutan is home to a number of distinctive Buddhist traditions. What does unite these traditions with each other, and with other Buddhist communities in the Himalayas, is the use of classical Tibetan as the language of their textual traditions, and elements of shared history, including lineage affiliation and ritual tradition. This leads these forms of Buddhism to be distinct from other forms of Buddhism found in the region, specifically Newar Buddhism and Theravāda Buddhism. As this is a comparative paper, I will refer to the Buddhist traditions under discussion as “Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhism” or by specific geographical labels.

The Perfection of Wisdom is a collection of texts that date back to the development of early Mahāyāna Buddhism in India. The Sanskrit texts that formed the basis for the Tibetan translations appeared to have assumed their basic format between the first century BCE and the seventh century CE.1 The Perfection of Wisdom texts contain within them the core ideal of Mahāyāna Buddhism, emptiness (Tibetan: stong pa nyid; Sanskrit: śūnyatā). In the Heart Sūtra, a text that condenses the ideals of the Perfection of Wisdom series, the Buddha outlines how practitioners should be “trained” to perceive all of reality as “empty of inherent existence.” As the Sūtra famously states, “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form; form is not other than emptiness. In the same way, feeling, discrimination, compositional factors, and consciousness are empty.”2 In Tibetan and Himalayan communities, this Sūtra is exalted as it is held to represent “the final wisdom [of the Buddha], directly realizing all the modes and varieties of phenomena in a single instant.”3

• 1
  Fabrizio Torricelli and Nickolai N. Dudka, “Manuscript LTWA No. 23476: A ‘sDe can’ Sample of the brGyad stong pa,” The Tibet Journal 24, no. 2 (1999): 29.
• 2
  Translation from Donald Lopez, The Heart Sutra Explained: Indian and Tibetan Commentaries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 19.
• 3
  Ibid., 23.

In Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist communities, the Perfection of Wisdom developed different iterations:

- The Perfection of Wisdom in 100,000 Lines (Tibetan: Shes rab kyi pha rol tu phyin pa stong phrag brgya pa; Sanskrit: Śatasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā), or in short, the Bum (Tibetan: ’Bum), which makes up around 12 volumes (depending on the printed or manuscript edition of the text);

- The Perfection of Wisdom in 25,000 Lines (Tibetan: Shes phyin stong phrag nyi shu lnga pa; Sanskrit: Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā), or in short Nyithi (Tibetan: Nyi khri) which makes up around three volumes (depending on the printed or manuscript edition of the text);

- The Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines (Tibetan: Sher phyin brgyad stong pa; Sanskrit: Aṣṭasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā), on in short, Gyadtongpa (Tibetan: Brgyad stong pa), which makes up around one volume (depending on the printed or manuscript edition of the text).1

• 1
  L.A. Waddell’s classic colonial study of Buddhism discusses what parts of the canon are included in the Bum:

  The first twelve volumes [of the Kangyur], called ’Bum (Skt. Ṣata Sahasrikā) or “the 100,000 (slokas of Transcendental Wisdom),” treat fully of the Prajñā-pāramitā at large, and the remaining volumes are merely various abridgements of these twelve. Thus the three volumes called Ñi-k’ri (pron. Nyi-thi) or the “20,000 (slokas)” is intended for those monasteries or individuals who cannot purchase or peruse the full text… - L.A. Waddell, The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism (London: W.H. Allen & Co., Limited, 1895), 161.

  I retain his description here for his mention of affordability, as this demonstrates an interesting consideration of economic materiality. Buddhologist Edward Conze published extensively on Perfection of Wisdom literature. See, for example, Edward Conze, The Prajñāpāramitā Literature (‘S-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1960).

The H. E. Sindrang Yab Gomchen, the Dorje Lopen (Vajra Master) of Pemayangtse Monastery, Chewang Rinzin, was born in Sindrang, raised his family there, and hosted the Bumkor many times (his son Yab Sonam Wangchuck is carrying on the tradition). According to him, these texts were distilled in different versions in order to represent the Mahāyāna ideal of skillful means (Tibetan: thabs; Sanskrit: upāya). The development of these different lengths and formats acknowledged that since all sentient beings have different karmic propensities and experiences, they needed access to different teachings and iterations of conventional and ultimate reality suited to their own dispositions in order to access the ultimate Buddhist goal of enlightenment. Sindrang Yab Gomchen Pemayangtse Dorje Lopen Chewang Rinzin told me that the Bum had special significance since it distilled The Perfection of Wisdom, the Mother of the Buddhas, due to its synthesis of the highest truth of emptiness; these books are the same as the voice of the Buddha.1

This invocation of Mahāyāna ideals provided further constructive interpretive scaffolding for understanding the significance of the Bum. On a conventional level, or to extend the language of the Perfection of Wisdom, on the level of form, the Bum were books, or pecha (Tibetan: dpe cha), and were therefore inanimate objects that contained the printed words of the Buddhist teachings. But these books also had other levels that acknowledged their power as apotropaic, healing agents, and in an ultimate sense, they were understood to be embodiments of the Buddha and capable of generating blessings and merit; in this way, they are representative of the truth of emptiness.2 Art historical research has demonstrated how the materiality of book editions and other material culture such as statues has been used historically for pedagogical reasons, as both their contents and material forms were seen to be capable to generating the blessings of the Perfection of Wisdom.3 In this article, I am interested not only in the materiality of these books, but also what people do with them. In western Sikkim, when they are wrapped in offering scarves, taken to visit the homes of local Buddhist patrons, and carried around local villages and fields as part of a ritual procession, or circumambulation, known as the Bumkor (Tibetan: ’bum skor or bum skor), the books that make up the Bum are not just objects, but are generative, active agents that are capable of producing and renewing auspiciousness in the local human and nonhuman community that resided in the landscape.

This community in the west district of Sikkim is one of many communities with similar ritual visits hosted throughout Tibet and the Himalayas during the annual ritual calendar. At times, the entire Kangyur canon (which can be over one hundred volumes in length, depending on the edition) is taken out and carried around villages as well in a ritual known as the Kangyur kora (Tibetan: bka’ ’gyur skor ba). In this paper, I will discuss the Sindrang Bumkor as an example of a distinctive Tibetan and Himalayan ethnography of the book that acknowledges the active lives books have in human societies beyond their textual content that at the same time reflects or enacts that content.4 Buddhist Studies as a field has tended to emphasize the study of texts without considering their materiality, or what Buddhists do with these books, and how these functions may represent different forms of pedagogy for different audiences. In this paper, I will explore material interactions between people and books, and books’ generative potential based on forms of efficacy associated with The Perfection of Wisdom and other books in Buddhist societies. These forms of efficacy include the power to heal, purify, protect, and nourish. Although the Bumkor does not include a complete reading of the Bum (aside from a few pages in order to create positive connections [Tibetan: rten ’brel] with the community), the enactment of the Bumkor in west Sikkim provides an example of how a community-organized ritual allows for the enactment of central ideas from The Perfection of Wisdom. This ritual tradition represents an actualization of the idea of skillful means by demonstrating how Buddhist books may inspire and inform communities using methods beyond textual study by becoming valued community members themselves and the understudied connections between the content of books and their social roles.

In my discussion, I will draw on the scholarship of anthropologists Alfred Gell on the agency of objects, Hildegard Diemberger on Tibetan and Himalayan book culture, Geoff Childs, who studied the Kangyur Kora in Nubri in the Gurkha region of Nepal, and Kim Gutschow and Niels Gutschow who studied a Bumkor in Rinam in Zangskar in northwest India, to put these studies in conversation with my own observations of the Bumkor in western Sikkim in northeast India. To unpack the powers generated by the books that make up the Bum, I will discuss comparative elements of book circumambulation processions drawing on case studies from other scholars alongside my own observation of, and participation in, Bumkor traditions in west Sikkim on several occasions between 2007 and 2018.

• 1
  Sindrang Yab Gomchen Pemayangtse Dorje Lopen Chewang Rinzin, interview, July 2019. The significance of the Bum as a distillation of the Buddha’s teachings can also be seen from the foundational role of this set of texts in the establishment of a household shrine. If possible, Sikkimese Buddhist families will aim to have at least this set of texts as representations of the Buddha’s speech (Tibetan: gsung) in their shrine room. I will expand on the position of books in household rituals in future publications.
• 2
  My thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for this thoughtful insight.
• 3
  Art historical works on Perfection of Wisdom-related materials include Jinah Kim, Receptacle of the Sacred: Illustrated Manuscripts and the Buddhist Book Cult in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Petra Müller, “Representing Prajñāpāramitā in Tibet and the Indian Himalayas: The iconographic concept in the Temples of Nako, rKyang bu and Zha lu,” in The Arts of Tibetan Painting: Recent Research on Manuscripts, Murals and Thangkas of Tibet, the Himalayas and Mongolia (11th–19th century), Asian Art ed. Amy Heller (2011), https://www.asianart.com/articles/mueller/index.html [Accessed December 15, 2020]; Reed O’Mara, “‘On Golden Tablets’: The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Manuscript as a Self-Referential Icon,” Religions 11, no. 274 (2020): 1-19.
• 4
  There are many communities that practice versions of this ritual, but surprisingly few studies dedicated to it, and none that I could locate that focused on its significance for understanding ethnographic functions of books with the exception of Cathy Cantwell, who mentions it briefly in her article “Seeing, Touching, Holding, and Swallowing Tibetan Buddhist Texts,” Postscripts 8, nos. 1-2 (2017): 147, citing examples seen by anthropologist Lawrence Epstein in Mysore in 1966, Martin Mills in Lingshed, Ladakh, and Geoff Childs (which will be discussed below). Other localities that practice versions of this tradition that have been studied include Kag in Southern Mustang, Nepal (discussed in Charles Ramble, “Patterns of Places,” in Reflections of the Mountain: Essays on the History and Social Meaning of the Mountain Cult in Tibet and the Himalaya, eds. Anne Marie Blondeau and Ernst Steinkeller (Vienna: Verlag de Österrichschen Akademie der Wissenschaft, 1996), 141-153); and among Monguors in Gansu (studied in Louis M.J. Schram, “The Monguors of the Kansu-Tibetan Border: Part II. Their Religious Life,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 47, no. 1 (1957): 100-101). A fascinating historical description from Darjeeling has been published as Jivanji Jamshedji Modi, “A Book-Procession of the Tibetan Llamas, as Seen at Darjeeling,” Anthropological Papers Part IV: Papers Read Before the Anthropological Society of Bombay (Bombay: British India Press, 1929), 93-99.

Sikkim is an eastern Himalayan state that borders Nepal, China, Bhutan, and the Indian state of West Bengal. Sikkim is now a multiethnic and multireligious state that is part of India. Before 1975, when the state became part of India, it was an independent kingdom nominally presided over by a Buddhist king (Tibetan: chos rgyal). The history of the state has been historically intertwined with Tibetan-derived Buddhist prophecies as a having a special status as a safe haven or “Hidden Land” (Tibetan: sbas yul), set apart by the popular promulgator of Buddhism in Tibet, Guru Rinpoche.1 Therefore, even though it is not the demographically dominant religion of the state, Buddhism continues to occupy an important position in daily life among many different ethnic groups and along with the other religions present in Sikkim constitutes an important part of Sikkim’s diverse shared heritage. While there are a number of Bumkor traditions in Sikkim,2 I researched and participated in the event that takes place around Pemayangtse Monastery, the royal monastery, in west Sikkim.3 In this annual event that takes place on the fifteenth day of the second month of the lunar calendar (normally in March or April), seven of the eleven villages that were historically administered by the monastery and paid taxes to it take turns hosting the Bum for one night each during the harvesting of barley, buckwheat and other crops that takes place following the winter.4 When I discuss the ritual below, I will summarize events from this eleven-year period based on my own observations and interviews with Bumkor participants, with additional details provided in instances of important changes or deviations during specific years.

• 1
  For more on Sikkimese history and culture, see anthropologists Anna Balikci’s Lamas, Shamans and Ancestors: Village Religion in Sikkim (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Vibha Arora’s “Roots and the Route of Secularism in Sikkim,” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 38 (2006), and Charisma Lepcha’s “Religion, Culture, and Identity: A Comparative Study on the Lepchas of Dzongu, Kalimpong, and Ilam,” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, North-Eastern Hill University, 2013; historian Saul Mullard’s Opening the Hidden Land (Leiden: Brill, 2011); geographers Mona Chettri’s Ethnicity and Democracy in the Eastern Himalayan Borderland (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2017) and Mabel Gergan’s “Living with Earthquakes and Angry Deities at the Himalayan Borderlands,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107, no. 2 (2017): 490-498. For specific discussion of Buddhism in west Sikkim, see Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia, “Foxes, Yetis and Bulls as Lamas: Human-Animal Interactions as a Resource for Exploring Buddhist Ethics in Sikkim,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 25 (2018): 45-69 and “Purifying Multispecies Relations in the Valley of Abundance,” MAVCOR Journal 5, no. 2 (2021).
• 2
  In Sikkim, this is an understudied but common ritual event. Anna Balikci has studied the Bumkor in Sikkimese village of Tingchim in her comprehensive anthropological study, Lamas, Shamans and Ancestors, 59; and more recently, Charisma Lepcha discusses it in relation to ecological change in “Lepcha Water View and Climate Change in Sikkim Himalaya,” in Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas, eds. Dan Smyer Yü and Erik de Maaker (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
• 3
  This Bumkor is briefly described in Hissey Wongchuk Bhutia’s informative history of a temple in west Sikkim, “A Precious Ocean of Amazing Faith: The History and Practices of Chumpong Mani Lhakhang (Temple),” Bulletin of Tibetology 47, nos. 1 & 2 (2011): 74-75.
• 4
  My deep gratitude to the people of Sindrang for inviting me to participate in the Bumkor and sharing their experiences with me.

Sikkim is home to a variety of ritual traditions that involve the recitation of texts. The Bumkor is particularly noteworthy because it is focused on the propitiation of books as venerated guests and community members. This treatment of books is by no means unique to Tibet and the Himalayas, and is found throughout South Asia and the Buddhist world. Since a very early period in Mahāyāna Buddhist history, “the cult of the book” has been an influential part of ritual life in Buddhist communities, where owning, seeing, copying, reading, and hearing were all recommended as forms of interaction that would create opportunities for generating merit. Multiple canonical texts, including the Lotus Sūtra, the Diamond Sūtra, and the Flower Adornment Sūtra extolled the virtues of worshipping books, which included giving them offerings as well as engaging in copying and reading.1 Historian Gregory Schopen has discussed the use of books as protective talismans in South Asian domestic settings in the early first millennium CE,2 and as Buddhism spread to China and other areas, so too did beliefs associated with the power of the book.3 As art historian Jinah Kim writes, the book has not just served as “a symbol of knowledge and authority but also a central object of worship, often serving as a great vehicle for the achievement of . . . ritual means.”4 In her important book Receptacle of the Sacred, Kim analyzes medieval Tantric books from South Asia, emphasizing that studying their layout and iconography as well as their textual contents reveal them to not only have been objects of reverence, but also ritual agents.

In modern Nepal, books retain this power. In David Gellner’s study of the readings of the Perfection of Wisdom at Kwa Bahah temple in Lalitpur, sponsors who provided patronage for the text to be read by ritual specialists mentioned a variety of motivations and occasions that led them to do so. These included illness, an auspicious occasion (such as a new house), a major life event in the family such as death, employment issues and aspirations, “the hope of safe return” from travel, or the general aspiration for clearing “ill fortune or bad luck in the home.”5 During a time of crisis, such as illness, sponsors made vows to deities that in exchange for healing or the clearance of an obstacle, they would sponsor the reading of the text.6 These reasons were given alongside more conventionally Buddhist reasoning that people gave for this sponsorship that included the desire to do good work, bring peace to one’s family and one’s mind, prevent obstacles or dangers, show devotion, or “uplift beings or the world.”7 These reasons demonstrate the belief that books as objects, as well as the knowledge within them, could bring about change and human flourishing.

Other South Asian religious communities also venerate their texts directly as community members. In Sikh communities, the central text of the community, the Gurū Granth Sāhib does not just symbolize or signify the teachings of their human gurus. As religious studies scholar Kristina Myrvold writes, the Gurū Granth Sāhib

. . . is an object of worship because the text is the guru as a person invested with agency to mediate a spiritual teaching and minimize the ontological gap between humans and the divine. In the daily liturgy of the gurdwārā, the physical manifestation of the text in a book form is treated like worldly royalty granting an audience: the Sikhs present the scripture with prayers, food, clothes, and offerings to be blessed; they put it to sleep in a human bed at night; and they recite and listen to its worlds as if a living guru continued to give verbal instructions.8

Along with this physical treatment and veneration, the Gurū Granth Sāhib has also received recognition for its authority beyond the Sikh community in the Indian nation state. In 2000 the Supreme Court of India declared that the Gurū Granth Sāhib a “juristic person” capable of holding and using property presented to the community as a form of charity.9

Traditions around Buddhist books in Tibet inherited much from their South Asian predecessors. In South Asia, books (Sanskrit: pustaka) were produced from treated palm leaves, and were long in form, as determined by the shape of the palm leaves used, and tied through the middle instead of being bound at the side. Veneration of The Perfection of Wisdom texts dates back to early Mahāyāna Buddhism and was especially associated with the “Cult of the Book” due to the equation of the text and its reader with the Buddha.10 Palm leaves were not available in the high Himalayas, but Tibetan books still resembled South Asian books in form: produced from loose leaf, unbound paper made from different roots and trees, they were long, unbound and even referred to as pothi (Tibetan: po ti), a term clearly derived from the term pothi used for book in a number of north Indian languages. Similar to the South Asian context, books in Tibet and the Himalayas were seen as living members of the Buddhist community, as physical “supports” capable of generating and conferring the blessings of the Buddha’s speech (Tibetan: gsung rten) that they contain.  In Tibetan and Himalayan areas, this phenomenon manifested in a number of ways, including extending the rules of etiquette related to honorable members of the religious community to books: not putting them on the floor or in low places, wrapping them appropriately in valuable fabric, and importantly, seeing them as capable of conferring blessings, as demonstrated by the common handling custom of touching books to the crown of the head. Texts are also always included in shrines, alongside other supports that represent the body (Tibetan: sku) and mind (Tibetan: thugs) of the Buddha, such as statues, stūpas and murals.11 Historical anthropologist Hildegard Diemberger has discussed how this honor extended to language, as the cloth wrapping used to encase them was “often called the same name as the monastic robe (namza; Tibetan: na bza’), tied with strings that are often called ‘belts’ (kura; Tibetan: sked rags), and invited (chendren; Tibetan: spyan ’dren) from one place to another as if they were honorific persons.”12 When people interact with books, they often use honorific terms, such as going to “meet” (Tibetan: mjal ba), as opposed to seeing or reading one. Additionally, texts and objects with adorned with Tibetan script must be stored in high places, away from all sources of ritual pollution, and, when they need to be disposed of, should be burnt or ritually buried, not thrown away. Diemberger has drawn on the work of anthropologist Alfred Gell to consider how inanimate objects can be agents in “an indirect sense, for although they themselves are not intentional beings they can act as a medium through which people manifest and realize their intentions. They can become ‘extensions’ of persons as part of their ‘distributed personhood.’”13 Elsewhere, she has argued that what makes Tibetan books agents is their ability to “act on” living beings and their environment.14 I intend to build on her argument here by examining at the specific rituals of the Kangyur kora and Bumkor in order to highlight this agency and its influence in local settings.

• 1
  John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 164-165.
• 2
  Gregory Schopen, “The Book as a Sacred Object in Private Homes in Early or Medieval India,” in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Objects in Global Perspective, eds. Elizabeth Robertson and Jennifer Jahner (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
• 3
  Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture, 168-176.
• 4
  Kim, Receptacle of the Sacred, 9-10.
• 5
  David Gellner, “‘The Perfection of Wisdom’: A Text and its Uses in Kwa Bahah, Lalitpur,” in The Anthropology of Buddhism and Hinduism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 186-187.
• 6
  Ibid., 186-187.
• 7
  Ibid., 187.
• 8
  Kristina Myrvold, “The Scripture as a Living Guru: Religious Practices Among Contemporary Sikhs,” in Objects of Worship in South Asian Religions, eds. Knut A. Jacobsen, Mikael Aktor, and Kristina Myrvold (London: Routledge, 2015), 163.
• 9
  Ibid., 177.
• 10
  Wen Zhao, “The Conceptions of Seeing the Buddha and Buddha Embodiments in Early Prajñāpāramitā Literature,” Unpublished PhD dissertation, Ludwig-Macmilians University, 2018, 45-7.
• 11
  As representatives of these ideas, Buddha statues correspond to the body of the Buddha, and stūpa (Tibetan: mchod rten) to the mind. Traditionally, these three elements are grouped together as the “body, speech, and mind” of the Buddha.
• 12
  Hildegard Diemberger, “Buddhist Books on Trans-Himalayan Pathways,” in Trans-Himalayan Borderlands, eds. Dan Smyer-Yu and Jean Michaud (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 110.
• 13
  Hildegard Diemberger, “Holy Books as Ritual Objects and Vessels of Teaching in the Eta of the ‘Further Spread of the Doctrine’ (Bstan pa yang dar),” in Revisiting Rituals in a Changing Tibetan World, ed. Katie Buffetrille (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 11. Quotations from Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 122.
• 14
  Hildegard Diemberger, “Quand le livre deviant relique,” Terrain 59 (2012): 19.

In the Tibetan and Himalayan cultural world, human communities interact with books in multiple ways. In a comprehensive article, Buddhist studies scholar Cathy Cantwell has discussed the ways that texts are not merely read, but instead are seen, touched, held, and swallowed to bring about transformation and the realization of Buddhist soteriological goals.1 What interests me here is that these interactions are not unidirectional or instrumental; instead, they are marked by forms of relationality discussed by Gell. Gell argues that

‘social agents’ can be drawn from categories which are as different as chalk and cheese (in face, rather more different) because ‘social agency’ is not defined in terms of ‘basic’ biological attributes (such as inanimate thing vs. incarnate person) but is relational—it does not matter, in inscribing ‘social agent’ status, what a thing (or a person) ‘is’ in itself; what matters is where it stands in a network of social relations.2

As noted by Diemberger, this relationality is revealed in Tibetan and Himalayan contexts by how books are treated: Buddhist devotees approach them as important community members, or in the case of rituals, as capable of bringing about transformation and change for people who touch, hear, read and copy them. Due to this ability to generate blessings, their presence in a monastery or residence is seen as a vital part of the material culture that allows for human flourishing in a place. Throughout the annual ritual calendar, people also read from these texts, especially in response to specific concerns including the health of community members, conferring merit with the hope of gaining prosperity, and to clear away any seen and unseen obstacles to both worldly and soteriological concerns.3

In the case of Perfection of Wisdom texts, the enactment of reading, handling and interacting with the book is especially powerful due to the importance of the contents (especially since these texts are held to summarize the most important teachings of Mahāyāna Buddhism, particularly emptiness), but also due to its generative ability. By generative here, I refer to the perception that it is not only reading, copying, or other forms of human action that bring about transformation on the part of the Buddhist practitioner, but that books themselves have the power to generate blessings and attract positive forces.

A vivid example of this may be seen from the practice of carrying books around places, such as villages and fields. The significance of books as active repositories of Buddha’s words means that interaction and any physical contact with them can confer the Buddha’s blessings, or, as anthropologist Toni Huber prefers, empowerment (Tibetan: byin rlabs). Empowerment refers to the capacity for such interactions to transform both a Buddhist practitioner and the world around them.4 Circumambulation, (Tibetan: skor ba) either by walking or prostrating, is a common tradition throughout Tibetan cultural areas. A common Buddhist explanation for these actions is that they allow for a practitioner to move their bodies around a sacred site or habitat (Tibetan: gnas) or object, thereby maximizing their connection to and interaction with the blessings. Circumambulation cleanses the body of ritual pollution, shadows or defilement (Tibetan: sgrib).5 Huber has argued that this process of interaction and purification does not just refer to an “abstract mental and cognitive” process, but also purification involves a “physical process” and the “actual acts or work it has to do.”6 The Kangyur kora or a Bumkor is a vivid exemplar of this idea, when books are carried on the circumambulation path around villages and residences for the purpose of spreading their empowerment into the soil and environment, allowing the book’s blessings to be conferred on the areas that are circumambulated. The human bearers of the books also receive blessings for facilitating this contact. The benefits of book circumambulation processions for both human and nonhuman participants affirm that these books have the same ontological status as the Buddha, and “can be accorded exceptionally high rank and status” due to their ability to function as “embodied conduits and sources of empowerment which can be ritually accessed by both an inner cult group and the lay public” in the same way as lamas and other significant religious figures in Tibet and the Himalayas.7

The recognition of books as the Buddha, or as teachers and lamas, to be treated as honored guests through the hosting rituals around the Kangyur kora and Bumkor in the Himalayas, allows us to see the many powers ascribed to these texts in the region. In particular, here I will focus on four specific powers The Perfection of Wisdom and other Buddhist books and the book circumambulation processions are associated with, with a focus on healing, purification, protection, and nourishment. 

• 1
  Cantwell, “Seeing, Touching, Holding, and Swallowing Tibetan Buddhist Texts.”
• 2
  Alfred Gell, Art and Agency, 123.
• 3
  For more on the magic in Buddhism, including magic attached to texts and words, see Sam van Schaik, Buddhist Magic (Boulder: Shambhala, 2020); and Vesna A. Wallace, “Texts as Deities: Mongols’ Rituals of Worshipping Sūtras, and Rituals of Accomplishing Various Goals by Means of Sūtras” in Tibetan Ritual, ed. Jose Ignacio Cabezon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 207–24.
• 4
  Toni Huber, “Putting the gnas back into gnas skor: Rethinking Tibetan Buddhist Pilgrimage Practice,” The Tibet Journal 19, no. 2 (1994): 41.
• 5
  Ibid., 35.
• 6
  Ibid., 44.
• 7
  Ibid., 49.

The Bumkor was not a one-day event, but instead represented a crucial point in the annual ritual calendar of west Sikkimese Buddhist communities around Pemayangtse. Organizing the logistics required coordination among the different villages that all historically paid taxes to Pemayangtse Monastery. Pemayangtse has historically played an important role in the Sikkimese state as the monastic center responsible for promulgating the teachings of Lhatsun Namkhai Jikme (Lha bstun nam mkha’ ’jigs med, 1597-1650/4), a Tibetan yogi who traveled to Sikkim in the seventeenth century and participated in the enthronement of the first king of the Namgyal dynasty that presided over Sikkim from the mid-seventeenth century until Sikkim’s annexation into India in 1975.1 The villages around Pemayangtse were crucial patrons for Buddhist activities and rituals, but were also bound to the monastery through kinship, as the one hundred and eight monastics were drawn from the local Bhutia clans of the area. Historically, it appears that Pemayangtse was a celibate monastic community, but by the nineteenth century most of the ritual and meditation specialists there had families and remained attached to their villages, even after taking admission as lamas.2 After 1975, the Government of Sikkim negotiated with the monastery to assume some of its historical administrative responsibilities, but at present, the monastery still presides over a large estate and its representatives function as tax collectors and landlords in the area.3

• 1
  For more on Sikkimese history, see Mullard, Opening the Hidden Land and Pranab Kumar Jha, History of Sikkim 1817-1904: Analysis of British Policy and Activities (Kolkata: O.P.S. Publishers, 1985).
• 2
  For more on Pemayangtse Monastery, see Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia, “The Importance of Jetsun Mingyur Paldron in the Development of Sikkimese Buddhism,” in Eminent Buddhist Women, ed. Karma Lekshe Tsomo (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 153-158 and Mélanie Vandenhelsken, “Secularism and the Buddhist Monastery of Pemayangste,” Bulletin of Tibetology 39, no. 1 (2003): 55-73.
• 3
  Yab Sonam Wangchuck, interview, July 2020.

Preparation for the Bumkor began with collaboration between lamas and village patrons to decide the logistics of the procession, including how many lamas and villagers would accompany the text, and the location of the patron’s house who would host the Bum before the procession left to circumambulate the village. An organization committee was formed to coordinate the circulation of the Bum between the villages historically associated with Pemayangtse. The committee was made up of at least one representative of the primary jindak (Tibetan: sbyin bdag), or sponsor household from each village, who prepared a shrine for the books and held a ritual (Tibetan: zhabs rten) and feast (Tibetan: tshogs) for the representatives from Pemayangtse who accompany the books. These representatives included tantric practitioners known as trapa (Tibetan: grwa pa)1 and machen, or “cooks” (Tibetan: ma byan), who function as ritual managers, from Pemayangtse, who visited the sponsor households ahead of the beginning of the ritual to help set up the ritual shrines required.2 In many instances, the lamas and patrons were actually the same people, since lamas are drawn from the villages around Pemayangtse and also maintain the responsibility of hosting the Bum as part of their family ritual calendar.

In Sindrang, cleaning the shrine and preparing food for the procession began several weeks in advance. Yab Sonam Wangchuck had been selected to host the Bum the preceding year, and so had worked with his family for several months to ensure preparations for the Bumkor would be sufficient. When he hosted the Bumkor in 2007, Yab Sonam Wangchuck was balancing his responsibilities as the patron with his other work as a member of the administrative team at Pemayangtse and as a contractor, building roads in west Sikkim. His wife, Chum Pema Lhanze was a government schoolteacher and his four children were studying in high school. Agya Bhai, a farm manager, his wife Ai Mailee, and two of their children also resided in the house. Preparation to host the Bum entailed a thorough cleaning of the residential shrine: airing silk tablecloths and pillows for the books to be placed on; sweeping, dusting, and mopping the room; cleaning ritual implements; and airing out cushions for visiting monks, along with making byasu and chadung, two types of roasted maize snacks to present to guests. Acting as the host for Sindrang also required that Yab Sonam Wangchuck inform Sindrang residents about dates for the procession and coordinate with them about food and drink donations for visiting human and book lamas.

One or two days before the Bumkor took place, lamas removed the Bum from its storage location, in the Kangyur Lhakhang on the second floor of Pemayangtse monastery. This Bum has resided at Pemayangtse for over one hundred years, after it was brought from central Tibet. The lamas used the opportunity to remove the pecha from their fabric wrapping and check for any insect or moisture damage. Due to heavy rainfall, books in Sikkim are vulnerable to mold, and silver fish take refuge in the humid, comfortable interior of books. Older books at Pemayangtse that were brought from Tibet were made from papermaking plants such as Stellera, Daphne, and Wikistroemia that were poisonous, which prevented or slowed down insect damage.3 Newer books printed on mass-produced paper from Taiwan and Delhi were much quicker to deteriorate in Sikkim’s climate, and were often marked with the distinctive circular patterns of insect consumption within a few months of their arrival. The Pemayangtse edition of the Bum remained intact, and was large, with each book measuring roughly 80 cm in length and 20 cm in width. The volumes were stored between pieces of wood and tightly wrapped with yellow fabric. The Bumkor provided an opportunity for the books to be checked for damage and, if necessary, for the fabric wrap to be replaced.

• 1
  Trapa in Tibetan refers to a monk. In Sikkim, these monastics have not been fully ordained so are not celibate. They are also referred to as ngakpa (Tibetans: sngags pa ངགས་པ་), or Tantric practitioners, but trapa is more common in local usage. At Pemayangtse, trapa who have been admitted to the monastery are also known by the distinct appellation of “Yab,” ཡབ་ which acknowledges their position as a member of one of the twelve Bhutia clans descended from the time of Khye Bumsa.
• 2
  “Cook” does not entirely capture the full range of responsibilities held by this community at Pemayangtse. They also act as lay caretakers, kitchen managers and farmers on the monastic estate, and as noted by Hissey Wongchuk Bhutia, they are also known as “zu nar bo ཟུ་ནར་བོ་, or players of the zu nar musical instrument” as they play ritual instruments that accompany monastic processions and possess in-depth ritual knowledge. Hissey Wongchuk, “A Precious Ocean of Amazing Faith,” 75.
• 3
  Alessandro Boesi, “Paper Plants in the Tibetan World: A Preliminary Study,” in Tibetan Printing: Comparison, Continuities, and Change, eds. Hildegard Diemberger, Franz-Karl Ehrhard and Peter Kornicki (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 504.

This is indicative of the ways that the Bumkor provided an opportunity for restoration and healing. In the village, this healing was social, as the community is brought together after a long winter to collaborate on logistics and allocate responsibilities to assure that the visit moved smoothly. In the monastery, the healing was physical, as the books are aired and inspected for damage. Therefore, both the text and community were healed, demonstrating a reciprocal relationship between them. This is not unique, as in many Buddhist cultures sūtras are associated with healing, and at times capable to healing as agents.1 In Tibetan Buddhism, there was a specific tradition of texts functioning as medicine that prescribed eating magical letters (Tibetan: za yig) to ward off illness and calamity.2 The Bumkor drew together these examples and combined both metaphorical and physical healing for human and nonhuman participants.

• 1
  Kim, Receptacle of the Sacred, 61; and Don Baker, “Monks, Medicine, and Miracles: Health and Healing in the History of Korean Buddhism,” Korean Studies 18 (1994): 50-75.
• 2
  Frances Garrett, “Eating Letters in the Tibetan Treasure Tradition,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 32, nos. 1–2 (2009): 85-113.

This concern is also seen in other parts of the Himalayas. In their article, “A Landscape Dissolved” based on research from Rinam, a village in the northwest Himalayan region of Zangskar, Kim Gutschow and Niels Gutschow referred to the Bumkor as a “spring cleaning.”1 In Rinam, there were several distinctive rituals that took place before the Bumkor. Gutschow and Gutschow discussed how the Bumkor began with a ritual ablution (Tibetan: khrus). They wrote:

The ablution is performed by a fully ordained monk (Tibetan: dge slong) who pours water from a consecrated vessel (Tibetan: bum pa) on to a mirror, while repeating a prayer to invite all beings from the six realms of existence to come and be cleansed. This purification ritual makes merit by cleaning individuals of their mental obscurations (Tibetan: sgrib) and cleansing fields of ritual pollution (Tibetan: sgrib) which accumulates during the darker winter months when ghosts roam more freely.2

Humans were believed to generate a lot of ritual pollution in everyday activities that entangled them in samsara, the cycle of birth and death. These activities included digging, ploughing, and other forms of agricultural activity that may inadvertently have harmed other seen beings such as insects and unseen beings such as local deities and spirits in addition to lifecycle processes such as childbirth, sex, and death that continued the cycle of rebirth and death. The Bumkor therefore helped to purify the village again to receive the blessings of the deities and to compensate for any infractions.

• 1
  Kim Gutschow and Niels Gutschow, “A Landscape Dissolved: Households, Fields, and Irrigation in Rinam, Northwest India,” in Sacred Landscape of the Himalaya, Proceedings of an International Conference at Heidelberg, May 1998, eds. Niels Gutschow (Vienna: Verlage der Österreische der Wissenschaften, 2003), 135.
• 2
  Ibid., 135.

Gutschow and Gutschow argued that “[t]he combined aspects of circumambulation and purification symbolically banish the wintertime specter of death and decay in order to make way for a fertile spring and prosperous harvest."1 They connected the Bumkor to other ritual processes that connected the individual body with the purity of their household, and the village more widely. The purity of the individual and the family in this instance could be attained through circumambulation around the village, which also purified the wider community and place.2 Importantly, not only the humans are purified, but also the books.

• 1
  Ibid., 146.
• 2
  Ibid.

After the Bum departed to visit the next village, most of the villagers remained at Yab Sonam Wangchuck’s house, where the atmosphere became celebratory. People shared tea and snacks, and picnics broke out in the compound around the house. The party continued on into the night, as bonfires were lit, millet beer (Bhutia: chang) was shared, and folk dancing and singing resounded throughout the village. At the end of the winter, the Bumkor marked the end of scarcity and coming of abundance, as books, humans, and the spirits were all provided with nourishment.

The Bumkor in west Sikkim increased reciprocity between the villagers, the monastery, and other seen and unseen beings, including the local protector deities and other spirits of the place who increase and divert positive forces in the community, such as health, prosperity, and happiness. The visit of this part of the canon was seen as a great blessing for the landscape and the community. From its welcoming procession, to the presentation of gifts and food, to its grand farewell, the Bumkor demonstrated how these books are seen as treasured visitors, who/that generate sought after forces for local multispecies communities through their visit. The attention to detail in the events and the care shown for the books (including offering them scarves and airing them) acknowledged their agency and their role within the community, and the way that the content of these books, related to compassion and emptiness, may be enacted in interactions with their form.

My exploration of a book procession circumambulation tradition in Sindrang shared common themes with other Himalayan communities, and with traditions connected to book and textual propitiation elsewhere in Buddhist cultures. The Kangyur Kora and Bumkor and other uses of Sūtras and Buddhist texts in these spaces served to promote human and nonhuman wellbeing through nourishment, healing, purification, and protection. These themes demonstrate that these canonical books are not inanimate objects that passively receive worship, but rather active agents who are valued and cared for members of their communities and who, in turn, encourage the consolidation of community ties and cooperation. They are also themes that resonate with concepts in The Perfection of Wisdom literature and demonstrate connection between the contents of texts and what people do with them. Even if people do not read these texts, ritual traditions and material interactions provide them with opportunities to bring about transformation in their lives and communities.

This recognition of the books’ authority, and ability to generate blessings for and bring positive forces to the community, resonates with other recent studies of book agents in non-Buddhist contexts. In Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist communities, the ideas in the Buddhist canon and their containers are equally treasured; and these containers are by no means inanimate. They are intentional objects, in the words of Gell, in that they are interacted with according to community hopes and aspirations. But they also go beyond this, as they generate transformative potential for human and nonhuman residents of the local landscape with an aspiration to benefit the universe.

My deep appreciation and thanks to all the seen and unseen residents of Sindrang and in the Pemayangtse community in west Sikkim, and especially to late H. E. Sindrang Yab Gomchen Pemayangtse Dorje Lopen Chewang Rinzin for illuminating the different levels of the Bumkor for me. I dedicate this article to him with gratitude. A huge thanks to Yab Sonam Wangchuck and Chum Pema Lhanjee; Ms. Kunzang Choden Bhutia for her beautiful photographs of her family’s hosting of the Bum in 2019, and especially of her late grandfather H. E. Sindrang Yab Gomchen Pemayangtse Dorjee Lopen; Mr. Chopel Dorjee Bhutia for allowing me to use his older family photos of the Bumkor; Mr. Gikdhal Wangchuck Bhutia for providing additional details; and my families in Sikkim and New Zealand for their support of my research into powerful books. Dr. Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia, Dr. Emily Floyd, and the anonymous reviewers for MAVCOR Journal all provided extremely helpful advice and constructive feedback. Thanks also to Mr. Jim Canary, Dr. Mona Chettri, Dr. Jana Fortier, Dr. Mabel Gergan, Dr. Rebecca Hall, Dr. Charisma Lepcha, Dr. Melissa Moreton, Dr. Benjamin Nourse, Mr. Raúl Montero Quispe, my colleagues at the Rare Book School, the organizers of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Cultural and Textual Exchanges at the University of Iowa, and many other colleagues for support, suggestions, and materials related to this project.

The concept of early modernity is shaking off its old Eurocentric connotations as historians of other regions and peoples find “common threads in the worldwide experience” of these centuries, most specifically in the “worldwide diffusion of new commodities.”1 This era is notable for more intensive and sustained interactions, including the translation of highly esteemed goods arising from Indigenous North American, African, Arabian and Asian cultures, moving to far flung world centers through the entanglement of people, goods, and political circumstance.2 Understanding these changes is better achieved through investigations outside privileged realms, including with media like tobacco and the material meanings that ensued with its travels. Studies, such as this one, open vital historical vantage points, where subaltern knowledge and agency figure in singular ways. Marcy Norton is prominent among the new generation of historians who place Indigenous American and African peoples at the center of early modern Atlantic world events.3 These histories reveal the porosity of European and Euro-colonial societies and the dependence of elite Europeans on material cultures that can be incorporated into the term Indigenous technology (whether arts, material culture, or processes of use). These materialities spread through colonial and metropolitan polities and cultures.4 Norton argues for the term “technology” as a means to encapsulate tangible media—including tobacco pipes —which also includes the wisdom, cultural, and spiritual facets of things arising from the Indigenous Americas. Directing particular attention to the myriad of “subaltern technologies” that distinguished these works, systems of knowing and doing that ultimately revised wider material worlds, Norton delivers a riposte to the historic denial of “imperial and colonial dependence” on these technologies.5 The tobacco pipe was a powerful translational tool. Its look and shape, feel and function footnote the transformational features of the early modern Atlantic world: landscapes of exchange. My focus is the multiple iterations of the pipe within the wider Atlantic basin arising from Indigenous forms, media that came to define this period, its solitary reveries and diverse sociabilities, systems of power, and deft resistances.

The history of technology originally focused on chronologies of western innovations—the term “technology” defined by Thomas Parke Hughes as part of a “human-built world.”6 More recently shifts in fields such as the history of science and technology, along with the developing field of the history of knowledge, manifest a far more capacious view of knowledge and applied knowing—itself a kind of technology.7 Simone Lässig, a social and cultural historian of Central Europe, observes:

Only in the last decade or two have scholars developed a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between knowledge and power that centers on the complexities and ambiguities of knowledge production and circulation in contexts of asymmetrical power relationships. This new understanding is reflected in the growing interest in topics such as subversive knowledge practices, the preservation of traditional knowledge, and the incorporation of subaltern knowledge within hegemonic knowledge.8

These subject areas lend themselves to the overarching rubric of subaltern technology, taking explicit account of the materiality through which knowledge was expressed, including by Indigenous populations, non-elite women and men, and later colonizing and colonized peoples of the Atlantic world. Norton notes that: “Deploying the term [subaltern technology] in its more capacious sense assists in moving away from cultural-evolutionary assumptions and approaching hegemonic and subaltern cultures without judgments about hierarchies of values.”9 Alfred Gell offers further insight into the meanings of technology more generally. He urges us to understand “technology, in the widest sense [as]… forms of social relationships which make it socially necessary to produce, distribute, and consume goods using ‘technical processes.’"10 Finally, Norton emphasizes, “Technology is at once process and product."11 She references “the early modern era,” a chronological term once considered irredeemably Eurocentric, but now accepted in non-European precincts precisely because of the newly shared materialities of this period and their significance.12

I consider the tobacco pipe from these perspectives, exploring entangled goods and peoples that generated new rituals, expectations, and habits in Atlantic communities. Exploring what objects do in discrete cross-cultural colonial environments, Nicholas Thomas has successfully deployed the term ‘entangled’ in respect to Pacific peoples, material culture, and colonialism.13 The notion of entanglement effectively captures complex colonial events, foregrounding active material culture and the communities that fashioned these ways. The pipe, a preeminent tobacco technology, reshaped Europe and its Atlantic colonies, materially and culturally, in diverse and quotidian ways. Feeding these pipes initiated critical new habits and processes, defining regions and peoples.

• 1
  James Grehan, “Smoking and ‘Early Modern’ Sociability: The Great Tobacco Debate in the Ottoman Middle East (Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries),” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (2006): 1353; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735-62.
• 2
  Beverly Lemire, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures. The Material World Remade, c. 1500-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• 3
  For example, Judith Ann Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Judith Ann Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travellers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Molly Warsh, American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire 1492-1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
• 4
  See Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw, eds. Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America: Material Culture in Motion, c. 1780-1980 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021).
• 5
  Marcy Norton, “Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World,” Colonial Latin American Review 26, no. 1 (2017): 18-38; Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).
• 6
  Thomas Parke Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
• 7
  For example, Peter Burke, What is the History of Knowledge? (Oxford: Polity Press, 2015); Simone Lässig, “The History of Knowledge and the Expansion of the Historical Research Agenda,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 59 (2016): 29-58. I thank Rita Nayer for her discussions of the history of knowledge.
• 8
  Lässig, “The History of Knowledge,” 37.
• 9
  Norton, “Subaltern Technologies,” 26.
• 10
  Ibid, 26.
• 11
  Ibid, 26.
• 12
  Grehan, “Smoking,” 1353-1354.
• 13
  Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 8-9; “The Case of the Misplaced Ponchos,” Journal of Material Culture 4, no. 1 (1999): 5-20.

Over the course of the sixteenth century, coastal and riverine encounters along the American continents became routine, with tobacco eliciting bafflement, curiosity, and then obsession among Europeans. Norton has explored this trajectory for the Spanish empire, revising previous histories of tobacco’s globalization to emphasize the importance of Indigenous American tobacco culture. Historians are in large part dependent on written accounts of tobacco transactions, though archaeological and other material evidence demonstrates the early and rapid adoption of Indigenous tobacco in the sixteenth century, including on the West African coast—pipes, pipe pieces and artistic works mark interactions and adaptations.1

Certainly, written records referencing tobacco are more commonplace in northwest Europe after the mid-sixteenth century. André Thevet (1516-1590), eventually cosmographer to the king of France, was among the first to record cigar smoking by Indigenous people in Brazil in 1557, following a two-year sojourn. He noted that Brazilians considered tobacco to be “wonderfully useful for several things.”2 Thevet later claimed first-hand knowledge of the use of tobacco among the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) peoples along the Saint Lawrence River; importantly, he employed the terminology of perfuming to make the smoke comprehensible to his readers.3 Europeans were deeply versed in the uses of incense and burning herbs for religious, ceremonial, and functional purposes. Thevet’s metaphor was important as an indication of the context in which this herb was placed.4 The aroma of tobacco likely scented the air of European Atlantic ports, as the plant was already notable among seafaring peoples, and became commonplace across a wider geography generations later, even as Thevet announced the arrival of this substance to literate elites. Jean de Léry (1536-1613), a Protestant missionary, added further to formal tobacco lore. Confirming tobacco’s martial value, he claimed that the Tupinamba of Brazil “will go three or four days without nourishing themselves on anything else” following the ritual ingestion of tobacco smoke.5 De Léry also observed tobacco use in Carib ceremonial contexts, recounting that smoking men encircled dancers, blowing smoke into their faces.6

Tobacco rituals marked daily, seasonal, and exceptional events in the Americas.7 Well-read Europeans gradually assembled information on these and other rites. Bit by bit, European-based elites caught up with the hard-won knowledge of unlettered seamen with firsthand accounts of Indigenous practice. Tobacco instruction and use permeated maritime communities. Intermediaries trained in explaining the use of tobacco fitments familiarized new generations with this resonant herb; European cognoscenti followed these leads.8

In the following decades, tobacco apprenticeships took place within countless communities in the eastern reaches of the Atlantic and beyond, as mariners, merchants, and missionaries transmitted their first-hand experiences of this leaf and its rituals in diplomacy, hospitality, and sociability. Their embodied knowledge, along with Indigenous accouterments like pipes, circulated along sea lanes. Tobacco translation ensued, a multi-generational process, imbrications of “process and product,” challenging initiates to slot this technology into local categories of meaning. Europeans and Africans witnessed tobacco’s roles, recognized its potential, and tested its properties in many milieus. The commercial possibilities were clear. Translations were repeated endlessly through embodied practices—hand-to-hand, mouth-to-mouth—and recontextualized by an array of common peoples for a variety of different purposes.     

European ties to commoditized tobacco began in the Caribbean in the early-sixteenth century, and local colonists soon understood the potential markets and profits to be had. They also seemed to learn the ways tobacco could be used in the lives of the enslaved, including on Santo Domingo.  One account speculated on tobacco’s value to those forced to perform heavy labor: “they say that when they [the enslaved] stop working and take tobacco their fatigue leaves them.”9 Decades before the 1490s, West Africans interacted with Iberian seaborne merchants.10 Little wonder, then, that in the aftermath of these transatlantic voyages, Africans, along with Europeans, were among the earliest outsiders to experience tobacco’s power. African seamen are confirmed among Columbus’s crew on his second foray to the Caribbean in 1494 and, doubtless, thereafter.11

The utility and potential profit from this leaf led to European investments in Venezuela, Brazil and Mexico.12 The preeminent value of this crop was evident to plantocrats, as well as to seafarers of all nations who traded for rations of this herb with Indigenous peoples wherever they could. Systematic colonial cultivation ensued with attempted small-scale farms and larger plantations, even as Indigenous farmers produced for this new market.13 Dutch and English privateers siphoned off Iberian cargoes or bought directly from Indigenous or Iberian settler farmers, despite legal prohibitions. Contraband traffic continued unremittingly, bringing tobacco into the calloused hands of many ranks and ethnicities. This was a matter of world significance, not a top down, but a bottom up adaptation of Indigenous tobacco technologies by predominantly Atlantic based folk, translating and globalizing a key facet of Indigenous American culture.14

The multi-pronged processes of adopting, adapting, and spreading tobacco technology drove the subaltern technology of the tobacco pipe. The pipe, itself, gradually became entangled with massive colonial land seizures and the highly capitalized enslavement of predominantly African populations. These two profoundly important European policies sustained the development of complex, capitalist commodity systems that moved tobacco in bulk to world markets and ensured vast European profits.15 The tobacco pipe evolved in this context, with innovations and manipulations in European, Euro-colonial, and African contexts. As tobacco pipes burgeoned, European tobacco consumers were also instructed in the racial hierarchies foundational to these systems. The use of tobacco pipes and instruction in racial hierarchies were sequential, part of “process and product,” which I discuss below.

A slim 70,000 pounds of tobacco was officially imported into the Spanish city of Seville in 1608—a figure that does not account for the informal traffic with Indigenous and settler farmers, nor with the private trade of ships’ officers and elite passengers, all of which must be recognized as significant.16 The sort of small scale traffic that crisscrossed eastern Atlantic waters included, for example, an English West Country ship in 1609, which transported six bags of pepper, one “pack” of calico, and two hundred weight of tobacco from Lisbon to Bristol.17 Like many ports, Bristol’s waterside taverns were frequented by those familiar with smoking, as well as would-be initiates. My interest here is not to track the timeline of colonization and the development of capitalist markets for this plant, but rather to offer a summary with a few simple numbers to illustrate the pace of change. By 1613, the cargo reaching Seville hit 404,554 pounds.31 “By 1619, Virginians’ sales equaled Spanish sales in London. By 1620, they were twice that.”32 Tobacco plantations flourished in the Chesapeake region of Virginia through African labor, some with experience of tending tobacco in African farms and gardens, now forcibly relocated.33 Between 1686-1688, approximately 36,352,000 pounds of tobacco were imported into England.34 Brazilian tobacco plantations were out-produced by the Chesapeake’s plantations, whose product dominated the key Amsterdam tobacco market. Portugal also received substantial quantities of this commodity from their colony, reaching 4 million pounds annually in 1672.35 The resulting imperial structures provided the foundation for the intersection of material systems and the genesis of new rituals of consumption as Atlantic World populations created and sustained tobacco rituals, an interwoven narrative with few equals.36 Underlying these processes was the might of imperial powers, which drove production of this leaf and built the networks of exchange that intersected lives and cultures. Common people of different ranks and ethnicities, gender and age, innovated within this system, resisting and revising, devising symbolic and spiritual meanings through pipe practice.

• 1
  Arlene B. Hirschfelder, Encyclopedia of Smoking and Tobacco (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1999), 297.
• 2
  Arlene B. Hirschfelder, Encyclopedia of Smoking and Tobacco (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1999), 297.
• 3
  Marcel Trudel, “Thevet, André,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Vol. 1, accessed Febuary 29, 2016 (University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003); André Thevet, “Singularitez de la France antarctique,” in André Thevet’s North America: A Sixteenth-Century View, trans. and ed. Roger Schlesinger and Arthur P. Stabler (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986), 10-11.
• 4
  I emphasize this perspective on tobacco as “perfume” in contrast to European writers’ established analysis, which has focused on the medicalization of this plant as an explanation for its popularity among Europeans. In fact, Thevet’s assessment suggests the far wider contextualization among Europeans, not least from the influence of Indigenous practice. For the medicalization of tobacco see Jordan Goodman, Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (London: Routledge, 1994). For a critique of the medicalization paradigm, Marcy Norton, “Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 660-689.
• 5
  Peter C. Mancall, “Tales Tobacco Told in Sixteenth-Century Europe,” Environmental History 9, no. 4 (2004): 653.
• 6
  Ibid, 655-656.
• 7
  Johannes Wilbert, Tobacco and Shamanism in South America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 13-16, 107-108.
• 8
  For example, Arthur J. Ray, An Illustrated History of Canada’s Native People. I Have Lived Here Since the World Began, 4^th ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), 36; Joseph C. Winter, “Traditional Uses of Tobacco by Native Americans,” in Tobacco Use by Native North Americans: Sacred Smoke and Silent Killer, ed. Joseph C. Winter (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 9-58; Marcy Norton and Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, “The Multinational Commodification of Tobacco, 1492-1650,” in The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624, ed. Peter C. Mancall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 254-256.
• 9
  Norton and Studnicki-Gizbert, “Multinational Commodification”, 256.
• 10
  Geoffrey V. Scammel, The First Imperial Age: European Overseas Expansion, c. 1400-1715 (London: Routledge, 2004), 38-40.
• 11
  Christopher C. Fennell, “Early African America: Archaeological Studies of Significance and Diversity,” Journal of Archaeological Research 19, no. 1 (2011): 8-9.
• 12
  Lawrence A. Peskin and Edmond F. Wehrle, America and the World: Culture, Commerce, Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 21.
• 13
  Lemire, Global Trade, 199-200.
• 14
  Ibid, 193-201; Goodman, Tobacco in History, Table 6.1, 143. It is crucial to note that Indigenous Peoples continued and continue to use tobacco in ceremonial practices.
• 15
  William Darity, Jr. “British Industry and the West Indies Plantations,” in Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 247-282.
• 16
  Norton, Sacred Gifts, 143.
• 17
  “The discourse of Captaine Downes,” The liues, apprehensions, arraignments, and executions, of the 19. late pyrates Namely: Capt. Harris. Iennings. Longcastle. Downes. Haulsey. and their companies. As they were seuerally indited on St. Margrets Hill in Southwarke, on the 22. of December last, and executed the Fryday following. (London, 1609), np (Image 25).
• 31
  Norton, Sacred Gifts, 143.
• 32
  Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topic, The World that Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 – the Present (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1999), 99.
• 33
  Anthony S. Parent Jr., Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 60-62.
• 34
  Robert C. Nash, “The English and Scottish Tobacco Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Legal and Illegal Trade,” Economic History Review 35, no. 3 (1982): 356; Joyce Lorimer, “The English Contraband Tobacco Trade in Trinidad and Guiana, 1590-1617,” in The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America, 1480-1650, eds. Kenneth R. Andrews, Nicholas P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair, David B. Quinn (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978), 124-150; Michael Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 22-23.
• 35
  James Lang, Portuguese Brazil: The King’s Plantation (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 111.
• 36
  The French government made the taxation of tobacco the foundation for state finances, which encouraged wholesale smuggling of this commodity into the country. Kwass, Contraband, 44-53.

Easily pocketed, stored in sea chests and readily breakable, tobacco pipes trickled around the Atlantic over the sixteenth century in unknown numbers—a multi-site circulation. The modest dimensions of some pipes and the range of potential Indigenous American and early colonial sources mark this ephemeral, subaltern technology. However small, this slight thing had disproportionate value to its owner. West African artistic renderings of pipes and the stylistic similarities they share with Floridian Gulf of Mexico and West African pipes suggest the early-sixteenth-century traffic in these wares, doubtless an informal exchange.1 With rising plantation production, consider the steady flow of pipes from hand-to-hand, and the countless initiations that ensued at each port of call, as plebeian sea-borne cognoscenti demonstrated the filling of the pipe bowl, application of fire to set the tobacco leaves alight, and settling to the comfort and reflection of the pipe. All those who endured hard labor—civilian or military—treasured its power.2 Of course, merchants, officials, and churchmen also learned and indulged. Was it the intimacy and immediacy of the pipe that quashed the loud (elite) critiques of “Indian tobacco”? We must take seriously the deep unease in some quarters, as colonial engagement with Indigenous Americans and the vast enslavement of Africans built new concepts of race.3 Some commentators agonized over tobacco and its creolizing potential, equating pipe smoking with sexual congress with an “Indian whore,” and seething against becoming “Indianized with the intoxicating filthie fumes of Tobacco.”4 A coterie of elites sustained objections, including King James of England and Scotland (1566-1625), who wrote of “the dislike Wee had of the use of Tobacco, tending to the general and new corruption both of mens bodies and maners.”5 In 1604, James asked “what honour or policie can move us to imitate the barbarous and beastly maners of the wilde, godlesse, and slavish Indians, especially in so vile and stinking a custome?”6 The peril of Indian-ness defined his disquiet. Fearing the corruption of European men’s bodies, James saw tobacco as a potential pollution that might undo their manliness—a theme repeated in European kingdoms engrossed in American colonization.7

Protests over tobacco use resounded. Yet the pipe persisted. Its increased presence contrasts sharply with the objections voiced by the high-rank echo chambers where written objections were bruited; complaints in those realms differed sharply with the ship-board, harbor-side, street-level, tavern-based personal encounters with the pipe—experiences that included well-placed elites. Dining rooms and private libraries were eventually populated by pipe-lovers. A wonderfully gestural device, hand-held pipes were smoothly warm to the touch and issued cycles of physical sensation that came with the glow of the coals and the evanescence of the smoke. Every treatise against tobacco issued from the sixteenth century onwards faced, as a counterpoint, the challenging and pervasive materiality of the pipe.

Leora Auslander argues for the particular importance of objects “that are not just seen, but also felt and touched. These goods . . . carry special weight in essentially all societies . . . used in everyday, repetitive embodied activities . . . not simply functional.”8 She continues with the succinct observation that “Artifacts, therefore, are differently informative than texts even when texts are available; texts, in fact, sometimes obscure the meanings borne by material culture.”9 Tangible and multi-sensory, the intimacy of smoking devices, and their rapid proliferation from the late-sixteenth century, effectively contested intellectual retorts against “the drinking of smoke.” Though friable, the clay pipe held enormous power.  

Clay pipes were the ultimate early modern subaltern technology, as evidenced by Atlantic-world landscapes of exchange. They served as vehicles of cross-cultural translation with repeated processes of domestication and were ultimately made in vast quantities in countless settings throughout Europe, its colonies, Africa, and other Atlantic world locales. Though sometimes differently gendered, among different ranks, and in different locales, these ubiquitous cultural tools impacted early modern populations. There is typically a multi-step process that precedes a new manufacturing venture: seeing and understanding the foreign (Indigenous) model, identifying processes of replication, experimentation, and then putting small-scale works in action. Tobacco was commonly grown “about every mans [sic] house,” reported an English seafarer visiting Sierra Leone around 1600. African-made clay pipes were a familiar sight in West Africa by the mid-sixteenth century. Around 1600, these long-stemmed pipes were reportedly “made of clay well burnt in the fire . . . [with] both men and women drinking the most part down [of the smoke].”10 Material translations took various forms as they moved across cultural spaces.11

• 1
  Lemire, Global Trade, 202-4; John Edward Philips, “African Smoking and Pipes,” Journal of African History 24, no. 3 (1983): 307-8.
• 2
  Norton, Sacred Gifts, 30. Spanish troops possibly introduced tobacco smoking to the Low Countries during the Dutch Revolt (1568-1648). Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 161-162; Wim Klooster, “The Tobacco Nation: English Tobacco Dealers and Pipe-Makers in Rotterdam, 1620-1650,” in The Birth of Modern Europe: Culture and Economy, 1400-1800. Essays in Honor of Jan de Vries, eds. Laura Cruz and Joel Mokyr (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 21. Tobacco also became central in coercive systems of consumption, employed to discipline and control key labor force—a subject addressed elsewhere. Lemire, Global Trade, 223-232.
• 3
  Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); “Accounting for ‘The Most Excruciating Torment’: Gender, Slavery, and Trans-Atlantic Passages,” History of the Present 6, no. 6 (2016): 184-207.
• 4
  John Deacon, Tobacco Tortured, or, The Filthie Fume of Tobacco Refined (London: Field, 1616), 10, quoted in Sabine Schülting, “‘Indianized with the Intoxicating Filthie Fumes of Tobacco’: English Encounters with the ‘Indian Weed,’” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 11, no. 1 (2005): 110.
• 5
  By the King [James I], A Proclamation for restraint of the disordered trading for Tobacco, (London: Robert Barker, and John Bill, printers to the Kings most Excellent Majestie,1620).
• 6
  King James I of England, A Counterblast to Tobacco (London, 1604).
• 7
  Rebecca Earle argues for the importance ascribed by Spanish colonizers to the European foodstuffs they ate as a way to mitigate the new environment of the Americas, “in the construction and maintenance of the colonial body.” Complications ensued as diets changed. Earle, The Body of the Conquistador, 11.
• 8
  Leora Auslander, “Beyond Words,” American Historical Review 110, no. 4 (2005): 1016-1017.
• 9
  Ibid, 1016-1017.
• 10
  Observations of William Finch, Merchant, Taken Out of His Large Journall. I. Remembrances Touching Sierra Leona, in August 1607, in Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes. In Five Bookes (London, 1625), 415; Barbara Plankensteiner, “Salt-Cellar,” in Exotica: The Portuguese Discoveries and the Renaissance Kunstkammer, eds. Helmut Trnek and Nuno Vassallo e Silva (Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, 2001), 93-94.
• 11
  Tobacco pipes were also a subject of curiosity for Richard Jobson. He ascended the Gambia River in 1620, travelling many hundreds of miles to arrive ultimately to the Tenda region in what is now Senegal. Among his observations are comments regarding the ubiquity of the tobacco pipe inland. He writes, “Few or none of them [men and women] . . . doth walke or go without.” The bowls of the pipe were also decorated “very handsomely, all the bowles being very great, and for the most part will hold halfe and ounce of Tabacco [sic].” Richard Jobson, The Golden Trade: Or, A discovery of the River Gambra, and the Golden Trade of the Aethiopians (London: Nicholas Okes, 1623), 122.

The Wellcome Collection holds clay pipes dated from 1580-1590 London, expressing the pervasiveness of pipe smoking in that time and place, decades before England emerged as an imperial power (Figure 1). What was termed a “Mexican” tobacco pipe apparently inspired English artisans and investors, pointing to webs of exchange that transected formal imperial networks. The pipes in Figure 1 likely shared features with eponymous pipes from Indigenous Americans that travelled along the trade routes from Iberia, or, indeed, from the Caribbean or eastern North America. Regional pipe workshops opened in London in the 1570s and later in ports like Bristol, Chester, Hull, Newcastle, and Gateshead. Edinburgh and other centers in Scotland also hosted this trade, as did Dublin, Limerick, and Cork in Ireland from the 1660s onwards; by this time, the Netherlands and areas of France stood as a major pipe-making centers.1 Importantly, clay pipes left a substantial physical record around the margins of the Atlantic basin, markers of early modern material entanglement.2 Few subaltern technologies bequeathed such robust physical evidence and engaged the energies of so many archaeologists and amateur enthusiasts, while demonstrating ubiquity so emphatically.3 A pipe-making oven was even part of the early English colonial venture in 1607 Jamestown, Virginia.4 Settlers did not want to depend on proximate Indigenous peoples for essential tools.

Recall, once again, Norton’s observation that “Technology is at once process and product.”5 The pipe was an appliance that both introduced and sustained tobacco smoking, ultimately a synonym for the plant itself and its colonial exploitation. Pipe making advanced in scale from the late 1500s, across a broad geography, enabling personal rituals, endlessly repeated, with ever more numerous participants, a critical addendum to imperial systems, embodied and reified. Pipe smoking was infinitely replicable while allowing for idiosyncratic innovations. Local practices, outside metropoles, demonstrate the penetration of this technology. For example, in the Atlantic-facing port of Galway in western Ireland, pipe smoking was pervasive by at least 1600, and essential for routine sociability. Galway’s investment in the colonial Caribbean helps explain this phenomenon in this northwestern region of the European archipelago.6 In what follows, I will return to the particularities of tobacco use in Ireland that subsequently evolved, moving from secular to sacred.

• 1
  Klooster, “The Tobacco Nation,” 28; Dennis Gallagher, “William and John Banks; Evidence Relating to the Early Manufacture of Clay Tobacco-Pipes in Edinburgh,” Society for Clay Pipe Research Newsletter 3 (1984): 1-13; Ruairí Baoill and Paul Logue, “Excavations at Gordon Street and Waring Street, Belfast,” Ulster Journal of Archaeology 64 (2005): 106-319; Bob Will and Tom Addyman, “The Archaeology of the Tolbooth, Broad Street, Stirling,” Scottish Archaeological Journal 30, no. 1/2 (2008): 111, 116, 134; David R. Perry, Castle Park, Dunbar: Two Thousand Years on a Fortified Headland (Exeter: Short Run Press, 2000), 171-172; Also see The Society for Clay Pipe Research http://scpr.co/ for detailed examples of pipe makers and archaeological findings.
• 2
  Naseema Hosein-Hoey, “Clay Tobacco Pipes (Bowls and Stems)” in Encyclopedia of Caribbean Archaeology, eds. Basil A. Reid and R. Grant Gilmore (Gainesville: University of Florida, 2014), 105-106; Robert H. Pritchett III and William K. Selinger, ARS Shipwreck Projects Dominican Republic, Vol. 1 (Never Mind Publishing, 2010), 129-130.
• 3
  A. Oswald, Clay Pipes for the Archaeologist (London: British Archaeological Reports, 1975), 28; Alexandra Hartnett, “The Politics of the Pipe: Clay Pipes and Tobacco Consumption in Galway, Ireland,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 8, no. 2 (2004): 133-147; Klooster, “The Tobacco Nation,” 17-34; for example, Andrew Sharp, “William and John Banks; Evidence Relating to the Early Manufacture of Clay Tobacco-Pipes in Edinburgh,”  Society for Clay Pipe Research Newsletter 3 (July 1984), 1-6; Diane Dallal, “The Tudor Rose and the Fleur-de-lis: Women and Iconography in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Clay Pipes found in New York City,” in Smoking and Culture: The Archaeology of Tobacco Pipes in Eastern North America, eds. Sean Rafferty and Rob Mann (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 207-239; for archaeological findings of clay pipes in seventeenth and eighteenth century Newfoundland, see: https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/exploration/pipemarks-introduction.php; Ivor Noël Hume, “Hunting for a Little Ladle: Tobacco Pipes,” CW Journal (Winter 2003-2004) https://www.history.org/foundation/journal/winter03-04/pipes.cfm; for examples from the United Kingdom, see Sarah Newns, “Appendix 3: Excavations in 2014 at Wade Street, Bristol - a documentary and archaeological analysis,” Internet Archaeology 45 (2017), https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.45.3.4.
• 4
  Jeffrey L. Sheler, “Rethinking Jamestown,” Smithsonian 35 (2005): 48-55.
• 5
  Norton, “Subaltern Technologies,” 26.
• 6
  Hartnett, “The Politics of the Pipe,” 133-137. See also, Joe Norton, “Pipe Dreams: A Directory of Clay Tobacco Pipe-Makers in Ireland,” Archaeology Ireland 27, no.1 (2013): 31-36.

Englishmen apparently transplanted pipe making to the Netherlands in the early 1600s as an adjunct of war and the provisioning of troops; of the seventeen pipe makers in Amsterdam before 1620 ten were Englishmen. Gouda flourished as another pipe making center and the port of Rotterdam thrived in supplying other European markets with this gear, along with African and wider Atlantic trade.1 Where production numbers survive, they show the striking measure of manufacture. Daily output from individual pipe makers in the city of Gouda ranged between 1000 to 1500 pipes, with 80 members of the pipe makers’ guild in 1665, 223 members in 1686, and 611 members in 1730, each heading his or her own works.2 Even a conservative estimate confirms the tens of millions of pipes made annually, solely by the Dutch, by the mid-seventeenth century.

• 1
  Klooster, “Tobacco Nation,” 17-34; Society for Clay Pipe Research Newsletter 3 (July 1984); Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 6, 111; Dallal, “Tudor Rose,” 212.
• 2
  Jan De Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perserverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 309-310.

Historian of Indigenous peoples in urban locales, Coll Thrush brings a different perspective to the question of race and the learning of racialism. He notes that “London had to learn to be colonial”—so, too, did other European citizens and settlers of the Atlantic regions.1 Instruction in race occurred variously and sporadically including among the unlettered, whether through direct experience on slave ships or plantations or more indirectly through the rising tide of figurative printed and material media that depicted new racial hierarchies. I first explored the question of “racialized consumption” in my recent volume on global trade and material change. I contend that western tobacco consumption held racialized categories at its core, shaping this new “instrumentation relationship.” Of course, the systems of consumption within colonial and metropolitan spheres were not monolithic, especially as African and Native American tobacco practices persisted and resisted hegemonic control.2 Those resistant systems are not my focus here.3 Rather, I explore the power of racialized consumption at a time when western perspectives of non-European peoples were in flux, premised on emerging racialized imperial precepts.

Jennifer Morgan traces travel writers’ descriptions and the growing racialized perspectives they developed of African women—views that percolated through literate European culture.4 These texts, along with more mechanistic records like account books and ship logs, document the commoditization of specific dark-skinned populations and the associated justifications that ensued in Enlightenment Europe. Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote of the “Certain Idea of Man,” which emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, stating “The more European merchants and mercenaries bought and conquered other men and women, the more European philosophers wrote and talked about Man”— or a certain idea of (White) man.5 Subaltern Europeans manned slave ships, fought in colonial contests, and seized lands from Indigenous communities, often learning of their White status through these encounters.6 But how did the mass of unlettered European women and men learn the tropes of race through other-than-alphabetic, numeric, or face-to-face means? Evidence of instructional media survive in museum collections: tobacco trade tokens, ceramics, and demotic prints like tobacco trade cards and wrappers, as well as cheap accoutrements aligned with tobacco use unearthed in archaeological digs. As a racializing system was put in place, these materials served as primers, undergirding the economic and legal structures of slavery. As Leora Auslander reminds us, “objects not only are the product of history, they are also active agents in history. In their communicative, performative, emotive, and expressive capacities, they act, have effects in the world.”7

• 1
  Coll Thrush, Indigenous London, 36.
• 2
  Lemire, Global Trade, 190-247.
• 3
  Some of those issues are address in Lemire, Global Trade, 190-247, as well as in my forthcoming article, “Material Technologies of Empire.”
• 4
  Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), esp. chapter 1.
• 5
  Michel-Rolph Troulliot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Books, 1995), 75.
• 6
  Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007), 187-221.
• 7
  Leora Auslander, “Beyond Words,” 1017.

Quotidian material culture informed the habits and ceremonies of life, building narratives and stereotypes that affirmed the rightness of colonial conquest and the unique pleasures for White westerners in a pipe of tobacco, the whole resting on the systematic subjugation of peoples of color. Maps and atlases depicted colonial contingencies, though this print media circulated within a narrow slice of society. Trade tokens were among the plebeian goods that arose in England in the later seventeenth century, used as informal currency where small coins were scarce. These multiplied in the mid-seventeenth century with the rise of small businesses that they advertised, including taverns and tobacconists. Among the symbolism used by this sector was imagery of racial difference, as well as racialized satires, all combining to instruct as customers learned the imperial connections that brought tobacco to hand (Figs. 5-6).

Rituals of the pipe marked major translational processes. Feeding tobacco pipes, a quotidian routine, made race an ever-present, everyday component of local rituals. This was a foundational feature of the pipe, evident in European-wide media and enfolded in Atlantic world politics and commerce. Yet pipes were an agential tool in ceremonial and lifecycle events, the clay seemingly molding itself to become part of myriad life passages.

Pipes and pipe-making illuminate a complex domestication. Pipes were shaped of simple clay, an often white or sometimes red substance, and their value increased over time. There were also variations in the pipes, reflecting the tastes of the makers or communities, with initials and regional symbols impressed into the pipes themselves, celebrating the attempted rendition of this device from an Indigenous tool to an essential in Atlantic spaces.1 Archaeologists have uncovered a vast array of evidence, often housed in museums and broken, which demonstrates the commonest technology of subaltern consumption. In Europe, the clay itself and the imprints on the pipes were claims for the transculturation of tobacco. Rather than purely commercial or benign decoration, the marks on tobacco pipes confirm explicit claims—claims made through conquest, trade, and plantations. Stamps of the Tudor rose, castles, makers’ initials, or the names of towns denominated these declarations—in Scotland this included the names of Edinburgh and Glasgow, the latter emerging as a preeminent tobacco port.2 Incised or stamped clay pipes from the Netherlands similarly record their makers, their locales, and sometimes the date of production, signaling their owners’ and makers’ complex intent and purpose, even as the pipes held prospects of pleasure.3

Tobacco culture diversified along various pathways, including in Europe. Some new tobacco rituals were unanticipated by authorities, involving formal observances such as memorial events. Layered meanings accreted one into the other. Indigenous tobacco usage always includes ceremonial and spiritual practice. The possibility of direct influence in these ceremonies between Indigenous communities and the Celtic regions of Britain remains undetermined. Ultimately, both Scotland and Ireland employed tobacco pipes during multiday funeral activities and several Scottish funerary clay pipes (or dregy pipes) survive from the late-seventeenth century in the collections of the University of Aberdeen.4 Folkloric and historical accounts note the importance of keeping adequate stores of pipes and tobacco to see the dead into the next world and to be shared by the community of mourners. In rural Ireland, the body was attended for several days and nights before the burial by the night watchers with pipes and tobacco. In all parts of Ireland, these supplies were placed proximate to the corpse in accordance with local observance: at the head, feet, or on the chest of the deceased. A familiar fragrance during the nights of vigil, pipe smoke lingered as a transitional essence between earth and sky. Each pipe was to be followed by a prayer for the dead, with official watchers often joined by family and friends.5

The integration of pipe smoke into memorial ceremonies (as an unofficial adjunct to incense at mass) bespeaks the full investment of non-elite communities in the power of the pipe. These practices persisted into the nineteenth century, as Maria Edgeworth recorded in 1810, “Even beggars when they grow old, go about begging for their own funerals; that is, begging for money to buy a coffin, candles, pipes, and tobacco.”6 Funerals knit communities together generationally with songs, observances, and expected hospitality that, from at least the seventeenth century, included tobacco and pipe. Later authorities in Ireland attempted to constrain what they saw as needless expenditure or “abuses” among the poor. Nevertheless, a generous supply of “whiskey as well as pipes and tobacco, bread, meat, etc.” was a sign of respect for the dead that rebounded as well on the family.7 In this case, official instructions held little weight.

It is evident from the surviving material remains that colonial populations modified tobacco customs in accordance with their traditions and contexts (though debates persist on makers and meanings of colonial pipes).8 Archaeologists describe distinct geographic spaces in the plantation settlements of Tidewater Maryland and Virginia where different populations found time and space for their pipes. Examples unearthed in the Chesapeake area indicate the complexities of regional colonial consumption, including the making and using of pipes by Africans, Indigenous Americans, and Euro-Americans of several ranks. It is important to integrate these material finds into the broader history of this subaltern technology. Archaeologists puzzled over the range of pipes they uncovered, including those of terracotta clay—a sharp contrast to the typical white pipe clay of most European manufacture. Terracotta pipes were found near former colonial dwellings where domestic laborers congregated; in one case, in a backyard area where the kitchen, privies, and trash pits were set—a clearly defined subaltern space.9 The cheapest pipes, including those locally made, were accessible to the poorest, who took their moments of respite as luck allowed. Material evidence suggests that local Indigenous people made some of these wares for proximate buyers, with shapes and dimensions modeled on common European forms that would be recognizable to Virginia residents. Other examples, excavated from eighteenth-century King William County, Virginia, were mold-made out of local red clay, a product of settler enterprise, though displaying aesthetic elements thought appealing to Indigenous tobacco users. Colonists took up secondary trades to supplement their income when times were hard, mastering the look and feel of goods aimed at local buyers, perhaps using Indigenous labor as servants or slaves. Christopher Fennell concludes that “archaeological and documentary evidence . . . [support] the interpretation that Chesapeake pipes were a product of English and Native American approaches.”10 Trade, habit, and custom are evident in surviving artifacts, opening wider narratives of subaltern technologies, the agents active in their production, and the varied communities they served.  

Tobacco pipes were exceptionally malleable cultural devices that held layered significance, including as part of an imperial apparatus; essential for plebeian hospitality and ceremony, they also became a tool to secure obedience from generations of African men and women on the Middle Passage and in plantation settings. Tobacco was thus re-oriented for African men and women (at least in part) in the transition to enslavement. Barrels of pipes were stocked on ocean-going vessels for the use of sailors and human cargo, as on slave ships.11 In the latter instance, tobacco leaves and a pipe were awarded to the newly enslaved, as well as those embarking on the Atlantic run, in a process described as “seasoning,” a strategy used by ships’ captains to secure compliance.12 Coercive rituals were as central as social ceremonies in the spread of this technology. Pipes for this purpose were also named. The designation of “negro pipes”  was not typically employed while onshore in Britain; it is rare, for example, to find this term mentioned in contemporary print sources. However, it was assigned in port records of exports and once laden as cargo. One shipment noted in the Dutch (and then British) colony of Demerara in 1804 included “fine long Dutch and Negro pipes.”13 “Negro pipes” were officially acknowledged when off-loaded in Caribbean ports, differentiated from similar accessories intended for the higher, whiter echelons. “Negro pipes” served as talismans of tobacco’s role in the management of enslaved populations, a denominator that is a further reminder of the power structures by which most tobacco was produced.14

But evidence of Africans’ familiarity with tobacco, including with their own pipes, survives in the form of colonial artifacts recovered from plantation sites, which demonstrate how West African aesthetics also shaped ceramic manufacture and decoration in the Atlantic World.15 In fact, Africans likely had tobacco access in their prison at Cape Coast Castle, Ghana, en route to their enslavement in the Americas. Archaeologists report the “large numbers” of finds recovered in slave holding cells in Cape Coast Castle; as previously stated, giving slaves access to tobacco prior to and during the Middle Passage was routine.16 Among the remnants of fauna, glass beads, and bottles in the female dungeon of Cape Coast Castle were “some forty-eight fragments of smoking pipes of Dutch or English manufacture dating to the period 1670-1790.”17 As Wazi Apoh, James Anquandah, and Seyram Amenyo-Xa observe, “Most striking are the similarities between European material culture found at Cape Coast Castle and European material culture recovered at other global sites of colonialism.”18 In keeping with spiritual beliefs and cultural priorities, the Africans who survived the transit marked their smoking utensils wherever possible, turning these pipes into culturally resonant instruments. Writing about backcountry, colonial Virginia, Ann Smart Martin confirms the agency of Africans once settled in the colonies, citing “the important evidence of independent slave production . . . [including] pipes made of locally available schist,” tools that would be “cut and marked” to make their pipes more aligned with the owner’s aesthetic and spiritual requirements.19 The totality of these interventions cannot be quantified, but the significance of this material agency is immense.

When chance allowed, enslaved Africans also selected material culture that supported their beliefs, including “the appropriation of a common European design element for a sacred [Central African] Bakongo one.”20 Some European-made pipes had designs resonant with Africans, such as the beehive motif of flying insects and other symbols, an instance of which comes from a plantation in the Bahamas where evidence survives of the priorities of a married African man in his fifties, working as a driver. Like other Africans in the Bahamas in the early 1800s, the driver originated on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa, a region where termite hills and flying insects are endowed with spiritual beliefs: “Termites are like the dead in that they fly, like souls and spirits, but live ‘underground’ in a grave like mound.”21 The slave cabin where this man lived yielded an assortment of clay pipe fragments, including a pipe bowl with an elaborate beehive design. Laurie Wilkie observes of the pipe that “like the Bakongo cosmogram, which emphasizes the relationship between life and death, and the interrelationship of each in the life cycle, the tobacco pipe could portray the same juxtaposition between the living and the dead.”22 Perhaps the smoke from a smoldering pipe held associated spirit meanings as well. Rare examples confirm that a few enslaved Africans carried African-style smoking pipes with them during the Middle Passage. This pipe may have been a random choice, picked up in extremis. Or, it could have been on their person, an everyday essential, carried on a journey the lengths of which they could not have guessed.23 Ira Berlin notes the persistence of African aesthetics and ritual among the African enslaved population of the mid-eighteenth-century Chesapeake region. He writes, “The pottery they made, the pipes they smoked, and perhaps most importantly the way they celebrated rites of passage . . . incorporated ancestral Africa into everyday African-American culture."24

• 1
  For the example of Philip Edwards (1649-1702/3), arising from an excavation in Bristol, see Type BRST 3 and 4 in Sarah Newns, “Appendix 3.”
• 2
  Dallal, “Tudor Rose,” 212; Gallagher, “Clay Tobacco Pipes” in “The archaeology of the Tolbooth, Broad Street, Stirling,” Scottish Archaeological Journal 30, nos. 1-2 (2008): 134-135; Sharp, “William and John Banks,” 1-6; Gallagher, “Appendix 4, Clay Tobacco Pipes,” 44-45.
• 3
  Barry Gaulton, “17th and 18th Century Marked Clay Tobacco Pipes from Ferryland, NL,” Heritage Newfoundland & Labrador, last modified May 2017, https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/exploration/pipemarks-introduction.php; P. J. Boon, “Collections,” Dutch Clay Pipes from Gouda, accessed July 8, 2020, http://www.goudapipes.nl/collections/.
• 4
  ABDUA: 18403, University of Aberdeen Museum.
• 5
  James Mooney, “The Funeral Customs of Ireland,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 25, no. 128 (1888): 268-271.
• 6
  Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, ed. Susan Kubica Howard (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2007), 68. Emphasis in original.
• 7
  atricia Lysaght, “Hospitality at Wakes and Funerals in Ireland from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century: Some Evidence from the Written Record,” Folklore 114, no. 3 (2003): 410-412.
• 8
  n the complexities and use of colonial Virginia pipe-making see Anna S. Agbe-Davis, Tobacco, Pipes, and Race in Colonial Virginia: Little Tubes of Mighty Power (New York: Routledge, 2015), 11-32.
• 9
  Susan L. Henry, “Terra-Cotta Pipes in 17^th Century Maryland and Virginia: A Preliminary Study,” Historical Archaeology 13 (1979): 14-37.
• 10
  Fennell, “Early African America,” 25.
• 11
  For example, the Fredensborg, a Danish slave ship that made a roundtrip from Copenhagen to West Africa and the Danish West Indies between 1767 and 1768 and the French ships “La Conquerant” and “Fidelity de Diep,” which were captured with four and eight half barrels of tobacco pipes in 1707 and 1708, respectively. Leif Svalesen, The Slave Ship Fredenborg, trans. Pat Shaw and Selena Winsnes (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), 33, 112-114; Records of the High Court of Admiralty (hereafter HCA) 32/55/16, 32/58/14, National Archives, UK (hereafter NA, UK).
• 12
  Lemire, Global Trade, 226-227. For examples of European ships seized by English privateers and their tobacco pipe cargo see: the Dutch ship Susanna of Middelburg, 1667, HCA 32/4/82, NA, UK; the French ship St John of St Malo, 1667, HCA 32/12/585, NA, UK; the Spanish ship La Conquerante, 1707, HCA 32/55/16, NA, UK; the French ship Fidelity de Diep, 1708, HCA 32/58/14, NA, UK. For English ships lost to privateers with cargoes of tobacco pipes see: the True Love of London, described as “laden with tobacco pipes,” 1672, HCA 32/9/35, NA, UK; the Batchelour, 1703-1704, HCA 32/51/12, NA, UK.
• 13
  The British seized the Dutch colony of Demerara in 1796, returned it in 1802 with the Peace of Amiens, and then re-seized it the next year with the return of hostilities, finally formally annexing this region as part of the British empire in 1815.  For example, see The Royal Gazette (Kingston, Jamaica), April 29, 1780, July 15, 1780; Daily Advertiser (Kingston, Jamaica), January 4, 1790; Essequebo and Demerary Gazette, June 23, 1804, no. 77 and March 17, 1804, no. 64 www.vc.id.au/edg/index.html, Accessed 1 March 2018; Bristol Presentments, May 10, 1803. No. 34; December 8, 1807. Exports from the 30^th of Nov. to the 7^th of Dec. 1807. No. 48; British Online Archive, https://microform-digital.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/boa/collections/47/bristol-shipping-records-imports-and-exports-1770-1917?q=%22negro%20pipes%22, Accessed 1 March 2018.
• 14
  Archaeological excavations in Port Royal, Jamaica recovered over 21,000 clay pipes (complete and fragmentary)—goods that arrived prior to the 1692 earthquake. Georgia L. Fox, “Interpreting Socioeconomic Changes in 17^th-Century England and Port Royal, Jamaica, Through Analysis of the Port Royal Kaolin Clay Pipes,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 6, no. 1 (2002): 62.
• 15
  Matthew C. Emerson, “African Inspirations in a New World Art and Artifact: Decorated Tobacco Pipes from the Chesapeake,” in ‘I, Too Am American’: Archaeological Studies of African American Life, ed. Theresa A Singleton, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999); James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1996).
• 16
  Jerome S. Handler, “An African-Type Healer/Diviner and His Grave Goods: A Burial from a Plantation Slave Cemetery in Barbados, West Indies,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 1, no. 2 (1997): 112-113; Lemire, Global Trade, 223-227.
• 17
  Wazi Apoh, James Anquandah, and Seyram Amenyo-Xa, “Shit, Blood, Artifacts, and Tears: Interrogating Visitor Perceptions and Archaeological Residues at Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle Slave Dungeon,” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 7, no. 2 (2018): 121.
• 18
  Ibid, 121.
• 19
  Ann Smart Martine, Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 185, 203.
• 20
  Laurie A. Wilkie, “Culture Bought: Evidence of Creolization in the Consumer Goods of an Enslaved Bahamian Family,” Historical Archaeology 34, no. 3 (2000): 22-23.
• 21
  Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 263 quoted in Wilkie, “Culture Bought,” 22.
• 22
  Wilkie, “Culture Bought,” 23.
• 23
  Lori Lee, “Archaeological Record of the Slave Trade,” in The Historical Encyclopaedia of World Slavery, ed. Junius P. Rodriguez (Oxford: ABC-Clio, 1997), 48; Graeme Henderson, “The Wreck of the Ex-Slaver ‘James Matthews,’” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 12, no. 1 (2008): 48-49.
• 24
  Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 128.

Mass-produced cheap pipes epitomized facets of empire that touched individuals and communities, engendered new material ecologies, and enabled ever-wider encounters with this exceptional plant. Clay pipe fragments are uncovered up and down the eastern seaboard of North America, as well as in settlements along inland waterways, including established Indigenous sites and fortifications. Every archaeological recovery marks a stage in the colonial process where cultures, economies, and political purposes engaged. European-made tobacco pipes are routinely unearthed, including at an Onondaga archaeological site in what is now northern New York State.1 Excavations dated to the seventeenth century confirm the networks of exchange that carried Dutch and English goods to this region, goods that can be precisely calibrated as more pipes arrived from Dutch suppliers until the late 1600s. Thereafter, English wares were most common. Importantly, excavations dated from the mid 1600s confirm the persistence of Indigenous-made pipes in traditional forms, a practice that continued into the next century.2 Contacts among Indigenous, African, European, and Euro-American peoples intensified through military alliances and trade, plus encroaching colonial settlements—another facet of the Atlantic World. Yet for all the pressures on Indigenous peoples of this region, the Gantowisas (Iroquoian women) and their councils held fast to their pivotal roles. These included transmitting sacred tobacco teachings, offering advice to the men’s council, and overseeing treaties, even as settler negotiators often misunderstood women’s responsibilities and the role of the pipe, as Seneca scholar Barbara Alice Mann recounts.3 Sir William Johnson (1715-1774), the preeminent Indian agent for the British in the mid-eighteenth-century colonial province of New York, developed sustained relationships with Indigenous communities and their prominent leaders, including Hendrick Theyanoguin (c. 1691-1755), a diplomatic leader of the Kanyen’kehà:ka (Mohawk) in the lands of the northeast river system and Great Lake regions.4 Johnson forged alliances and encouraged peace treaties between the British and former Indigenous enemies; gifts often accompanied Johnson’s negotiations.5 He followed local Haudenosaunee traditions, arranging ceremonies with chiefs and their retinue, honoring the rituals of tobacco and pipes.6 Sharing a pipe, giving a pipe as a diplomatic token, and accepting gifts of the same, carried enormous weight in Indigenous and Euro-American affairs.7

Parallel to these rituals, Johnson gifted materials to allied Indigenous communities, calibrated on the intimate knowledge of local politics and recipients. Presents included common clay pipes and tobacco. Both were now products of imperial systems, including the one thousand pounds of tobacco and a “case” of pipes disbursed in June of 1753 at a treaty conference.8 Tradition persisted within treaties and ceremonies involving Euro-Americans and Indigenous participants. In this respect, Indigenous peoples effected a complex parallelism in the material culture of tobacco, employing pipes from Europe, Indigenous, and even colonial made implements, while maintaining deep-rooted spiritual observances around this ceremonially powerful plant.

• 1
  The Onondaga being one of the five nations of the Haudenosaunee [Iroquois] Confederacy.
• 2
  James W. Bradley and Gordon DeAngelo, “European Clay Pipe Marks from 17^th Century Onondaga Iroquois Sites,” Archaeology of Eastern North America 9 (1981): 109-133.
• 3
  Barbara Alice Mann, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisis (Peter Lang: New York, 2004), 172, 185-186, 299-301. My thanks to Cree Elder, lawyer and Indigenous activist Sharon Venne (Notokwew Muskwa Manitokan) for bringing this book to my attention.
• 4
  Timothy J. Shannon, “Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick, William Johnson, and the Indian Fashion,” William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 1 (1996): 13-42.
• 5
  Alexander Henry, Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories between the years 1760 and 1776… (New York: J. Riley, 1809), 56, 166-171.
• 6
  British Library, Add MS 21670, 8, Letter from William Johnson to Col. Haldiman, 12 May 1760; Add MS 21670/42 & verso, Council with British officers, regional Chief and entourage, May 9, 1773.
• 7
  Timothy J. Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (New York: Viking, 2008), 78-102.
• 8
  Shannon, “Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier,” 36-38.

It is impossible to separate tobacco and the meanings tied to the pipe from the entangled politics of colonial expansion. Resistance was a constant narrative in this history, among colonized, marginalized, and enslaved communities. However, the racialized purposes of European and Euro-colonial authorities were equally important in understanding the pipe and its roles. Through investments and politics, elite White men and the middle class from the Dutch Cape Colony to the Caribbean, the Chesapeake to Britain, whether local or metropolitan, merchants or professionals, profited most directly from constructs of imperial tobacco. These men also constructed rituals of ingestion that articulated political and gender primacies, fashioning occasions and spaces to indulge in smoke. The pipe’s emphatic presence was a defining feature of the early modern period when, as Simon Schama notes, “The smell of the Dutch Republic was the smell of tobacco.”1 Indeed, prominent Dutch males developed their own routines, suited to their Calvinist ideals. Dutch gentlemen’s guarded indulgence is shown in the painting Nobody Spoke (1770), which captures the circumspect pipe use among polite male Netherlanders (Fig. 13). This convention was also apparent in the Dutch empire where settlers and administrators for the Dutch East India Company assumed a collective (mute) introspection once pipes were lit after the mid-day meal.2 Smoke and shared solitary reflection defined their gentlemanly sociability. An eighteenth-century English visitor to the Cape Colony found this pensive state odd and outside his ken, reporting that “As soon as the dessert commences, the Dutchmen call for their pipes . . . and smoke away with a solemnity and gravity that a stranger might imagine to be studied. They will at times sit smoking for a couple of hours with the most stupid composure, nor ever think of stirring . . . from the time a Dutchman’s pipe is put into his mouth, [things] are with him altogether at an end.”3 Patterns of the pipe assumed distinct national or regional forms, fitting religious and cultural observances, which in this context might have benefitted the smokers, since such repose could reinvigorate their imperial labors.

• 1
  Simon Schama, An Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 189.
• 2
  Their demeanor echoed that of seventeenth-century English smokers, which John Lacy poetically described: “o’er the Mind delightful Quiet spread. Thou mak’st the Passions due Obedience know.” John Lacy, Tobacco, A Poem (London, 1669), 1.
• 3
  A Swedish physician also described the behavior of VOC officers at the Cape Colony. Andrew Sparrman, A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope: towards the Antarctic Polar Circle, and round the World…from the Year 1772, to 1776, Vol. 1. (London: G.G. J. and J. Robinson, 1785), 22.

The English visitor to the Cape was likely accustomed to the livelier “smoking clubs” suited to polite White Anglophone males, homo-social venues where the business of empire, politics, and profit could be addressed with more select company than a tavern. Gentlemen’s clubs served the same purpose, with rules and spaces for pipe-smoking, the first opening in London in 1693 with many others following, including in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York, where formal smoking rituals prevailed.1 A satiric commemoration of this popular space and pastime, Figure 14, is an example of the many such scenes produced in the late-eighteenth century. This clientele doubtlessly enjoyed good quality pipes, buttressed by social regulation aligned with sociable imperial and colonial masculinity.2 Note the salient image of an Indigenous (or perhaps African?) American on the back wall of the smoking club, recurring racial symbolism seemingly required for this purpose. In settings such as this, as in many others, agents of empire showed their “dependence on subaltern technologies and their ‘disavowal’ of this dependence.”3 The tobacco pipe was expressive in many ways and nowhere more clearly than in its personal and collective uses in the early modern Atlantic World. 

• 1
  Chris Beyers, “Race, Power, and Sociability in Alexander Hamilton’s ‘Records of the Tuesday Club,’ The Southern Literary Journal 38, no. 1 (2005): 21-42.
• 2
  Examples include: James Gillray’s A Smoking Club (1793), which depicts leading British politicians; Henry William Bunbury’s A Smoking Club (1792), which shows four men from various middling ranks in a state of meditative vacuity; John Boyne’s The Smoking Club (1792), which shows a large public room  filled with smoking men of all ages, with rules posted above the door. See the George Arents Collection, The New York Public Library, and the British Museum Collection. The coffee house phenomenon was an earlier iteration of this craze. The establishment of gentlemen’s clubs, beginning with White’s in 1693 further refined this practice. For the impact on male sociability in the Ottoman Empire see Grehan, “Smoking and ‘Early Modern’ Sociability.”
• 3
  Norton, “Subaltern Technologies,” 20.

Across empires and republics, the participants crowding into smoking clubs, or congregating around a Dutch dinner table, felt “at home” with their tobacco rites—“part of the given world that had made them who they were.”1 The rituals devised over centuries upheld empires of exchange. It is equally true, however, that the smell of tobacco smoke in the air marked other states of being and claims of worth that escaped constraining forces. Think of the cheap terracotta pipe pieces found at a Maryland plantation out by the kitchen, privies, and trash pits, where seventeenth-century women and men—indentured or enslaved Indigenous, African, or English servants—enjoyed brief refreshment.2 Also recall the generations of Irishmen who filled their pipes during their night watch over the deceased. Likewise, a preference among enslaved Africans for certain cultural designs marked their spiritual and aesthetic priorities, a bulwark against the worst trials, and Indigenous peoples of the Americas persisting with their spiritual practices involving tobacco. Pipes spoke in myriad tones. The flow of early modern pipes enabled social, cultural, political, and economic processes diagnostic of the early modern era, an entanglement where racial hierarchies were learned and where subaltern innovations also found expressive space.

• 1
  Hall and Rose, At Home with the Empire, 3.
• 2
  Henry, “Terra-Cotta Pipes,” 31.

This essay is part of a series that addresses the theme of “Exchanges in the Americas,” which Dana Leibsohn proposed to MAVCOR Journal.

An early colonial narrative in the central Mexican Nahuatl language describes a striking scene in which a wise person, referred to as a tlaiximatini, or “experiential knower,” climbs to a point high on the land in the pre-dawn darkness (Fig. 1).1 Likely drawn from Nahua oral tradition, the episode appears twice in the Florentine Codex, or Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, a twelve-book work written in central Mexico between 1575 and 1577.2 The first version appears in Book 10, on people, and describes the practice as a form of knowledge used by the ancient Toltec people. The second, in slightly modified form, appears in Book 11, on the natural world, as an account of how wise people among the Nahuas located precious stones.

• 1
  I wrote this article while a predoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) in Washington, D.C., where I benefitted immensely from the Center’s support and from intellectual exchanges with the other fellows. I would also like to express my deep thanks to Dana Leibsohn and to this article’s two anonymous reviewers, who greatly enriched this article through their generous and thoughtful comments.
• 2
  The Historia general exists in various versions, the most complete of which is the Florentine Codex (ms. 218–220, Col. Palatina), an illustrated codex in three volumes held in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. Earlier drafts of the document, known as the Códices matritenses, are held in Madrid’s Real Academia de la Historia (ms. 9-c-103) and Biblioteca del Real Palacio (ms. rfa. 3280). The Florentine Codex is comprised of twelve books, which follow an organizational sequence of divine, human, and natural subjects that is thought to have been based on contemporary European works, especially Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalisand Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum. See Ángel María Garibay K., Historia de la literatura náhuatl, vol. 2, second ed. (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1953–54), 69–71; Donald Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 170–72; Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: The General History of the Things of New Spain, vol. 1, trans. and eds. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1950–1982), 11.

The account preserved in these two passages has generally been interpreted as a description of a prospecting technique and as a major piece of evidence that Nahua people of the Aztec Empire valued greenstone for its association with water. In 1974, Tatiana Proskouriakoff cited the Book 11 version as an “account of how the Aztec prospected for jade in Conquest times in Mexico,” concluding, “the account is permeated by superstitious belief, but it is clear that the Aztec deliberately set out to find worked jades buried in caches and in tombs, noting the formerly occupied sites or cemeteries by differences in vegetation.”1 Emily Umberger (1987) later reported Proskouriakoff’s interpretation that “one passage in Sahagún’s Florentine Codex indicates that the Aztecs looked for changes in surface plant growth and other signs as indications of where to dig for ancient objects.” Umberger further linked this practice to Nahuas’ association of greenstone with water and fertility and a belief that these stones attract moisture, noting, “perhaps for this reason the Aztecs looked for a column of mist and greener plants.”2 Most recently, Leonardo López Luján presented the Book 11 passage as a description of “the procedure individuals had to perform to acquire precious stones” and linked the passage to Aztec excavations of Toltec and other antiquities.3 By and large, these discussions have focused on the Book 11 version, positioned the human viewer as the main subject of the episode, and seen the text’s central issue to be its connection of greenstone to water.4 Although these readings highlight an important component of the text, the narrative’s marked interest in the senses and in the way the visual exchange between human and stone takes place within the landscape points to further dimensions of the episode that also provide a new understanding of the meaning of the precious stones’ emissions.

Comparison of the two versions of the episode highlights its existence not as an ethnographic account but as a narrative, which was purposefully incorporated into two different contexts in the Historia general. The Florentine Codex was composed between 1547 and 1579 through a collaboration between the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and multiple Nahua authors and artists, including Martín Jacobita, Antonio Valeriano of Azcapotzalco, Alonso Vegerano and Pedro de San Buenaventura of Cuauhtitlan, Diego de Grado and Bonifacio Maximilliano of Tlatelolco, and Matheo Severino of Xochimilco.5 Intended as a study of Nahua culture and language that would benefit missionaries in the region, the project included a sustained focus on documenting the Nahuatl language and oral tradition.6 Early in the project, Sahagún and the Nahua collaborators spoke with Nahua elders, known as tlamatinimeh, or “wise ones,” in Tepepulco, México-Tenochtitlan, and Tlatelolco.7 Following these conversations, the Nahua collaborators penned texts in Nahuatl, which are preserved in draft copies, today held at the Real Academia de la Historia (RAH) and the Biblioteca del Palacio Real in Madrid and thus known as the Códices matritenses. Sahagún ultimately reorganized and lightly edited these texts for the Florentine Codex version, using them as well as the basis for accompanying Spanish translations and images made by Nahua artists.8 Throughout the project, the contributions of the Nahua authors, alongside Sahagún’s interest in recording Nahuatl discourse in textual form, gave rise to highly literary passages that privileged original Nahuatl forms of expression, many of which were likely based on the words of the Nahua elders.9

The tlaiximatini episode from the Florentine Codex appears in the earliest extant copy of the text, in the portion of the Códices matritenses held at the RAH. The Book 10 version appears in identical form on folios 174r–v of the earlier RAH manuscript in the hand of a Nahua scribe, with only one marginal annotation added by Sahagún, glossing the section, “De la manera que tenjā en descubrir las piedras preciosas” (“On the manner they had of discovering precious stones”) (174r). In the folios of the RAH manuscript that correspond to Book 11, the same scribal hand incorporated some of the same ideas in the first draft of a text on precious stones, writing of quetzalitztli (emerald-green jade): “this stone, [it is] something that has smoke, has mist; wherever it is, it is giving off smoke, giving off mist. The thinker, when it is still early morning, places themself facing where the sun emerges, waiting for it; greatly do their eyes shine” (“inin tetl pocyo ayauhyo ȳ canī ca mopocyolitica. mayauhyotitica ȳ monotzaleq¯ oc yovatzinco ȳ quiça tonatiuh quixnamictlalia tlachixuicate quitzti cēca mixpetzova”).10 This entire section was then crossed out, and the same scribe began anew on the next folio (309r), providing a full account of the tlaiximatini episode as an attribute of precious stones (tlaçotetl) more generally. These details from the RAH manuscript support the text’s attribution to a single Nahua scribe and suggest that both versions derived from a common source, which was included twice because of its perceived relevance to two different sections of the Historia general.

Despite their adaptation to different contexts, the two final versions of the narrative retain the same key terms and phrases, which evoke the vision of an interconnected, sensory landscape. In their use of these structuring terms, the texts employ a strategy that is itself fundamental to oral storytelling and which may connect the written versions to an earlier oral telling.11 Close consideration of the key terms and phrases used suggests a new understanding of the relationship that connects the precious stones, the human knower, and the sun, an important yet generally unacknowledged third participant. As close attention to the texts’ word choice reveals, the episode evokes a place-bound relationship that links the human, sun, and precious stones by virtue of their mutual acts of presenting themselves to and seeing one another. In these sensorial exchanges, the three actors are all described as emerging from a state of hidden interiority into a fully public sphere, in which they can both see and be seen. This underlying structure of a shared, socio-sensory sphere of interaction counters Western notions of a possessive, anthropocentric gaze, while instead echoing ancient Maya concepts of a communally possessed perceptual field, referred to as -ichnal.12 The participatory landscape that grounds the episode further suggests a new understanding of the precious stones’ emissions as a form of fame, which signals the stones’ possession of social presence. By emitting vapors that announce both their presence and their inner nature, the precious stones reveal their ability to enter and participate in a public sphere. As a whole, the two versions of the episode trace how interactions between sun, human, and precious stone form a socio-sensory landscape, premised on the notion of multiple beings interacting and becoming knowable to one another.

• 1
  Tatiana Proskouriakoff, Jades from the Cenote of Sacrifice: Chichen Itza, Yucatan, vol. 10, no. 1 in Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University  (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, 1974), 15.
• 2
  Emily Umberger, “Antiques, Revivals, and References to the Past in Aztec Art,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (Spring 1987): 66–67.
• 3
  Leonardo López Luján, “The Aztecs’ Search for the Past,” in Aztecs (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2002), 25.
• 4
  An exception to the exclusive focus on the Book 11 version is Molly Bassett, The Fate of Earthly Things: Aztec Gods and God-Bodies (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 101, where the author cites the Book 10 passage as evidence of the Aztec association of turquoise with the Toltecs.
• 5
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, vol. 1: 55; Miguel León-Portilla, Bernardino de Sahagún: First Anthropologist, trans. Mauricio J. Mixco (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 115–16. See also SilverMoon, “The Imperial College of Tlatelolco and the Emergence of a New Nahua Intellectual Elite in New Spain (1500–1760),” PhD diss., (Duke University, 2007).
• 6
  León-Portilla, Bernardino de Sahagún, 132–33; Sahagún, Florentine Codex, vol. 1: 11. From Sahagún’s perspective, the importance of Nahuatl expression to the project is suggested by his initial conception of the work as a calepino, a vocabulary including citations from classical texts to illustrate usage. See Sahagún, Florentine Codex, vol. 1: 50; Pilar Maynez, El calepino de Sahagún: Un acercamiento (Mexico City: UNAM ENEP-Acatlán, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002), xxi–xxii.
• 7
  León-Portilla, Bernardino de Sahagún, 213.
• 8
  This editorial process is made evident through comparison of the Florentine Codex with the earlier Códices matritenses, in which the hands of Bernardino de Sahagún and various Nahua scribes are identifiable. See Sahagún, Florentine Codex, vol. 1: 9–23; Howard Cline, “Evolution of the Historia general,” in Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 13, eds. Robert Wauchope, Howard Cline and John Glass, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973); Miguel Ángel Ruz Barrio, “Los Códices Matritenses de fray Bernardino de Sahagún: estudio codicológico del manuscrito de la Real Academia de la Historia,” Revista española de antropología americana 40, no. 2 (2010): 189–228; and Rebecca Dufendach, “Nahua and Spanish Concepts of Health and Disease in Colonial Mexico, 1519–1615,” PhD diss., (University of California, Los Angeles, 2017), 210–19.
• 9
  See Louise Burkhart, “Flowery Heaven: The Aesthetic of Paradise in Nahuatl Devotional Literature,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 21 (Spring 1992): 90.
• 10
  Real Academia de la Historia Manuscript, ms. 9-c-103, folio 308v; my transcription and translation. My attribution of both passages to the same scribe is based on comparison of the handwriting in the original document, which contains distinctive letter formations that strongly suggest that they belong to the same hand.
• 11
  See Albert B. Lord, “Homer, Parry, and Huso,” American Journal of Archaeology 52, no. 1 (Jan.–Mar. 1948): 34–44. I am grateful to the article’s first anonymous reviewer for suggesting this connection.
• 12
  Stephen Houston and Karl Taube, “An Archaeology of the Senses: Perception and Cultural Expression in Ancient Mesoamerica,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10, no. 2 (2000): 287.

Readings of the Florentine Codex episode as documenting a human prospecting technique have often implicitly drawn on a culturally specific, Western concept of landscape as a visual practice. In this construction, which originated in the Renaissance, human subjects both bring the landscape into being and possess it through their gaze. In this Western tradition, Denis Cosgrove has argued, “the landscape idea represents a way of seeing—a way in which some Europeans have represented to themselves and to others the world about them and their relationships with it.”1 As Dianne Harris and D. Fairchild Ruggles write, this way of seeing draws heavily upon certain visual and representational strategies, most notably single-point perspective, which centers vision in a privileged vantage point, from which space is conceived of as infinitely visible.2 In this form of surveillance, “the viewer brings a landscape into being but remains unseen, and therefore is imbued with a globalizing sense of totality.”3 In this approach to landscape, the act of viewing constructs a relationship between viewer and viewed that defines one as subject and the other as object. Viewing thereby reinforces the different ontologies of viewer and viewed, constituting the former as set apart from the external world, which they can know only through the filters of perception, comprehension, and desire. In this way, “vision does not unite subject with object so much as it discloses the eternal chasm between them.”4 This Western act of viewing simultaneously enacts a relationship of epistemic and economic possession, constructing the environment as a resource for human use.5 These theorizations of landscape as a tradition in which vision, subjectivity, and domination are intricately interwoven thus designates landscape as a prime site of Western ideology.

Although the Florentine Codex seems to employ many of these same terms—with its attention to viewership, landscape, and valued resources—the actual interaction between these elements suggests instead an understanding of landscape as a social sphere, comprised by multiple human and non-human agents. This approach to landscape is suggested in part by comparison with Maya concepts of a social landscape comprised by visual exchanges. Stephen Houston and Karl Taube have argued that the Maya term -ichnal encapsulated the concept of a visual field that emerged from and asserted the subjecthood of multiple participants. -Ichnal, the authors explain, was a visual field defined “in terms of the totality of objects within view, each as a participant in the world.”6 In glyphic inscriptions, they found:

The visual field always embraces another person and someone else’s action … [I]t was not simply a vista or a bracing view of architecture, but … a reciprocal, heavily social context involving other people or beings. In truth, this was ‘communion-oriented’ vision, an ‘ecological event’ … of a very special sort. With gods in particular, the -ichnal would have been extended, presumably, by the field of view [of] multiple participants.7

In this ancient Maya construction, seeing formed a shared sphere that was place-bound, participatory, and potentially communal. Among modern Mayan speakers, William Hanks (1990) described the cognate concept of -iknal as a possessed space of perception with connotations of interpersonal connection. As a visual field, -iknal can be possessed communally by multiple participants, including such non-human entities as trees, animals, wells, and cars.8 Hanks writes, “under face-to-face conditions, unless otherwise specified, the -iknal of either participant includes the other one as well. Hence it denotes a joint interactive corporeal field containing reciprocal perspectives rather than an individual schéma corporel.”9 The Maya concept suggests an understanding that sensory exchange occurs within and inaugurates spheres of communication between multiple, and not exclusively human, participants. Within this construct, visual experience forges not an experiential divide between human subject and non-human object, but a space of communication. Though not an articulation of Nahua thought, the Maya concept of a social perspectival field nonetheless suggests an alternative to Western constructions of landscape and suggests the need for a sensitivity to reciprocated, non-human gazes.

• 1
  Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 1.
• 2
  Dianne Harris and D. Fairchild Ruggles, “Landscape and Vision,” in Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 18.
• 3
  Ibid, 24.
• 4
  Ibid, 13.
• 5
  See Nathaniel Wolloch, Nature in the History of Economic Thought: How Natural Resources Became an Economic Concept (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).
• 6
  Houston and Taube, “Archaeology,” 287.
• 7
  Ibid, 288.
• 8
  William Hanks, Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space among the Maya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 92, 94.
• 9
  Ibid, 92.

The two illustrations (figs. 2, 3) that accompany the main episode in the Florentine Codex provide an initial indication that, in the narrative, the human gaze is neither the sole nor most important visual act. The Florentine Codex’s paintings were developed by Nahua artists in response to the Nahuatl text and were added in the manuscript’s blank left column after the Nahuatl text had already been written (see fig. 1).1 As such, the images can be taken in part as a visual interpretation of the text that provides some insight into contemporary Nahua artists’ reading. Despite the two images’ similarity in composition, their differences in anatomical proportion and line quality suggest that they are the work of two different artists, although one may certainly have based their composition on the work of the other, recognizing that the episode recounted was the same.2 Both artists portrayed an Indigenous noble at right, his eyes looking straight ahead and his finger pointing left to the rising sun, while stones to the left send out emissions.3 In both images, the man shares the foreground with a smoking stone and is positioned either with his feet planted firmly on a low rise of ground or seated in the landscape. In the Book 10 version, a second, glyphic representation of stone is placed on the top of a distant mountain ridge, yet also apparently just in front of the figure’s pointed finger in the foreground. In the images, the placement of the man and smoking stones in a shared foreground suggests their spatial proximity to one another while also anchoring the human figure within the landscape.

• 1
  Jeanette Peterson, “The Florentine Codex Imagery and the Colonial Tlacuilo,” in The Work of Bernardino de Sahagún, Pioneer Ethnographer of Sixteenth-Century Aztec Mexico, eds. Richard M. Leventhal and J. Jorge Klor de Alva (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 273–93.
• 2
  See Diana Magaloni Kerpel, The Colors of the New World: Artists, Materials, and the Creation of the Florentine Codex (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2014).
• 3
  Although the Nahuatl text is gender-neutral, the artists for this section represented the human as male.

The Florentine Codex episode describes a charged time and place in which human, sun, and precious stones form a relationship with one another, predicated on their sudden ability to see and appear to one another. Though previous interpretations have focused exclusively on how the precious stones enter human vision, the Nahuatl texts highlight that the narrative’s other two players—the human and sun—undertake parallel acts of sensorial emergence. In the episode as a whole, the human, sun, and stones all engage in both seeing and appearing, actions that the text conveys are linked intimately to one another.

As the first entity on the scene, the human tlaiximatini is said to arrive on a prominent place on the landscape, where they look upon and appear in their surroundings by using their ixtli, a Nahua body part that encompassed the eyes, face, and surface.1 The ixtli is fundamental to the human’s characterization and actions in the narrative. The term appears in the human’s main designation, tlaiximatini (“experiential knower,” plural tlaiximatinimeh), which is comprised of the verb ihmati, “to know how to do something well, to be deft, expert in something,” and the incorporated noun ix(tli), meaning, “one who knows by means of the ixtli.”2 An open-ended descriptor, tlaiximatini was applied variously to gold-workers, lapidaries, physicians, and Toltecs, all of whom possessed knowledge grounded in experience.3 In fact, the Book 10 version specifically frames the episode as a demonstration that the Toltecs were tlaiximatinimeh, noting, “injc cenca vellaiximatia,” “to such an extent did they know things with the ixtli [iximatia].”4 Ixtli also features in the major actions that the human performs in the episode: working their eyes (huel/cenca imix intequiuh), making their eyes shine (mixpepetza/mixpetzoa), not blinking (aoc omixcueyonia), facing the sun (quixnamictimotlalia/quixnamiqui in tonatiuh), and recognizing the precious stones (quiximati in tlaçotetl). Particularly when understood in light of the fuller meanings of ixtli as an entity that conflates sight, appearance, and social presence, these terms frame the human’s act of seeing as a simultaneous act of appearing to those around them. As underscore by these terms, in using their ixtli, the human emerges from a state of inaccessible interiority into an external sphere of interaction.

As a bodily organ, the ixtli encompassed eyes and visual experience, surface appearance, social presence, and engagement with the external world. By combining reference to eyes and surface—respectively, the organ of visual perception and the aspect of self that was visible to the external world—the ixtli served as the bodily entity through which beings both perceived and were accessible to the outside world. The ixtli’s role in seeing and appearing is suggested by its derivations. In uses that denote the eyes and sensory perception, ixtli appears in the compounds ixtelolohtli, “eyeball;" ixayotl, “tears;” ixmiqui, “to be blinded by the sun or bright ligh;,” ixmixtlachiya, “for one’s vision to be clouded;” and ixnehnemiltia, “for one’s eyes to swim.”5 Simultaneously, derivations related to surface condition or appearance include ixahuia, “to rinse or whitewash something;” ixcuicuilli, “someone with a dirty face;” ixhuicci, “to blush;” and ixnenehuilia, “to resemble someone.”6 Ixtli’s applicability to both vision and appearance suggests that the ixtli enabled perceptibility in general, with acts of seeing and appearing linked by their co-occurrence in the space just beyond the body’s surface.

Ixtli’s relation to exteriority is developed further by its use to designate presence and social contact.7 Ixpan (“on the ixtli”) means, “before, in front of, in the presence of, in the time of,” and ixtlan (“at the ixtli”), “before, in the presence of.”8   As one example, ixpan is used in the Florentine Codex to denote offerings made in the presence of the ritual impersonator (ixiptla) of the solar god Tonatiuh: “tlacotonaia, tlenamaca, yn ixpan ixiptla tonatiuh” (“they beheaded quail and offered incense before [ixpan] the sun’s ixiptla”).9 The locative uses of ix(tli) are related conceptually to further derivations that designate social interaction. Such terms include ixnamiqui, “to have a confrontation”; ixcomaca, “to confess to having done something; to tell another person his faults to his face, to give evidence”; and ixnahuatia, “to make an assertion, to condemn or dismiss someone, something.” Further examples include ixpoloa, “to dissemble, to be misleading about what one is doing”; ixmahuiztic, “someone pleasant, agreeable”; and ixtilia, “to hold oneself in high regard, to be vain, to have respect for someone.”10 The inclusion of ix(tli) in these terms marks the action’s performance in the presence of others, as in a face-to-face confrontation, denunciation, or assertion. In incorporating a social dimension, these terms also underscore the main action’s social implications. Thus, compounded with ix(tli), poloa (to perish) takes on the social valence of “misleading,” and mahuiztic (marvelous, awesome) acquires the sense of a character evaluation, “agreeable.” In these uses, ixtli exceeds the meanings of sensory perception or perceptibility to denote actions carried out in relation to other people and with embedded social valences.

In an even more general sense, ixtli is used in a final set of derivations that denote accessibility to the outside world. Ixpetlani means, “to revive, sober up, return to one’s senses” and ixitia, “to wake up, come to, to recall something.”11 Although Alfredo López Austin interprets such usages as direct references to consciousness, these derivations can also be understood on a more basic level to denote engagement with one’s surroundings.12 As descriptions of emerging from sleep, drunkenness, or senselessness, ixpetlani (to revive) and ixitia (to wake) refer to a renewed engagement with the surrounding world. Another suggestive derivation, ixquiza—literally, “to depart the ixtli”—is defined, “to go about aimlessly and without rest, for dye to wash out of something, for something to get defaced.”13 In this term, the departure of the ixtli is described as the fading of dye or the defacement of a work and, in people, as obliviousness to and detachment from one’s surroundings. As a whole, usages of the term suggest a basic understanding of the ixtli as a structure that permitted vision, appearance, presence, and socio-sensory contact, because it was the part of the body through which entities were present in and engaged with the external world.

Understood in light of its larger network of meaning, the specific uses of ixtli in the Florentine Codex texts signal how the human uses their ixtli to become present in their surroundings, both visually and socially. The idea that the human’s act of seeing also entails becoming visible to and interacting with others is further conveyed by the Nahuatl terms used to describe the act. The two versions of the episode describe the human’s actions of mixpepetza/mixpetzoa (to scrutinize, lit. “for the ixtli to shine”), mixcueyonia (to blink, lit. “for the ixtli to glitter”), ixnamictia (to encounter, lit. “to meet with the ixtli”), and quiximati (to recognize, lit. “to know with the ixtli”). Translated literally, the first two terms describe acts of seeing as, respectively, “burnishing” the ixtli (ixpetzoa, ixpepetza) and preventing it from “glittering” (ixcueyonia), while the latter two describe the human using the ixtli to “meet” and “recognize” the sun and precious stones, in a manner that suggests social as well as visual contact.

Alonso de Molina defines the first term, mixpepetza, as, “mirar con diligencia escudriñando alguna cosa” (“to look with diligence, scrutinizing something”).14 More literally, this term and the closely related mixpetzoa denote “shining” one’s ixtli and are derived from petzoa, “to polish, burnish something, to make something smooth and shiny.”15 In this way, Frances Karttunen defines ixpetzoa, “to be involved in scrutinizing something; to plane, smooth, polish something.”16 The term is built on the root ?petzi, which derives from petztli, defined by Molina as “piedra de espejos” (“mirror stone”) and identified by Karttunen as pyrite.17 As seen in derivations like petztic (literally, “mirror-stone-like”), defined as “pulido, brillante, reluciente, barnizado, fino, liso” (“polished, brilliant, shining, varnished, smooth, even”), the root describes reflectivity of light that arises from the smoothness of a surface.18

The text’s allusion to blinking, ixcueyonia, describes a contrasting form of brilliance in the ixtli: shimmering. Cueyoni appears in Molina as a synonym of its derived form, cuecueyoca, “relumbrar o relucir, o bullir y heruir los piojos, pulgas, gusanos, hormigas en el hormiguero, la gente en el mercado, o los peces en el agua” (“dazzling or gleaming, or the seething and swarming [alt. boiling] of lice, fleas, worms, ants in an anthill, people in a market, or fish in water”).19 The logic of this definition associates the macroscopic view of a multitude of tiny, moving components with the visual effect of dazzling or glittering. With the addition of the incorporated noun, ix(tli), the term ixcuecueyoca is defined, “pestañear” (“to use the eyelashes,” or blink).20 The term’s etymology suggests a reading of blinking as a motion that gives rise to a glittering effect, possibly as the shining eye is seen intermittently through closing lashes.

Both descriptors of the eye may be rooted in empirical observations of eyes’ glistening and luminous effects and are clearly related to other Nahuatl descriptions of eyes as shining, brilliant entities.21 In the Florentine Codex passage, however, these terms more specifically denote qualities of vision, with mixpepetza/mixpetzoa (for the eye to shine) signaling an intense and unwavering looking, whereas mixcueyonia (for the eye to glitter) refers instead to intermittent vision. Suggestively, both of the terms name these qualities of vision by describing the eye’s appearance to an outsider, with the eye’s intense engagement in vision denoted as the eye taking on a polished, mirror-like quality and abstaining from a fluttering, glittering affect. The approach of describing quality of vision via an external portrayal of the eye, in turn, evokes a more basic understanding, common across Mesoamerica, of sight as extromissive, that is, projected from the eye. As Byron Hamman has shown, Nahua, Maya, and Mixtec codices depict nobles’ eyes projecting smoke, feathers, and flames, descriptors that Hamman interprets as designating different styles of vision and that he connects with the representation of sound as emitted speech scrolls.22 In describing the appearance of unwavering and interrupted vision, the Nahuatl texts of the Florentine Codex likewise evoke the idea that acts of seeing are themselves visible. By employing the ixtli, the human viewer in essence engages their body’s surface, entering an external sphere of vision and simultaneous visibility.

By emitting shine from their ixtli, the human further parallels the emissions of brilliance by the sun and, later on, of smoke by the precious stones. In taking on a specifically mirror-like brilliance, the human’s ixtli acquires an appearance that directly resembles that of the sun. In both versions, the sun is said to be oalpetzini (“one that comes shining”), an agentive form of petzihui, defined by Molina as “pararse muy luzio lo bruñido, o acecalado” (“for something burnished or smoothed to turn out shiny”), and built on the same root, petztli (mirror stone), as the descriptor of the human’s eyes.23 Though the term is a common descriptor of the sun, its pairing in both versions of the text with the less common mixpepetza/mixpetzoa as a descriptor of the human’s eye highlights an underlying similarity between the seeing human and shining sun. Through their actions, both acquire a shining, mirror-like surface that enables vision at the same time that it makes the owner visible. Rather than an exceptional act that exposes the separation between human and landscape, seeing is presented as basically similar to the actions of the sun and stones and, fundamentally, as serving to permit contact between these entities. By using their ixtli, the human reveals themself to and becomes present within the landscape, opening themself up to sensory and social interaction with other members of the shared space.

• 1
  Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1992), 121; Alfredo López Austin, Human Body and Ideology: Concepts of the Ancient Nahuas, trans. Thelma Ortiz de Montellano and Bernard Ortiz de Montellano (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), 195–97. Ix(tli) is an absolutive noun, which is translated most literally as “it is a face/surface/eye.” When possessed or in a compound form, ix(tli) appears without the absolutive suffix -tli, simply as ix.
• 2
  Karttunen, Analytical, 121, 99.
• 3
  The Florentine Codex attributes the action of iximati to the eyeball (ixtelolo), which “teiximati, tlaiximati” (“recognizes people, recognizes things”), in Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 10: 103. Iximati’s distinction from mati (to know) is reflected in Alonso de Molina’s definition of mati as “saber algo” (to know something) and of iximati as “conocer algo generalmente” (to be familiar with something generally), aligning mati with the Spanish saber, to know facts or learned skills, and iximati with conocer, to be acquainted with something. Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, facsimile edition, ed. Julio Platzmann (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1880 [1571]), 45v, 52v. See also López Austin, Human Body, 177, 195.
• 4
  Sahagún, “General History,” bk. 10: 117r.
• 5
  Karttunen, Analytical, 110, 116, 119.
• 6
  Ibid, 110–11, 113–16.
• 7
  See López Austin, Human Body, 195–96.
• 8
  Karttunen, Analytical, 117, 121.
• 9
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 4: 6; my translation.
• 10
  Karttunen, Analytical, 112–13, 115–16, 118, 120.
• 11
  Ibid, 115–117.
• 12
  López Austin, Human Body, 195–96.
• 13
  Karttunen, Analytical, 119.
• 14
  Molina, Vocabulario, 46v.
• 15
  Karttunen, Analytical, 192.
• 16
  Ibid, 117.
• 17
  Molina, Vocabulario, 81r; Karttunen, Analytical, 193; see also Emiliano Gallaga M., “Introduction,” in Manufactured Light: Mirrors in the Mesoamerican Realm (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2016), 3–24.
• 18
  Rémi Siméon, Diccionario de la lengua náhuatl o mexicana (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1977 [1885]), 381.
• 19
  Molina, Vocabulario, 26r, 25v; my translation.
• 20
  Ibid, 45r; my translation.
• 21
  See Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 10: 103.
• 22
  Byron Hamman, “Seeing and the Mixtec Screenfolds,” Visible Language 38, no.1 (2004): 84–93. Hamman’s finding that these forms of vision pertain specifically to elites is also suggestive, given that the accompanying images portray the human in this episode as a noble.
• 23
  Molina, Vocabulario, 81r.

Because the narrative opens in the pre-dawn darkness, neither the sun nor light are represented as given features of the landscape. Instead, the episode’s major action hinges on the sun’s rising, which simultaneously brings light into the scene and prompts the human to begin seeing and the stone to begin smoking. The two versions of the text state that both of these actions occur only once “the sun came emerging” (“in jquac ie ocalqujça tonatiuh”). By rising, the sun produces the conditions of visibility and, simultaneously, encounters the awaiting human and stones. Highlighting the social dimensions of seeing and being seen, the passage’s portrayal of the sun and its statement that the sun’s rising prompts the human to “meet eyes with the sun” (quixnamictia/quixnamiqui in tonatiuh) conveys that in entering the scene, the sun gives rise to the visual interactions that will integrate sun, human, and stone into a shared social space.

Highlighting its agency, the sun performs a series of dynamic actions to reveal itself to the other members of the landscape. Using terms common in Nahuatl descriptions of sunrise, the texts describe how the sun hualquiza (comes emerging), hualmomana (comes laying itself out), and hualpetzini (comes shining).1 All of the verbs employ the directional hual- (alt. oal-), meaning that the actions are performed towards the main point of reference, typically the speaker.2 As highlighted by this element, the sun’s actions cause it to enter a shared space of reference, thought of as the sun’s emergence from the land of the dead into the living world, giving rise to light, time, and the cardinal directions.3 In the context of the narrative, the frame of reference into which the sun moves (hual-) is more specifically the space shared with the human and stones. This point is underscored by the human, who parallels the sun’s actions and position by also “emerging” (quiza) onto the scene and positioning themself in a prominent place, described as tlacpac (“on top”), the main root of which, -icpac, also forms the basis for icpalli, a throne or seat of authority.4 Underscored by these terms, the sun and human’s emergence onto prominent sites create a direct spatial symmetry, as the two entities move in relation to one another and produce a space of shared reference. In revealing itself, the sun thus creates the very possibility of vision and interaction and, simultaneously, helps form a new, shared frame of reference.

The social valences of the sun’s emergence are signaled principally by the statement that the human “meets ixtli with the sun,” conveyed by the phrase, quixnamictia/quixnamiqui in tonatiuh. The main verb, ixnamictia, is a compound of ixtli (face, eyes, surface) and namictia, “to get married, to come together with someone for some purpose; to marry someone off, to join two things together or to even things off.”5 One dimension of this term’s meaning is suggested by the flanking Spanish texts in the Florentine Codex, which translate it as denoting orientation—rendering the term as “el rostro hacia donde sale el sol” (“with their face towards where the sun rises”) and “miran hazia adonde sale el sol” (“they look towards where the sun rises”). Nonetheless, the original Nahuatl term encapsulates a strong additional sense of interpersonal contact, as is evident from examining attestations of the phrase and its main verb.6 This fuller understanding of the phrase quixnamictia in tonatiuh (meeting ixtli with the sun) underscores the roles of both the sun and human as actors who thereby meet and form a relationship with one another.

In the Florentine Codex, simple spatial orientation, including in relation to the sun, is typically denoted with the verb itta (in combination, itz-), to look, as in, “ie tonatiuh icalaqujampa itzticac in ticitl” (“the midwife stood facing the sun’s place of entering [i.e. West]”) and “tonatiuh yixcopa itztiaque” (“they went towards the sun’s front [i.e. East]”).7 In contrast, the phrase quixnamictia in tonatiuh (meeting ixtli with the sun) is far rarer, appearing less than half a dozen times in the entirety of the Florentine Codex.8 Besides the tlaiximatini episode, there are only three other places where this phrase occurs. Examining these attestations in depth provides a fuller sense of the meaning of this phrase in the main episode. In the first occurrence of this term, the eagle is described as “aixmauhquj, amjxmauhtianj: vel qujxnamjquj, vel qujtztimoquetza in tonatiuh” (“not fearful, not a timid one; it truly meets [ixnamictia], it truly stands watching the sun”).9 In the second instance, a priest dressed as a fire serpent is said to “meet” the sun during the festival of Huitzilopochtli, a god with strong solar connotations:

Auh in ocōnmanaco, niman no ic oaltemo in xiuhcoatl, amatl itlaquen ietiuitz, in inenepil cueçalli tlatlatiuitz. In otemoco tlatzintla in oncan itlaquaia Vitzilobuchtli, quisnamictimoquetza in tonatiuh: niman ie ic coniiaoa in iscopa, nauhcampaisti iuh quichioa.

Once they had come to make the offering, then, in the same way, the fire serpent came descending. His garments came being of paper, his tongue of scarlet macaw tail feathers came burning. Once he had descended here to the base, where was Huitzilopochtli’s place of eating, he stood confronting [ixnamictia] the sun. Right then, he made an offering in his presence;10 to all four directions he did so.11

The final attestation is in the description of a Spanish raiding party that was captured and decapitated. Using ixnamictia, the passage describes how the Spaniards’ heads were arranged on a tzompantli (skull rack): “Auh in ontlamjctiloc, nec qujnquaquauhço in intzontecon in Españoles…in çoçotoca, tonatiuh qujxnamjctoca” (“And when they had been killed, there they drove stakes through each of the Spaniards’ heads…They each lay pierced, meeting [ixnamictia] the sun”).12

In each of these contexts, the phrase quixnamictia in tonatiuh (meeting eyes with the sun) denotes a communicative encounter with the sun itself. In contrast to uses of itta (to look) to describe simple orientation vis-à-vis the sun, the first example of the eagle “meeting” the sun evokes a true encounter with the solar entity that requires actual bravery on the part of the bird. In its other uses, ixnamictia is used suggestively to denote an offering to the sun or the solar god Huitzilopochtli. The second example cinematographically describes how the priest descends to the base of the temple, “meets ixtli” with the sun, and “niman ie” (right then) makes an offering “at the ixtli” (“iscopa”) of the sun. Similarly, the placement of the Spaniards’ heads on the tzompantli (skull rack) so that they “meet the sun” reinforces and may even signal their status as sacrificed war captives, meant to nourish the sun.13 In these instances, then, the use of quixnamictia in tonatiuh underscores a degree of mutual recognition and exchange, in which the sun registers the orientation of the other player towards it.

The subtle portrayal in these examples of the sun as a perceiving, social presence is further underscored by the fact that, in the latter two examples in particular, tonatiuh (sun) seems to refer simultaneously to the solar body and teotl (god). Tonatiuh was as a divinity associated with the east, daylight, militarism, and the start of cosmic cycles, and is described by H. B. Nicholson as “the symbol of godhead par excellence and the theoretical recipient of all blood sacrifice.”14 The sun was also identified with select other teteoh (gods), most notably the Mexica patron Huitzilopochtli.15 The natural and divine aspects of tonatiuh were not necessarily distinct: as Esther Pasztory argues, though Nahua gods could be conceived of and represented anthropomorphically, they were also understood as literal natural phenomena, such as rain, thunder, and wind.16 Nonetheless, the sun’s identity as a teotl (god) encapsulates its particular ability to interact socially. As Molly Bassett writes, “Aztec teteo (gods) acted in the world: they spoke to devotees, they inhabited and oversaw elements of the landscape, and they appeared in localized embodiments constructed by priests and practitioners.”17 Given their emphasis on social interaction, the infrequent references to “meeting eyes” with the sun may further highlight engagement with the sun specifically as a teotl.

The social implications of this phrase’s use in the main passage are made clearer by examining the term ixnamictia (“meeting with the ixtli”) in depth. Molina defines ixnamictia as, “aforrar algo, o poner vna cosa contra otra; competir, o rifar con otros; reboluer a otros” (“to fold over, to put one thing against another; to compete or dispute with others; to confront others”).18 In its invocations of folding and confrontation, the entry underscores mutual, symmetrical contact, in which two entities come face-to-face with one another. In its further designations of a competition or dispute, ixnamictia also carries a strong interpersonal sense. Namictia can be derived from the noun, namictli, “spouse,” or from the intransitive verb namiqui, “to go to meet someone or find something, to have a confrontation.”19 These definitions together suggest a core meaning of an encounter between two parties, in which their relationship is implicated. The senses of intimate contact, symmetry, and social relationships also appear consistently in the term’s usage across the Florentine Codex. These elements are seen most overtly in uses of the term to describe mating, as in the statement that the tapaxi lizard “mjxnamjctimanj, anoço moteca, ce tlanj onoc, aquetztoc, ce panj onoc” (“mates [ixnamiqui], perhaps it lays down, one lying below, on its back, one lying on top”).20 Evoking a similarly symmetrical relationship, the term is also used to name the overlay of two materials, such as layers of paint or feathers, to create an optical mixture.21

In other uses, the term connotes two-way social encounters more generally. A description of the tlatlauhqui ocelotl (“red jaguar”) in Book 11 uses ixnamictia to describe how the animal confronts hunters:

Ca in iquac qujtta: in iquac qujnamiquj, in qujmjxnamjctia: Anquj, in tlamj̄quj: amo motlaloa, amo choloa: çan qujxnamjctimotlalia, Vel motlalia, hatle qujmotoctia: inin ocelutl.

When it sees, when it meets, encounters [ixnamictia] a hunter, it does not run, it does not flee. It simply places itself to confront him [ixnamictia], it places itself well, it does not hide itself behind anything, this jaguar.22

In contrasting ixnamictia with fleeing (tlaloa, choloa) and hiding behind something (quimotoctia), the text underscores the former term’s connotations of a full and open encounter, in which both entities are visible to one another. A similar sense is apparent in the term’s use in the Book 12 narrative of Moteuczoma and Hernán Cortés meeting:

Njmā qujoalilhuj in Motecuçoma. Cujx amo te? cujx amo ie te? ie te in timotecuçoma: qujto in Motecuçoma, ca quemaca ca nehoatl: njmā ie ic vel ommoquetza conjxnamjctimoquetza, connepechtequjlia, vel ixqujch caana, motlaquauhquetza:

Then he [Cortés] said to Moteuczoma, “Is it not you? Are you not he? Is it you, Moteuczoma?” Then said Moteuczoma, “Yes, it is I.” At this, he arose and stood to encounter him [ixnamictia], bowed to him, drew near, and stood erect.23

Strikingly, in the passage, ixnamictia denotes unfettered and mutual social contact, as the two men speak to and formally recognize one another, while standing, facing one another. A final use in Book 10 describes the tetzauhcioatl (translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles Dibble as “scandalous woman”):

ca tetlaxinqui tepaniani, auilli camanalli, uetzquiztli, netopeoalli, aoc tle itoca, aoc tle itenio, omic, omomiquili, ichtacapiloa, motlatlaxiliani, açazce quimixnamictia…

she is an adulteress, a goer-on-top. She is pleasure, a joke, laughter, ridicule. Nothing is her name, nothing her renown; she is dead, she was killed; she bears children in secret, she is a repeated aborter; no one interacts with her [ixnamictia]…24

The passage’s evocation of the woman’s social death—expressed by her lack of name, renown, and even her metaphorical death—comes to a culmination in the statement that, “no one interacts with her,” expressed in the Nahuatl as, “açazce quimixnamictia,” “no one meets ixtli with her.” Across these three examples, and as especially marked in the final example, ixnamictia denotes mutual and overtly social interactions, with connotations of visual access, recognition, and social relations.

Understood in light of these examples, the use of quixnamictia in tonatiuh (meeting ixtli with the sun) in the main passage suggests that the encounter described occurs mutually between the human and sun, which, from their prominent places on the landscape, face one another and form a relationship premised on mutual accessibility. Exceeding simple orientation or unilateral viewing by the human, the invocation of “meeting ixtli” conveys instead a full, visual and social encounter between human and sun, which see one another and thereby form a relationship. In these actions, the sun is construed as a social entity, possessing the capacity for social interaction and possibly identified specifically with the solar teotl. Upon entering the shared space, the sun introduces light and prompts responses in kind from the other participants in the landscape, as the human’s eyes begin to shine like mirrors and the stones begin giving off smoke and mist. Ultimately, the sun’s emission of light and the resultant possibility of visual interaction knits these three entities together in a particular moment and place, creating a place-bound relationship that is at once sensory and social.

• 1
  Karttunen, Analytical, 213, 135, 192.
• 2
  Lockhart, Nahuatl, 14.
• 3
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 6: 163. This latter effect is particularly explicit in Nahuatl, which expresses both time of day and cardinal directions in reference to the position of the sun (tonatiuh). For instance, nepantlahtonatiuh (at midday) literally means “middle tonatiuh”; and “in aiamo valqujça tonatiuh” (early dawn) is literally, “when tonatiuh had not yet come to emerge.” Similarly, the term for “east,” formed from quiza (to emerge), is tonalquizayampa, literally, “where the sun habitually emerges.” Karttunen, Analytical, 169, 246; Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 11: 25.
• 4
  Karttunen, Analytical, 95. Sample usages include icpac tepetl (“on top of the mountain”), nocpac (“on my head,” literally, “my icpac”), and tlalticpac (“on earth”). James Lockhart, Nahuatl as Written: Lessons in Older Written Nahuatl, with Copious Examples and Texts (Stanford: Stanford University Press and UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 2001), 23.
• 5
  Karttunen, Analytical, 121, 158.
• 6
  Sahagún, “General History,” bk. 11: 117r–117v, 203r–203v; my translation.
• 7
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 6: 201, bk. 10: 191; my translation.
• 8
  I generated this count using a word-searchable PDF of Anderson and Dibble’s paleography of the Florentine Codex, created by William Gassaway and Andrew Finegold, to whom I am most grateful for sharing this resource with me.
• 9
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 11: 40; my translation.
• 10
  Though Anderson and Dibble translate coniiaoa as “gesture,” a more specific meaning appears in Molina’s entry: “Iyaua. nitla. ofrecer algo desta manera, o incensar” (“Iyaua. nitla. to make offerings in this manner, or to offer incense”). Molina, Vocabulario, 36v; my translation.
• 11
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 9: 65; my translation.
• 12
  Ibid, bk. 12: 99–100; my translation.
• 13
  H. B. Nicholson, “Religion in Pre-Hispanic Central Mexico,” in Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 10, eds. Gordon Ekholm and Ignacio Bernal (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 424–25. On the tzompantli, see Virginia E. Miller, “The Skull Rack in Mesoamerica,” in Mesoamerican Architecture as a Cultural Symbol, ed. Jeff K. Kowalski (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 340–60; and Emilie Carreón Blaine, “Tzompantli, horca y picota: Sacrificio o pena capital,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 88 (2006): 5–52.
• 14
  Nicholson, “Religion,” 424; Cecelia Klein, “The Identity of the Central Deity on the Aztec Calendar Stone,” The Art Bulletin 58, no. 1 (1967): 3.
• 15
  Nicholson, “Religion,” 425.
• 16
  Esther Pasztory, Aztec Art (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 57.
• 17
  Bassett, Fate, 89.
• 18
  Molina, Vocabulario, 46r; my translation.
• 19
  Karttunen, Analytical, 158–59.
• 20
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 11: 92; my translation.
• 21
  Ibid, bk. 9: 96, bk. 11: 244.
• 22
  Ibid, bk. 11: 2; my translation.
• 23
  Ibid, bk. 12: 42; my translation.
• 24
  Ibid, bk. 10: 56; my translation.

The human and sun’s interactions provide a new vantage onto the emissions of breath, smoke, and mist by the precious stones, which typically have been interpreted as an indication of greenstone’s connection to water.1 Attention to the larger narrative’s interest in socio-sensory contact instead highlights the connection between the stones’ actions and ideas of communication and fame. In both versions of the Florentine Codex passage, the gases emerge from stones that initially are described as either unseen, because they are hidden within a larger stone or the earth, or unrecognized, because of their rough appearance. The Book 11 version explains,

Wherever something like a little smoke stands up, truly they see it, whatever is giving off mist, that is the precious thing. Perhaps it is a spattered stone, perhaps it is a dirty stone, or perhaps it is a polished stone, perhaps a spherical stone: they take it away, they carry it off. And if there is nothing arriving on the surface, there where the little smoke stands, if it is only razed land, thus do they know that where the earth is, that is where the precious thing, the stone, is: then they dig there where they see it, where they discover it.2

In the passage, the stones' emissions fundamentally serve to make them visible, both by designating the stones' location and, crucially, by making them recognizable as precious. Both passages primarily refer to the stones in question not as chalchihuitl, or greenstone, but as tlazohtetl, precious stones, a broader category that includes greenstone but exceeds it. The name tlazohtetl derives from tlazohtli, meaning “beloved, precious, rare,” and tetl, stone or any other discrete, solid entity, and includes a wide range of semi-precious stones, a number of which were said to give off various emissions.3 As a trait of tlazohtetl (precious stones) generally, rather than greenstone specifically, breath, smoke, and vapor betray a close association with the stones’ ability to manifest fame, renown, and social presence. Within this context, the stones’ emissions act not only as a passive sign but as an intentional signal, by which the stones manifest their valued status to those who see and thereby know them. In this sense, the stones’ emissions are cast as an act of self-proclamation, performed in relation to an informed public that can see and interpret the signal. Understood in light of the larger episode and its interest in interpersonal, sensorial relationships, the stones’ emissions are a sensory act that connects the stones to other elements of the landscape, directly paralleling the human and sun’s acts of seeing and shining. Through their act, the stones emerge into a sphere shared with the human and sun and gain social recognition as stones of value.

The stones are said in both versions to release breath, moisture, smoke, and mist at the exact moment of the sun’s rising, coinciding with the human’s act of seeing. The description may have an empirical basis in the tendency of certain materials, referred to as hygroscopic, to maintain moisture equilibrium with the relative humidity of the surrounding air. In an environment like the one described, these materials absorb moisture at night, when relative humidity is high, and release it in the form of vapor at sunrise, when the relative humidity drops. Through this process, materials respond to diurnal cycles of the rise and fall of relative humidity, cyclically absorbing and releasing humidity in the form of water vapor. Examples of hygroscopic materials include organics like wood and paper, as well as inorganics like salt.4 Jadeite, an aggregate crystalline material, is another likely candidate for this type of responsivity to ambient humidity.5

Providing a further layer of interpretation, the specific Nahuatl terms used to characterize these emissions underscore their social valences and point to an understanding that, by emitting gases, precious stones were presenting themselves to a knowing public. The two versions describe the stones’ emissions as follows: “mjhiotitica” (“it is giving out breath”), “tlacuechaoatica” (“it is getting moist”), “poctontli, aiauhtontli moquetzticac” (“a little smoke, a little mist stands up in place”), and “popocatica” (“it is smoking”).6 Collectively, these terms describe specific types of emissions: breath (ihiyotl), smoke (poctli), and water vapor (ayahuitl). The first term, mihiyotitica (it is giving out breath), provides a general description of the phenomenon of an entity’s partial sublimation into its surroundings, allowing it to aquire an overtly sensible and agentive quality. The second two terms provide a more specific charactization of the emissions as poctli (smoke) and ayahuitl (water vapor). Together, these terms form a rhetorical pair, known as a difrasismo, that refers to one’s manifestation before a viewing public.7 As will be seen, these terms collectively interpret the stone’s emissions as transforming aspects of its materiality into a perceptible, social presence.

The first term, ihiyotl, describes the stones’ breath as a sensorial emission that emerges from a body into surrounding space.8 The term is known mainly from its application to humans, where it named an animating force, conceived of as a gaseous entity that resided in the liver.9 Jill Furst describes the human ihiyotl as multisensory, characterized by both smell and glow, and able to emerge from the body as living breath and, upon death, as nebulous gas.10 Usage of ihiyotl in other contexts provides a fuller sense of this term and its applicability to a broader range of observable emissions. In his definition of ihiyotia, to cause or make ihiyotl, Molina glosses the term as, “resollar, o peerse, o tomar aliento o resplandecer y luzir con ricas vestiduras” (“to breathe heavily, to pass gas, to breathe, or for rich apparel to gleam and shine”).11 Complicating an anthropocentric understanding of ihiyotl, Molina’s reference to emissions of light from “ricas vestiduras” (rich apparel) suggests that the term names not only gaseous emissions from the human body, but also other strongly sensorial emissions. This interpretation is also suggested by the definition of the verb in its reflexive form, mihiyotia, "to make ihiyotl for oneself," used in the main Florentine Codex passage to describe the stone “giving off breath” (mihiyotitica). Molina defines mihiyotia as, “echar de si resplandor, o proceder grã frio dela nieue, o gran ardor o dela llaga” (“to give off resplendence, or for great cold to come from the snow, or a burning sensation from a wound”).12 This gloss evokes emissions of brilliance, cold, or burning, all of which are unified by their connection to sensory experience, with their specific traits derived from the nature of the body from which they emerge. In this way, cold emerges as the ihiyotl of snow and burning as that of a wound. These definitions portray ihiyotl as an incorporeal yet sensorial entity that expresses the nature of the body from which it emerges and enables that entity to be experienced.

In addition to carrying sensory information, the ihiyotl was also closely tied to communication—especially speech—and to action in the outside world. Ihiyotl’s connection to speech is seen in its use in the phrase, ihiyotl, tlahtolli (“breath, words”), a metaphor for fine speech.13 Its communicative and interactive nature is underscored further by its use in the term tlaihiyoana, “to take things with the breath,” a frequent attribute of precious stones. The term is formed from tla-, the non-specific impersonal object prefix; ihiyo(tl), “breath”; and ana, “to take hold of, seize,” with the resultant meaning, “to take hold of things using the breath.”14 This term appears in Book 11 of the Florentine Codex as an attribute of the greenstone quetzalitztli (“quetzal-obsidian”), which is said to be “mjtonjanj tlaihioananj” (“one that sweats, a taker of things with its breath”). This usage suggests that, in addition to an incorporeal entity that elicited sensory experience, ihiyotl could be used to act in one’s surroundings. In this way, tlaihiyoana (to take with the breath) was used to describe certain animals’ technique of hunting by drawing unwilling creatures to themselves with the breath. The Florentine Codex states of the tlilcoatl, or black snake:

Auh in aca çan qujpantilia: in aço vmpa aci, in oncan canjn onoc tlilcooatl: injc vel cana achtopa qujztlacmjna, in iehoatl tlilcooatl … njmā qujhiioana, yioma ivicpa iauh in tequanj; mochichicanauhtiuh, chichicoieoatiuh, iuhqujn tlaoanquj icamac calaquj in tequanj…

If someone just comes upon or arrives there, where the black snake is lying, because of this, right there, the black snake strikes first … Then it siezes him with the breath [ihiyotl], and, oh!, towards the wild creature he goes: he goes being taken and proceding while weaving side-to-side, and, like a drunkard, enters into the mouth of the wild beast…15

In this usage, the ihiyotl, by virtue of its ability to emerge from the body and make contact with external entities, physically draws them into the body from which it emerged.16 A related dimension of the ihiyotl appears in the statement that the ocelotl tlatlauhqui (“red jaguar”) “mjpotza injc ihiiotica qujçotlaoaz, qujiolmjctiz, in tlamjnqui” (“belches, so that by means of its breath [ihiyotl] it will make the hunter faint and pass out”).17 Though, in their translation, Anderson and Dibble render ipotza as “hiss,” the term appears in Molina defined, “regoldar” (to belch), apparently describing an eruption of breath, or ihiyotl.18 In these actions of the ihiyotl, its ability to carry sensory information to the outside world also entails an ability to act in the same realm, communicating, intimidating, and even physically moving entities it contacts.

In light of these more general usages, the reference to the ihiyotl in the main Florentine Codex passages suggests the stone’s emergence from a state of self-containment into one of interpersonal contact. As a perceptible emission, grouped in the passage with water vapor and smoke, the ihiyotl acts by emerging from the unseen or unrecognized stone into a space shared with the sun and human knower, where it can be seen and known. In so doing, the stone produces its own social presence. By way of this act of self-presentation, the stone creates sensory contact with those around it, who thereby recognize it as a precious stone.

The Florentine Codex’s entries on the different kinds of precious stones, which appear in Book 11, speak more broadly to the role of such emissions in transforming a stone’s essential nature into a perceptible signal. Of the forty-one precious stones listed in the section, five—turquoise, amber, and three kinds of greenstones—are said to emit breath, moisture, or smoke. Among the greenstones, quetzalitztli (emerald-green jade) is described as “mjtonjanj tlaihioananj” (“one that sweats, a taker of things with its breath”); quetzalchalchihuitl (“quetzal-jade”) as “mjtonjanj, in ommahaiovia, mjtonjtiquiça” (“one that sweats, it emits moisture, it quickly sweats as it emerges”); and chalchihuitl (jade) as “mitoniani” (“one that sweats”). Apozonalli (amber), the name of which means “water foam” in Nahuatl, is described as a “tlaihioani” (“one that breathes”). Finally, a single form of turquoise, teoxihuitl (“fine turquoise”), is said to “popoca, teoxiuhpopoca” (“smoke, smoke like fine turquoise”).19 In these entries, possession of breath (ihiyotl) frequently coincides with emissions of moisture, denoted with mitonia (to sweat) and ahayohuia (to produce moisture). In contrast, the sole reference to smoke (popoca) appears alone, as an attribute of fine turquoise. The distribution of these terms suggests that emissions of moisture were associated with the greenstones and amber, materials perceived as watery in nature, whereas turquoise, a material associated with the sun and the daytime sky, exuded fiery smoke.20 Echoing Molina’s discussion of ihiyotl, these descriptions suggest a harmony between the materiality of the stone’s body and its emissions, such that the sensory emissions from the stone truthfully index, and indeed may be understood as a transmutation of, the stone itself.

A similar approach, linking the ihiyotl of greenstone with watery emissions, appears in an addendum at the end of the Book 11 passage, the sole portion of either of the main episode texts to refer specifically to chalchihuitl (greenstone) rather than to tlaçotetl (precious stones). The brief section describes “another way” in which greenstones (chalchihuitl) are known: “muchipa tlacelia, tlacecelia, qujlmach inin chalchivitl ihiio; auh in jhiio cenca cecec, tlacamaoanj” (“there it is always sprouting, intensely sprouting. They say that is the greenstone’s ihiyotl, that its ihiyotl is very cold and an announcer of its qualities”).21 The Nahuatl terms used to describe “sprouting” (tlacelia) and “coldness” (cecec) derive from the same root, ce(tl), ice, reflecting a wider cultural association of coldness, water, and vegetation, and simultaneously implying a material connection between the cold and sprouting aspects of the greenstone’s breath.22 In a literal sense, the cold, sprouting ihiyotl of the greenstone is a transmutation of the stone’s materiality into a sensory signal, populating its surroundings with visible and tactile experiences. The text’s final note that the ihiyotl is “tlacamaoanj” (“an announcer of its qualities”) underscores this communicative aspect. The term is comprised of the prefix tla-; cama(tl), “mouth”; the suffix -huia, to wield or apply; and the habitual -ni, giving the meaning, “one who converses.” In the earliest extant version of the text, in the Real Academia de la Historia manuscript, Sahagún wrote in the margin the Spanish gloss for the term: “tlacamaoanj comunjca su virtud” (“tlacamahuani, communicates its virtue”) (369v). As underscored by this term, in transmuting the stone into a cold, vegetative signal, the ihiyotl serves as a vocalization of the stone itself.

Nonetheless, in the main passages’ discussion of precious stones (tlazohtetl) more generally, the essential nature communicated by the stones is not their wateriness, but rather their possession of personal presence. In the main section of the Book 11 and the entirety of the Book 10 passages, the stones’ emissions are characterized as a combination of both “smoke” (poctli) and “mist” (ayahuitl) that “stand up” (moquetza). Unlike the individual entries on precious stones in Book 11, where smoke and water vapor distinguish fiery from watery materials, the main episode texts instead pair these emissions to form the difrasismo, “poctontli, ayauhtontli” (“a little smoke, a little mist”), a Nahuatl rhetorical phrase that denotes fame and renown.23 The meaning of this couplet is explained in a passage from Book 6 of the Florentine Codex:

Injn tlatolli: itechpa mjtoaia in aca tlatoanj, aiamo vecauh omjc, aiamo polivi in jpocio, in jaiauhio: qujtoznequj: imavizço, itēio: anoço aca veca oia, aiamo polivi in jtēio, in jmavizço.

These words were said about some ruler who had died not long ago, whose smoke, whose mist [poctli, ayahuitl] still had not been lost. It means: their honor, their fame [mahuizyotl, tenyotl]. Or else, of someone who had left for a far-away place, that their fame, their honor had not yet disappeared.24

In the expression, the departed’s persistence in collective memory is denoted by the statement that their “smoke and mist” continue to be visible, as enduring aspects of their social presence. The passage further describes poctli, ayahuitl (“smoke, mist”) as an equivalent of tenyotl, mahuizyotl (“fame, honor”), a key expression of renown.25 As Patrick Hajovsky argues, these terms express fame as a combination of that which is said by and about a person (tenyotl, literally, “lip-ness”) and their visible aura (mahuizyotl, “awe”), providing a larger articulation of fame as one’s audible and visible presence.26

As an attribute of precious stones, “smoke and mist” underscore that the essential nature communicated by the stones is their very possession of renown and personal presence. Fundamentally, the “smoke and mist” emitted by the stones allow them to present themselves to the sun and seeing human, and thereby to emerge from a state of internal containment into one of interpersonal contact and recognition. A nearly identical usage of the phrase in a prayer to the god Tezcatlipoca underscores that the emisisions connote becoming exposed and knowable in another’s presence. The passage from Book 6 of the Florentine Codex reads:

a ca quavitl, ca tetl itic, titlachia, titlamati: auh aviz nelle axcan, ca titic titlamati, titic titechcaquj, ticcaquj, ticmati in tlein titic tiqujtoa, in tiqujlnamjquj, in tix, in toiollo, iuhqujn poctli, aiavitl mjxpantzinco moquetza.

That which is inside the trees, inside the stones, you observe, you know. Truly now, what is inside us, you know; what is inside us, you hear. You know what we say inside ourselves. You remember our faces, our hearts. Like smoke and mist [poctli, ayahuitl], in your presence, they stand up [moquetza].27

Employing terms deeply reminiscent of the main episode, the prayer describes Tezcatlipoca’s ability to see inside stones, trees, and people to their true nature, denoted by “tix, toiollo,” “our faces, our hearts,” an expression of one’s personhood and identity.28 In the passage’s final line, the speaker’s true, inner self is said to stand up, “like smoke and mist, in your presence” (“iuhquin poctontli, ayahuitl mixpantzinco moquetza”). With this expression, the speaker evokes a full and open manifestation of one’s nature, externalizing what was once hidden and transforming it into a visible signal that is presented to another entity. That this action is said to take place in Tezcatlipoca’s mixpantzinco (“presence,” literally, “on your ixtli”) further underscores the social dimension of revealing oneself in order to be seen and known.

The expressions used to denote precious stones’ emissions in the main episode suggest that the release of ihiyotl (breath) and poctli, ayahuitl (smoke, mist) were modes through which precious stones made their inner nature visible and knowable to members of the outside world. Engaging in the same types of actions as the human and sun, both of whom emerge beyond themselves into an external realm of interaction, the precious stones generate a signal that derives from and expresses their materiality. Attributed in the passages to tlazohtetl (precious stones) generally, these emissions serve to communicate and manifest the stones’ status as materials of value that carry renown and personal presence. In this way, the Book 11 version states, “in canjn iuhquj poctontli moquetza, vel qujtta, in catleoatl maiauhiotitica, iehoatl o, in tlaçotli” (“wherever something like a little smoke stands up, truly they see it, whatever is giving off mist, that is the precious thing”).29 Through this sensory interaction, the stone not only reveals its physical location but connects with those around it by presenting itself to them.

• 1
  See for example, Pasztory, Aztec, 251–52; and Umberger, “Antiques,” 66–67.
• 2
  For the Nahuatl, see above, paragraph 3.
• 3
  Karttunen, Analytical, 306, 235.
• 4
  “The Who, Why, When and How of Moisture Equilibration,” Image Permanence Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology, 2018, www.imagepermanenceinstitute.org/resources/newsletter-archive/v4/moisture-equilibration.
• 5
  Jill Walker, “Jade: A Special Gemstone,” in Jade, ed. Roger Keverne (London: Anness Publishing, 1991), 32, 41.
• 6
  Sahagún, “General History,” bk. 10: 117v; bk. 11: 203r; my translation.
• 7
  Mercedes Montes de Oca Vega, Los disfrasismos en el náhuatl de los siglos XVI y XVII (Mexico City: UNAM, 2013), 181–82, 236, 642.
• 8
  For a fuller analysis of ihiyotl and its representation, see the forthcoming dissertation by Alanna Radlo-Dzur, Ohio State University.
• 9
  López Austin, Human Body, 194, 232–235; Jill Leslie McKeever Furst, The Natural History of the Soul in Ancient Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 156.
• 10
  Furst, Natural, 156.
• 11
  Molina, Vocabulario, 36v; my translation.
• 12
  Ibid, 56v; my translation.
• 13
  Bartolomé de Alva, A Guide to Confession Large and Small in the Mexican Language, 1634, eds. Barry Sell and John Frederick Schwaller, with Lu Ann Homza (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 22.
• 14
  Karttunen, Analytical, 11.
• 15
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 11: 71; my translation.
• 16
  The crocodile similarly is said to hunt with its ihiyotl: “ieh vel camacoiaoac, camaxacaltic, tlapetztoloanj, tepetztoloanj, teihiioananj…tlaihiioana, teihiioana, tlapetztoloa, tlacēcalaquja” (“it is gaping of mouth, with a mouth that is cavernous [literally, ‘like a shack’]; it swallows things, swallows people with ease, it seizes people with the breath [ihiyotl]…it seizes things with the breath, seizes people with the breath, swallows things with ease, takes them in whole”). Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 11: 67; my translation.
• 17
  Ibid, bk. 11: 2; my translation.
• 18
  Molina, Vocabulario, 42r.
• 19
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 11: 223–34.
• 20
  Karl Taube, “The Symbolism of Turquoise in Ancient Mesoamerica,” in Turquoise in Mexico and North America, eds. J. C. H. King, Max Carocci, Caroline Cartwright, Colin McEwan, and Rebecca Stacey (London: Archetype Publications in association with The British Museum, 2012), 132; Justyna Olko, Insignia of Rank in the Nahua World (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2014), 314; Emily Umberger, “Conflicting Economic and Sacred Values in Aztec Society,” in Rethinking the Aztec Economy, eds. Deborah L. Nichols, Frances Berdan, and Michael E. Smith (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017), 196–97, 201.
• 21
  Sahagún, “General History,” bk. 11: 203v; my translation.
• 22
  Olko, Insignia, 314.
• 23
  Montes de Oca, Difrasismos, 181.
• 24
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 6: 244; my translation.
• 25
  See Marc Thouvenot and José Rubén Romero Galván, “Fama, honra y renombre entre los nahuas,” Estudios de cultura náhuatl 39 (2008): 54–55.
• 26
  Hajovsky, On the Lips of Others, 28–29.
• 27
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 6: 25; my translation.
• 28
  López Austin, Human Body, 196–97.
• 29
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 11: 203r; my translation.

As understood from two closely related versions in Books 10 and 11 of the Florentine Codex, a narrative describing interactions between a human knower, sun, and precious stones enables a new interpretation of Nahua accounts of precious stones releasing vapors, while also providing greater insight into the nature of sensory experience in Nahua thought more generally. Attention to the larger narrative suggests that the episode situates descriptions of stones releasing gasses within a larger theory of the role of sensation in forming a sphere of social interaction. The episode in fact hinges on the actions of three players—a human, sun, and precious stones—all of whom emerge from concealed states into a shared scene, in which they interact sensorially and socially, seeing, meeting, and recognizing one another. To do so, the human and sun engage in parallel, extromissive acts of seeing and shining, while the precious stones transform their materiality into perceptible emissions of breath, smoke, and mist that communicate their nature and presence to those around them. Through these respective acts of emergence, human, sun, and stone become present to one another, giving rise to an interactive, socio-sensory field, bounded in space and time.

This essay is part of a series that addresses the theme of “Exchanges in the Americas,” which Dana Leibsohn proposed to MAVCOR Journal.

In 2003, an enormous landslide between Gezing and Pelling, two urban centers in west Sikkim, cut the major state highway between the West District and the capital for days. Houses were destroyed, a number of their inhabitants hospitalized, and power and water supply was cut off. Food and rations supplied from the Indian border town of Siliguri were delayed, and deliveries to nearby villages dependent on Gezing market paused. Local Buddhist communities did not see this only as a symbol of state negligence and apathy towards road maintenance, which it was, but also considered the broader reasons behind the disaster.1

• 1
  Sikkim is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual state in northeast India. This article focuses on Buddhist communities, and specifically discusses Lepcha (also known as Rong in Lepcha language, or in Bhutia, Mon) and Bhutia (also known as Lhopo) residents of west Sikkim. The Lepcha people are Indigenous to the region and have a distinct language and cultural tradition. The Bhutia, or Lhopo, are held to have arrived from eastern Tibet in the thirteenth century, and presided over the Namgyal dynasty that ruled the kingdom between 1642 and 1975, when Sikkim became part of India. Bhutia language has many similarities with classical Tibetan, and uses Tibetan script. Here I will use the terms “Lepcha” and “Bhutia” for accessibility, as they are the most widely used in contemporary Sikkim. There are a number of other cultural and ethnic groups that practice Buddhism in Sikkim, and there are regional variations in Buddhist practices. Different ethnic communities in Sikkim also often participate in religious and cultural traditions outside of their own immediate community, so while this paper does focus on a specific locality, it should be noted that other non-Lepcha and Bhutia and non-Buddhist residents have also participated in the ritual traditions and cosmological systems described in the article. A full consideration of the dynamics of this participation is beyond the focus of this piece. For more on the dynamics of religion in Sikkim in other districts and areas, see anthropologist Anna Balikci’s Lamas, Shamans and Ancestors: Village Religion in Sikkim (Leiden: Brill, 2008) and political geographer Mona Chettri’s Ethnicity and Democracy in the Eastern Himalayan Borderland (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017).

This sang ritual is known as the Riwo Sangchö (Tibetan: Ri bo gsang mchod, The Mountain Smoke Offering), and it is now practiced in Tibetan, Himalayan and Inner Asian Buddhist communities around the world.1 Its performance in Sikkim has a special dimension for Sikkimese Buddhists, however, because the Riwo Sangchö is held to have been directly inspired by the landscape of the Hidden Land. In this article, I will explore the narratives connected to the history of the revelation and performance of the Riwo Sangchö in Sikkim, its connection with the landscape, and the significance of its localness for understanding multispecies relations in contemporary west Sikkim. This study contributes to discussions across religious studies, political geography, and anthropology about how transdimensional relations between humans, animals, spirits, plants, and other elements of the world are changing during the Anthropocene. In particular, my article makes two contributions to broader conversations: firstly, to the study of ritual as a site for understanding historical and cultural change in the Himalayas, and what it tells us about diversity in Himalayan Buddhism; and secondly, to discussions in political geography about layers of “built” environments and how they interact.

By thinking about the localness of this ritual, I do not mean to suggest that the Riwo Sangchö is an inherently environmentally friendly ritual that is only efficacious in Sikkim or has the same aims as contemporary environmental movements; I am also not arguing that the Riwo Sangchö can be understood in this way in other places it is practiced. Instead, my focus is on what narratives connected to the Riwo Sangchö tell us about how Sikkimese communities understand the history of their relationship with the land in which they live, and how contemporary performances of the ritual continue to facilitate inter-dimensional communication between humans and other beings resident in the landscape. To achieve this, I engage with work by a number of anthropologists and religious studies scholars of Tibet, Inner Asia, and the Himalayas, including Gillian Tan, Cathy Cantwell, and Jared Lindahl to think about how ritual, and especially sang, can function as a history, and more specifically here, environmental history; and also how ritual can provide insight into local understandings of environmental ethics. I then provide an overview of the Riwo Sangchö and its “recovery” as a pure vision for Lhatsun Namkhai Jikme in Sikkim, before considering its contemporary uses in both mitigating and responding to environmental change. I draw on close reading of classical Tibetan-language Buddhist sources related to Riwo Sangchö and my experience growing up in Sikkim in a Buddhist community in west Sikkim, as well as my experience carrying out scholarly research there for nearly three decades. My research in the Pemayangtse region has included participation in and observation of a wide range of Buddhist and Indigenous ritual life, and discussions with local ritual specialists and laypeople in Bhutia, Lepcha, and Nepali languages.

Considering the local history of Riwo Sangchö provides us with significant insight into how diverse religious sources and practices, including ritual, contribute to another level of the “built environment” of Sikkim as discussed by political geographers Duncan McDuie-Ra and Mona Chettri.2 Since Sikkim opened for tourism after its absorption into the Indian nation state in 1975, it has experienced enormous environmental change as urban centers have emerged from the forests and paddyfields of the landscape.3 While McDuie-Ra and Chettri’s research focused on the use of concrete in construction in contemporary Sikkim, I argue that the ritual regime of communication facilitated by the Riwo Sangchö is another historical example of constructing the environment and building a landscape. This process was not a straightforward case of the “Buddhacization” of the landscape, but instead represented a negotiation between Buddhist and Indigenous cosmologies, where the landscape that included the trees and mountains exercised agency.4 Acknowledging the role of Sikkim’s ecology in the shaping of this ritual is significant for understanding diverse and complex attitudes towards discourses of development in contemporary Sikkim, and in this article I add a religious studies perspective to critical discussions by political and cultural geographers including Chettri, McDuie-Ra and Mabel Gergan.5 It also serves as an example of how understanding local material and ecological histories can enrich our appreciation of the specific contexts in which rituals develop. Current developmentalist discourses often marginalize local perspectives and responses. Tracing the history and use of Riwo Sangchö provides us with an insight into environmental management and interaction from a Sikkimese Buddhist point of view, and poses as intervention to ahistorical narratives of ritual life.

• 1
  In this article, Riwo Sangchö, Denjong Nesol, and the names of other rituals are italicized for consistency as they are based on specific ritual texts. Types of ritual, such as sang offerings, are not italicized, since they are broader practices that may have many specific ritual iterations and texts in which they are enacted.
• 2
  Duncan McDuie-Ra and Mona Chettri, “Concreting the Frontier: Modernity and its Entanglements in Sikkim, India,” Political Geography 76 (2020): 2.
• 3
  For more on the history of tourism in Sikkim, see Maitreyee Choudhury, “Community Development and Tourism: The Sikkim Experience in the Eastern Himalayas,” in Mountains of the World: Community Development between Subsidy, Subsidiarity and Sustainability, Proceedings of the World Mountain Symposium, 30th September—4th October 2001, Interlaken, Switzerland. Berne: Swiss Development Cooperation, 1-13.
• 4
  For more on the Buddhacization of landscape in Sikkim’s sacred geography, see Anna Balikci-Denjongpa’s important article “Kangchendzönga: Secular and Buddhist Perceptions of the Mountain Deity of Sikkim among the Lhopos,” Bulletin of Tibetology 38, no. 2 (2001): 5-37.
• 5
  McDuie-Ra and Chettri, “Concreting the Frontier,” and Mabel Gergan, “Living with Earthquakes and Angry Deities at the Himalayan Borderlands,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107, no. 2 (2017): 490-98 and “Disastrous Hydropower, Uneven Regional Development, and Decolonization in India’s Eastern Himalayan Borderlands,” Political Geography 80 (2020): 102175.

The Riwo Sangchö belongs to a category of ritual known as sang throughout the Tibetan, Inner Asian, and Himalayan world.1 It is widely understood and practiced as a rite of purification, where the fragrant smelling smoke (sometimes rendered as incense or fumigation) is understood as both cleansing and as nourishment for the many unseen inhabitants of the landscape. In his classic study of sang, Tibetan studies scholar Samten Karmay traces the history of smoke offerings back to pre-Buddhist history on the Tibetan plateau and its use in a variety of settings, including lay, religious, Bon, and Buddhist, as a rite with many potential uses, but especially associated with purification.2

One of the elements of unchanging tradition related to sang is that certain materials are collected to make sang due to their perceived efficacy.3 Tibetan religious studies scholar Chapbel Tseten Phuntsok stresses that specific types of materials are required for efficacious sang to be made. He writes,

The major ingredients for incense burning are fragrant trees and herbs, such as cyprus, juniper, rhododendrons and tansy. Those who are stylish concerning their incense ingredients add white and red sandalwood, aloewood, saffron, nauclea cadamba and others. The flour used in incense burning called Sang tsam (bsang rtsam) is made from barley flour mixed with butter and those who are stylish concerning the Sang tsam add the three whites (milk, butter and curd), the three sweets (honey, sugar and jaggery) and the powdered medicines. Having mixed them up, they put these into the incense fire. Also the first offering of wine and tea and offering water for purification are sprinkled on the incense fire.4

These materials are associated with purity, in contradistinction with materials that are deemed to hold or produce grib, ritual pollution. To demonstrate the relationship between purity and pollution in Tibetan societies, anthropologist Gillian Tan has outlined how different types of smoke are perceived. She emphasizes how smoke (Tibetan: du ba) is necessary for life among Tibetan pastoralists, but some smoke is problematic due to its association with forms of pollution. This type of smoke includes tobacco smoke, which is widely represented in historical accounts as a negative, defiling substance that “emits a smell that displeases the deities who subsequently act out their displeasure by striking calamities and wars on to humans.”5 This smoke is distinct from sang, which is a positive and powerful substance used for offerings.

Tan goes into more detail in another study. In a case study from Minyak, eastern Tibet (Tibetan: Khams Mi nyag), she outlines how sang creates “smoky relations” that bring about transformation for Buddhist nomadic communities. This is possible due to sang’s liminal existence that is “simultaneously material and non-material” and thereby breaks down dualities.6 She writes that “. . . entities are not only fortified or augmented by the smoky relations of sang but are also dependent on them for continued existence. Because smoky relations are an ongoing practice, and influence both human practitioners and worldly deities, the relationship may be more specifically articulated as a mutuality of becoming and un-becoming.”7 Her focus is on burning offerings to worldly deities that are susceptible to emotions and are capable of conferring both positive benefits and creating obstacles for their human co-inhabitants. She outlines how a local incarnate lama performed a sang offering on an area of pasture as part of a process of maneuvering “to call in a worldly deity from another place” to replace a deity that had previously fled the region after polluting acts occurred during the period of early Chinese influence in the region.8

Tan’s investigation of sang provides insight into the significance of smoky relations for interspecies communication, but also significantly affirms the importance of recognizing specific local contexts for considering the efficacy of the sang ritual. Religious studies scholar Jared Lindahl also discusses how sang offerings in Mongolia to mountain deities there are significant in the Mongolian landscape as an example of the ritual process through which local gods have been displaced by Buddhist pantheons. To him, these Mongolian sang rituals are exemplars of Buddhist dominance over Indigenous beliefs and appropriation of the Mongolian landscape.9

These context-specific examples provide important interventions in the field of Tibetan Buddhist environmental ethics. In popular stereotypes, Buddhism is often depicted as a “green religion,” with writers arguing that Buddhist concepts such as the interdependence of all things naturally lend themselves to an environmental ethic.10 Tibetan studies scholar Tenzin Atisha has argued that Tibetans were historically deeply concerned about the interrelationship between “all plants, animals, as well as the ‘non-living elements of the natural world’,” and that this concern was manifest in rituals including sang offerings.11 Tibetan studies scholars Toni Huber and Emily Yeh have critiqued these claims as ahistorical and as examples of contemporary politicized re-imaginings of the past to present a favorable image of Tibet to global audiences.12

However, religious studies scholar Cathy Cantwell provides nuance to these arguments in her critical analysis of the Earth Ritual (Tibetan: sa mchog). In her 2001 article, Cantwell argues that while the Earth Ritual cannot be understood as an environmentally friendly ritual according to contemporary understandings, it can be seen as part of a broader form of specifically Tibetan Buddhist environmental ethics. In the Earth Ritual, human desires are used to “bring about transformation in the practitioner’s experience” through violent Tantric visualization in which the Earth Goddess is first acknowledged and then “tamed” (Tibetan: ’dul ba). But this taming is not a straightforward taming. Cantwell argues that reciprocity between the earth and the practitioner is crucial as, if it were not, there would not be the necessity of periodically renewing this relationship by reenacting the ritual. In the ritual, “the environment is seen as a potential Buddha-field,” but this is not a case of the superimposition of a Buddhist artificial world. Instead, here the natural world’s attributes are re-defined, the self-other dualism between the practitioner and their world is dissolved, and instead the opposition of nature and culture, or human and not-human, is removed.13 As Tan has also argued, these rituals connected with landscape provide the opportunity for alternative interspecies relationships to emerge. These ritual traditions, along with other forms of narrative related to the ecology of a place, allow us to recognize a unique form of Buddhist environmental ethic that is historically situated.14

In this article, I will develop Tan’s and Lindahl’s insights on “smoky relations” to consider how the history of the influential sang ritual the Riwo Sangchö can be seen not only as a form of environmental ethics, but also environmental history. Historian Johan Elverskog has more recently argued that environmental histories of Buddhism have historically ignored the expansionist and exploitative attitude of Buddhist institutions towards the environment around them, and that environmentalist movements among Buddhists are all modern and demonstrate change within Buddhist institutions.15 In my analysis of the history of the Riwo Sangchö in Sikkim, I connect the promulgation of the Riwo Sangchö in Sikkim to the development and human exploitation of ecology in the state, as it was used in the building of Buddhist institutions that drew on materials drawn from the forests and mountains. However, rather than an extractive economy, whereby the Riwo Sangchö is performed to facilitate human expansion, I argue that the offering demonstrates the reciprocity highlighted by Tan and Cantwell, echoing the mutuality noted by folklorist Kikee D. Bhutia in her discussion of human-chökyong yullha zhidak relations.16 This reciprocity is demonstrated by the use of the Riwo Sangchö to both prevent and make recompense between humans and nonhumans when disasters occur. The Riwo Sangchö entails a giving back into the environment through smoke offerings, and often accompanies other types of environmental action that emphasizes mutuality, as opposed to exploitation.

• 1
  Forms of Buddhism found throughout Tibet, Inner Asia, and the Himalayas are diverse and too often lumped together as “Tibetan Buddhism,” due to their shared use of the classical Tibetan language. In this paper, I try to be specific about the type of Buddhism and where it is practiced in order to differentiate between various vernaculars; but also acknowledge the shared forms of practice between these Buddhisms.
• 2
  Samten Karmay, “The Local Deities and the Juniper Tree: A Ritual for Purification (bsang),” in The Arrow and the Spindle: Studies in History, Myths, Rituals, and Beliefs in Tibet ed. Samten Karmay (Kathmandu: Mandala Book Point), 380-412.
• 3
  Ibid., 405-6.
• 4
  Chabpel Tseten Phuntsok, “The Deity Invocation Ritual and the Purification Rite of Incense Burning in Tibet,” Tibet Journal 16, no. 3 (1991): 26. Minor edits for consistency of style by author.
• 5
  Gillian Tan, “Differentiating Smoke: Smoke as duwa and Smoke from bsang on the Tibetan plateau,” Anthropological Forum 28, no. 2 (2018): 130.
• 6
  Gillian Tan, “Smoky Relations: Beyond Dichotomies of Substance in Tibet,” in Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond, eds. Phillipp Schorch, Martin Saxer and Marten Elders (London: University College London Press, 2020), 146.
• 7
  Ibid., 147.
• 8
  Ibid., 151.
• 9
  Jared Lindahl, “The Ritual Veneration of Mongolia’s Mountains,” in Tibetan Ritual, ed. Jose Cabezon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 226.
• 10
  An influential example of work that develops these associations between Buddhism and environmentalism is Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft, eds. Dharma Rain (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2000).
• 11
  Tenzin Atisha, “The Tibetan Approach to Ecology,” Tibetan Review 25 (1991): 9-14.
• 12
  Toni Huber, “Green Tibetans: A Brief Social History,” in Tibetan Culture in the Diaspora, ed. Frank Korom (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1997), 103-19 and Emily Yeh, “The Rise and Fall of the Green Tibetan: Contingent Collaborations and the Vicissitudes of Harmony,” in Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, eds. Emily T. Yeh and Chris Coggins (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 255-78.
• 13
  Cathy Cantwell, “Reflections on Ecological Ethics and the Tibetan Earth Ritual,” The Eastern Buddhist 33, no. 1 (2001): 113-19.
• 14
  A recent work that develops the idea of spatially situated ethics in the Himalayas is Karine Gagné, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019).
• 15
  Johan Elverskog, The Buddha’s Footprint (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
• 16
  Kikee D. Bhutia, “‘I exist therefore you exist, we exist therefore they exist’: Narratives of Mutuality between Deities (Yul-lha gzhi bdag) and Lhopo (Bhutia) Villagers in Sikkim,” Folklore 75 (2019): 191-206.

How does the ritual demonstrate this? The Riwo Sangchö itself is quite a short text, and can be performed as a short or long ritual. In west Sikkim, sang is offered on a daily basis in the morning and in the evening to cleanse domestic residences. Additionally, the Riwo Sangchö is often performed to purify an area, particularly during auspicious days of the Buddhist lunar calendar, in support of other ritual activities, or during childbirth, when people are sick or following death. It may also be performed to prevent, or in response to, misfortunes broadly construed, related to health, economic stability, and social relations.

Undertaking the Riwo Sangchö begins with the preparation of 108 ingredients, including different types of pine and juniper trees and other pleasant-smelling substances (the longer list is discussed below).1 Branches of trees are gathered and made into kindling for the fire, and pine tree branches are gathered for offerings, a day in advance to clear out insects. This preparation is undertaken by lamas or laypeople, and the materials will be assembled in a clean place above the area that needs to be cleansed. Ideally, this will be on a hill or the top of a building in a sangbum (Tibetan: bsang bum), a repository with openings designed to be used for smoky offerings. Top quality wood, free of insects, that produces good charcoal is gathered and set on fire by the propitiant, who will often remain beside the fire adding substances and tending it.

At the beginning, the lama, or ritual officiant presiding over the Riwo Sangchö will recite the refuge and lineage prayer of Lhatsun.2 He or she will then invoke “om ah hum” three times and sprinkle purifying water on the fire, which can also serve to calm the flames. Once the fire has burned into charcoal, the sang materials are added, starting with green juniper which is cut and added to the charcoal. Other ingredients such as the three whites and three sweets (discussed above) are slowly added until the smoke begins to billow out of the fire. The sang has a strong smell. It makes the eyes of the residing lama and the people in attendance prickle, and sometimes even leads to sneezing or coughing. The lama then begins the prayer, standing or sitting near to the fire but not so close that the smoke prevents them from reading their text. Some lamas will do a simple recitation of the prayer; others will accompany their prayer with a bell (Tibetan: Dril bu) and small hand drum (Tibetan: Da ma ru). Lay propitiants may stand near the lama during this process, or may be occupied helping tend the fire or making refreshments for the people gathered there to join the lama in the offering.

• 1
  I am currently compiling a list of these 108 ingredients for future publication.
• 2
  In this article, I will refer to these figures as lama for consistency, though other scholarship on sang has noted that sang rituals are also performed by laypeople. In west Sikkim, laypeople prefer to invite lamas either from their own family or one of the local monasteries to perform the Riwo Sangchö. In Sikkim, most monasteries are made up of lay Tantrists (Tibetan: sngags pa སྔགས་པ) who have varying level of ritual expertise. The most experienced ritual experts may also be scholars or meditation masters, and they may or may not be incarnates (Tibetan: sprul sku སྤྲུལ་སྐུ་). Women can also perform this ritual, but here I refer to “he or she” since most lamas in Sikkim identify as male.

The prayer of Riwo Sangchö takes the form of an offering to unseen beings with an aspiration for them to reach enlightenment and for obstacles to be cleared. The text invokes all the different classes of beings, from those at the top of the Buddhist universe model such as Buddhas, gurus, and yidams, down through the beings of the six realms to demons and negative spirits.1 Finally, the ritual offers a dedication for the welfare of all sentient beings. The text may be recited several times (and may even go on for an entire day) depending on the situation. At the end of the text, the lama allows the sang to burn off slowly, while smoke pervades throughout the local environment, across the horizon, and across the world, representing all the beings who should benefit. At times, additional prayers may also be recited at the end of the text with further dedications for all beings. Eventually, the lama departs and the smoke burns down into a pile of ashes. The ashes either remain in the sangbum, or are collected and scattered in a clean area by the lay sponsors or the lama’s assistants.

• 1
  The classical Tibetan text of this ritual is published as Lha bstun nam mkha’ ’jigs med, “Ri bo bsangs mchod,” in Rig ‘dzin srog sgrub (Delhi: Chos spyod dpar skrun khang, 2000), vol. 1, 829-34. A full translation of the ritual text is available at Lotsawa House, https://www.lotsawahouse.org/tibetan-masters/lhatsun-namkha-jigme/riwo-sangcho.

This colophon alone does not tell us much about the local history of the specific ritual text of the Riwo Sangchö. However, other sources provide us with more information. The History of Sikkim is a unique historical source composed by the ninth king of the Namgyal dynasty of Sikkim, Thuthop Namgyal (Tibetan: Mthu stobs rnam rgyal) and his wife, Queen Yeshe Dolma (Tibetan: Ye shes sgrol ma), while they were under house arrest by British authorities in 1908. The text was written as a response to what they perceived to be misrepresentations of Sikkimese history and culture in the British-sponsored Gazetteer of Sikhim that was compiled by H.H Risley and published in 1894.1 The History of Sikkim is based on compiled manuscripts and oral sources about the kingdom of Sikkim’s history as it was understood by the king and queen. The early history in particular emphasized Sikkim’s status as a prophesied Hidden Land and goes into extensive detail about the visit of Lhatsun Namkhai Jikme to “open” the Hidden Land. Since during his visit he also enthroned the first king of the Namgyal dynasty, the king and queen’s concern for recording this part of Lhatsun’s narrative is understandable, as it reconfirmed their legitimacy as sovereign rulers.2 However, the narratives of The History of Sikkim are also important for relating the received history of many elements of Buddhist practice in Sikkim in the early-twentieth century. The section on Lhatsun is a vivid example of this. In the book, the narrators relate that when Lhatsun first arrived in Sikkim, he came from the north to a place called Chukarpangshung (Tibetan: Chu dkar spang gshongs) in the border between Tibet and Sikkim.3 There,

. . . the Lepcha Tekong Salang (Tibetan: Mon The kong za lang) came to receive him. Later when Lhatsun was opening the door to the sacred place, Mon Tekong Salang gave him a thorough introduction to Traktongrong (Tibetan: Khrag ’thung rong), Phagmorong (Tibetan: Phag mo rong), Lhari Nyingpug (Tibetan: Lha ri snying phug), Taden Yangsangpug (Tibetan: Rta mgrin yang gsang phug), Dechenphug (Tibetan: Bde chen phug), and the other great caves, as well as many other sacred places. This led to the compilation of the guidebook (Tibetan: gnas yig) [to the sacred landscape]. Tekong Salang lived for three hundred years and his throne remains at Lhari Nyingphug; his footprints are imprinted at Thagthongrong, and the bamboo and tobacco plants [that he planted] are still there, along with his grave.4

Tekong Salang’s presence and role in Lhatsun’s “revealing” of Sikkim is not mentioned in the colophon. However, his significance to Lhatsun, and their collaborative process, is further affirmed by his presence in the popular folk song, the Denjong Chakrab (Tibetan: ’Bras ljongs chags rabs, The Establishment of Denjong). The relevant verse declares,

How fortunate and gratifying that the keeper of the Hidden Land, there was a keeper of the Hidden Land,

How fortunate and gratifying that the keeper of the Hidden Land was Tekong Salang, that keeper of the Hidden Land . . .5

In this song and The History of Sikkim excerpt Tekong Salang is called the “Keeper” of the Hidden Land, and his guidance of Lhatsun directly results in the compilation of Lhatsun’s guide to the sacred places of Sikkim, which suggests a collaboration as opposed to domination. This collaboration demonstrates the Indigenous Lepcha cultural influence on the development of Sikkim’s “built” sacred Buddhist geography. Interestingly, by the seventeenth century Lepcha communities already had an agricultural practice known as “slash and burn,” in which controlled fire was used in preparing land for cultivation. Bongthing, ritual specialists that practice Indigenous Lepcha traditions, also use burned offerings. Both Buddhist and Indigenous rituals incorporated smoky relations. The meeting of Buddhism and Indigenous traditions is not unique to Sikkim. It has been characteristic of Buddhism’s incorporation into the cultural geography and politics of the Himalayas for more than a thousand years. Treasure traditions (Tibetan: gter ma) that are held to have been hidden by Guru Rinpoche and later rediscovered and revealed by his students (such as Lhatsun) have been particularly important as a way to bring together different perspectives of the landscape and to make political claims over territory.6

This local influence is also present in the list of deities and spirits who are invoked in the sang ritual text. In the Denjong Nesol rite (Tibetan: ’Bras ljongs gnas gsol; English: Earth Propitiation) that is also believed to have been revealed by Lhatsun Namkhai Jikme, there is an additional section that elaborates on how sang should be offered, and more specifically, to whom. The list of beings incorporates both members of the Buddhist pantheon and Indigenous spirits. It sorts the beings of Sikkim into three categories: the deities at the top of the landscape, the spirits in the foothills, and the spirits in the valleys. The text states that sang can clear “external, internal and secret” obstacles for all of the demons, spirits, and gods (Tibetan: bdud, mtshan, lha) of those places.

• 1
  H.H. Risley, The Gazetteer of Sikhim (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1894).
• 2
  Tashi Tsering, “A Short Communication about the 1908 ’Bras ljongs rgyal rabs,” Bulletin of Tibetology 48, no. 1 (2012): 33-60.
• 3
  For additional detail on the historical context and chronology of these events, see Mullard, Opening the Hidden Land.
• 4
  My own translation, Mthu stobs rnam rgyal and Ye shes sgrol ma, ’Bras ljongs rgyal rabs (Gangtok: Tsuklhakhang Trust, 2003), 52.
• 5
  The lyrics to this song are provided in Bhutia and English in P.T. Gyamtso, Denjong Sunglu (Gangtok: Denzong Lhomen Kiduk, 2009), 20-22. Since the published version found in this book omits a number of verses, here I offer my own adapted translation with the lyrics I was taught as a child that featured Tekong Salang.
• 6
  For more on how Treasure revealers participated in this process in nineteenth-century Kham, see Alexander Gardner, “The Twenty-Five Great Sites of Khams: Religious Geography, Revelation, and Nonsectarianism in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Tibet,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 2006.

Above all the deities is Dzonga (Tibetan: Mdzod lnga) the mountain deity who presides over all of Sikkim.1 After him comes Pawo Hungri, the Great Demon Dharma Protector (Tibetan: Bbud bstan chen po dpa’ bo hung ri), followed by the twenty-one worldly vow holders. In the valley, there are one hundred and nine lakes, including Rigzin Latso (Tibetan: Rig ’dzin bla mtsho), Jampal Latso (Tibetan: ’Jam dpal bla mtsho), Tadring Latso (Tibetan: Rta mgrin bla mtsho), Yangdak Latso (Tibetan: Yang dag bla mtsho) which are all home to deities of the place (Tibetan: sa bdag), Naga spirits associated with water (Tibetan: klu), lords of the trees (Tibetan: gnyan), and Tenma Goddesses (Tibetan: Bstan mar). There are also lakes where deities associated with the Phurba Kilaya, female spirits and worldly deities are resident, along with lakes associated with Taksa (Tibetan: Trag shad), Maning (Tibetan: Ma ning), and all the eight classes of demons and wrathful deities. The lakes can be sorted into three general categories: the upper white milk lakes are residences of the gods; the middle red blood lakes are residences of tsan spirits; and the lower blue medicinal lakes are associated with lower beings. All of the important sacred sites including the sacred caves of Orgyan Dechenphug (Tibetan: O rgyan bde chen phug), Khandro Sangphug (Tibetan: Mkha’ ’gro gsang phug), Lhari Rinchenphug (Tibetan: Lha ri rin chen phug), the monastery of Pemayangtse (Tibetan: Pad ma yang rtse), the royal palace of Rabdentse (Tibetan: Rab ldan rtse), and the waterfall of Pagmorong (Tibetan: Phags mo rong) are home to chökyong yullha zhidak. The Denjong Nesol text lists all of them, and then states that the sang will reach “the four directions and eight cardinal points” to satiate all the chökyong yullha zhidak with smoke from the “king of trees,” the pine.  This type of ecological detail situates the performance of the Riwo Sangchö within Sikkim’s landscape. Along with details about the history of Lhatsun’s revelation of the ritual details, the role of the Riwo Sangchö in other rituals such as the Denjong Nesol demonstrate its significance for Sikkimese communities, even as it has been widely adopted throughout Buddhist communities on and around the Tibetan plateau and in Inner Asia.

• 1
  Dzonga is also known as Kanchenjanga, the third highest mountain in the world (spelt variously as Kanchenjunga, Kangchendzonga, Khangchendzonga), or locally as Kanchendzonga (Tibetan: Gangs chen mdzod lnga གངས་ཆེན་མཛོད་ལྔ་). Balikci-Denjongpa provides a detailed overview of Dzonga in her article “Kangchendzönga: Secular and Buddhist Perceptions of the Mountain Deity of Sikkim among the Lhopos.”

Gathering the materials for sang offerings with good intention is especially important for ensuring favorable outcomes. In Sikkim, sang is prepared using mostly widely available materials; historically, it has also been associated with key moments in Sikkimese history. Without offering sang, Lhatsun could not have proceeded into Sikkim from the mountain passes; it directly facilitated his ability to open the Hidden Land and set in motion Sikkim’s Buddhist history. Most importantly, Lhatsun’s offering of sang acknowledged the presence of the local spirits of the landscape and their significance. In Sikkim today, people continue to seek the blessings of these transdimensional beings before any major activity that might disturb their environment, and also to apologize and make reparations for their behavior.

These offerings are necessary in Sikkim’s rapidly changing landscape. In the last century, Sikkim has seen enormous changes as urban centers have sprouted up on the sides of its steep hills, replacing forest and agricultural land, and shifting water sources. These changes have been especially obvious in Sikkim’s West District. The region has seen huge development in infrastructure over a very short period of time to facilitate tourism focused around the mountain vista of Kanchendzonga. Historically, west Sikkim was important as the center of the Buddhist sacred landscape, and the site of the capital of the Buddhist Namgyal dynasty that ruled the state from 1642 until 1975. However, after the capital moved to Tumlong in north Sikkim in the nineteenth century and British influence in the state increased with the development of the post of the Political Officer, west Sikkim’s infrastructure did not develop. Instead, Gangtok became the state’s urban center and has become an enormous, sprawling concrete metropolis. In the early to mid-twentieth century, west Sikkim became known for its agricultural abundance and, since tourist permits to the border state were hard to come by, only a small group of trekkers and guests of Gangtok elite ventured westward. This changed after Sikkim was absorbed into the Indian Union in 1975. In 1990, the state eased restrictions on tourist movement and communities in west Sikkim began to build hotels, roads, and other infrastructure to cater to tourists.1

• 1
  It should be noted that as of 2020 foreign tourists are still only permitted to visit Sikkim for a period of two months after obtaining an Inner Line Permit (ILP).

Taking Permission

As the built environment of Pelling has changed radically, so too have local people’s relationships with the chökyong yullha zhidak and other unseen residents. In order to prevent disruption to the local spirits, Buddhist residents are careful to continue their ritual maintenance of reciprocity in Pelling. Most importantly, before hotel construction begins, aspiring hotel builders will invite lamas, mostly from Pemayangtse, to undertake consecration (Tibetan: rab gnas) rituals.

This consecration is known as Sa da lu nyen (Tibetan: sa bdag klu gnyan), or the Offering to the Lord of the Soil, the Nagas (Tibetan: klu) and the Local Spirits. The name itself represents the different classes of deities and spirits present in the landscape, referring to the soil (sadag), any water sources (lu) and other materials (nyen, who are often rendered as gods of the trees). Before beginning the rite, lamas are invited to consult on whether the place is appropriate or not for construction. This acts as a kind of spiritual Environmental Impact Assessment in lieu of building permits from the state, where lamas will check if there is any lord of the land (Tibetan: sa bdag po) who may be present there. Places that often have lords of the land present include water sources, such as wetlands, marshy areas, and streams; this land is often structurally unsound and prone to erosion, but it is also the residing place of naga spirits that need to be left alone, lest they are angered and bring illness to human residents. At times, spirits may manifest as large rocks or boulders, and moving them or blasting them with dynamite can bring illness and misfortune to human builders. Doing a thorough check for any unseen residents is therefore very important before undertaking the consecration rite.

The consecration rite is reciprocal in its structure. After offering Riwo Sangchö several times to purify the place, the lama will then propitiate the local spirits and offer them gifts. These are materials such as water and minerals, and are enclosed in a bumpa (offering vase) and buried in the soil. This gift is intended to consolidate the relationship between the local spirits and prospective human residents, creating an environment where a building can last and its human residents prosper. This offering is also given to Kanchendzonga and the other deities of the land, who can always “cut funding” or create other obstacles to humans if not propitiated appropriately. At the end of any building project, the Khimsa Tashi (Tibetan: Khyim sa bkra shis; English: Auspicious New House) ritual is undertaken, where lamas are again invited and give offerings to the spirit of the place.

Making Reparations

In the last twenty-five years, Pelling has seen many consecrations as new hotels have multiplied in the landscape. However, these consecrations have not been enough to compensate for the significant environmental changes that have taken place. In the early 1990s, an enormous landslide at the Hungri (Bhutia: Hung ri) stream, which flows under the cliff that is the base of Pelling town, was seen as evidence of the displeasure of the nonhuman residents of the town. At the time, the revered Tibetan-Sikkimese lama Yangthang Rinpoche (Tibetan: G.yang thang rin po che, 1930-2016) was a resident of Pelling. He pronounced that the landslide was not a natural disaster, but instead had been created through the unforeseen impact that hotel building and other forms of “development” had brought to Pelling. Additionally, he said that the construction of hotels had been undertaken in places where lu, or naga spirits associated with water, were resident, and that the mismanagement of septic tanks, dirty water and other types of waste were agitating other spirits, the lu and nyen. He prescribed an annual performance of Riwo Sangchö to rebalance this and to give offerings to all of the deities and spirits. The Riwo Sangchö was performed along with the making of offering vases that were buried below hotels on the top of the Hungri cliff and along the adjoining ridge. Local Buddhists expanded on this directive and began a tradition of doing an annual Denjong Nesol for the area that rotated between the residences in Pelling until the 2010s, when it was re-homed in the Singyang Mani Lhakhang, a temple near Pelling.

The landslide in 2003 was another example of the impact of urbanization, as the growth of Gezing, the district capital, led to businesses and farms moving into new areas where there were previously no human residents. More recently in 2011, another significant landslide took place at Sangha Choeling monastery (Tibetan: Sangs sngags chos gling) above Pelling. In that year, a local contractor began road construction up to the important Sangha Choeling meditation center in preparation for a giant statue of the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara to be built there. After some heavy rain, the road that had been dug out collapsed, sending down rocks and mud all the way to the Rimbi river. It narrowly missed Singyang village. Distraught local community members again went and requested advice from Yangthang Rinpoche; he instructed them to conduct a large Riwo Sangchö ritual to apologize to the spirits resident in the Dorje Phagmo Lhakhang at the monastery, who were angry because of the use of dynamite in the road construction. The rituals went on for three days and after that, despite the challenging terrain, the road was eventually completed. In 2018, the Avalokitesvara statue was opened to the public—following a presentation of Riwo Sangchö, of course.

In these instances, the Riwo Sangchö functioned to repair transdimensional relations and re-establish reciprocity between local human and nonhuman residents in the Pelling area of west Sikkim. Mabel Gergan has recently discussed how state-led development projects (especially hydroelectrical dams) have led to new stresses on human inhabitants in Sikkim, and how disasters in Sikkim’s landscape are understood in local cosmologies as warnings from the deities about inappropriate human conduct. Ritual practices and narratives have responded to these changes and the anxieties brought by them, which “displays that cosmological worlds have room for flexibility and openness.”1 Acknowledging the layers of these practices and cosmologies allows us to think about environmental change beyond simplistic paradigms of loss, and to imagine alternative ways for seen and unseen beings to live together in the environment of the anthropocene.2 The Riwo Sangchö and its accompanying prescriptions allow for residents in the quickly growing urban tourism hub of Pelling to consider human-environment relations and responsibilities in alternate ways, and also have cautionary effects in discouraging humans from over-development. In this way, this latest use of Riwo Sangchö represents another moment in transdimensional reciprocity in Sikkim’s landscape.

• 1
  Gergan, “Living with Earthquakes,” 496.
• 2
  Ibid., 491.

As the eastern Himalayas undergo rapid environmental change, new sources and alternative readings of cultural resources including rituals can provide us with a different way to understand environmental histories of the region, and to recognize both what is no longer present and new emerging formations. The Riwo Sangchö is a ritual exchange that facilitates smoky relations between humans and spirits resident in landscapes around the world. But its initial history, as inspired by the landscape of Sikkim, provides insight into the complex materiality (and, at times, immateriality) of Sikkimese religion and ways that Sikkimese Buddhist communities have historically negotiated environmental change. Originally revealed by Terton Lhatsun Namkhai Jikme in the seventeenth century, the Riwo Sangchö was used in his project to open the “Hidden Land” of Sikkim as part of a process of inscribing and interpreting the land of Sikkim for Buddhist inhabitants. This was no passive process, as the land was home to transdimensional inhabitants. The Riwo Sangchö facilitated connections between humans, nonhuman animals, spirits, and the other beings and forces that inhabit the enchanted Himalayan landscape. But this enchanted landscape has changed over time. “Development” of infrastructure that consolidates Sikkim within the Indian nation by facilitating the movement of tourists, goods, and services has also ramped up exploitation of the land. The Riwo Sangchö is used by Buddhist communities in contemporary Sikkim to acknowledge the enormous changes brought by road construction, septic tank installation, hydroelectric dams, deforestation and other projects that benefit some humans, but not all human communities or other inhabitants of the multispecies environment.1 In examining the layers of history and practice of the Riwo Sangchö, my intention has been to highlight not only the local history of a ritual practice, but also the layered connections of that practice as a form of multispecies communication and acknowledgement through history. The resilience of such as practice points to an alternative way of conceiving of multispecies interaction in the Anthropocene, and historically contextualized directions for making new opportunities that benefit beings across dimensions.

• 1
  As an another example of how Riwo Sangchö has been used to adapt to new challenges, see my article on its use during the Covid-19 pandemic. Bhutia, Kalzang Dorjee. 2021. “Cleansing the Sacred Habitat in the Time of Coronavirus: Buddhist Sang Rituals in Sikkim in Response to the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic.” Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia, no. 1. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/9192.

I offer my deep thanks to the human and non-human inhabitants of Sikkim, including the chökyong yullha zhidak, and to my family for their support, advice and photographs. I dedicate this article to my late father, Sangchen Pemayangtse Dorje Lopen Sindrang Yab Gomchen Chewang Rinzin, for sharing his wisdom about smoky relations with me. I also offer gratitude to Geshe Wangchuk la for insightful discussions about sang, and Gezing Mani Lhakhang Doling Yab la, Dr. Emily Floyd, Dr. Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa, Dr. Mona Chettri, Dr. Mabel Gergan, Dr. Rebecca Hall, Dr. Jana Fortier, and two anonymous reviewers for MAVCOR for their helpful suggestions and for sharing of sources. This research was generously supported by an ACLS/ Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Research Fellowship in Buddhist Studies, and my thanks to Professor Nancy Levine and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles for their support.