![]() The book also includes information on pictography, preserving a rare sample of Comanche scapula drawing. ![]() Gelo’s introduction discusses the circumstances in which García Rejón gathered his material and annotates significant aspects of the vocabulary in light of current knowledge of Comanche language and culture. This translation adds the English equivalents to the original Spanish-Comanche list of 857 words, as well as a Comanche-English vocabulary and comparisons with later Comanche word lists. It preserves words and concepts that have since changed or even disappeared from the language, thus offering a unique historical window on earlier Comanche culture. ![]() The Comanche Vocabulary collected in Mexico during the years 1861–1864 by Manuel García Rejón is by far the most extensive Comanche word list compiled before the establishment of the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation in 1867. Goss, Professor of Anthropology, Texas Tech University It should be in every university research library.” -James A. This is cutting-edge history, drawing not only on original research in extensive primary documents but also on theoretical perspectives from other disciplines.“This is the most important pre-reservation document that we have for the Comanche language . . . Drawing on obscure details buried in Spanish accounts of their time in the lands that became known as Comanchería, Betty provides an interpretive gaze into the culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Comanches that offers new organizing principles for the information that had been gathered previously. ![]() In this context, he looks at the kinship basis of inheritance practices, which, he argues, undergirded private ownership of livestock. He describes in detail the Comanche horse culture as it was observed by the Spaniards and the Indian adaptation of Iberian practices. In considering how and why Comanches adopted the Spanish horse pastoralism, Betty demonstrates clearly that pastoralism was an expression of indigenous culture, not the cause of it. The author then considers a number of aspects of Comanche life-pastoralism, migration and nomadism, economics and trade, warfare and violence-and how these developed along kinship lines. Rather than a narrative history of the Comanches, this account presents analyses of the formation of clans and the way they functioned across wide areas to produce cooperation and alliances of hierarchy based in family and generational relationships and of ancestor worship and related religious ceremonies as the basis for social solidarity. Betty details the kinship patterns that underlay all social organization and social behavior among the Comanches and uses the insights gained to explain the way Comanches lived and the way they interacted with the Europeans who recorded their encounters. ![]() In Comanche Society: Before the Reservation, Gerald Betty develops an exciting and sophisticated perspective on the driving force of Comanche life: kinship. More recent studies of the Comanches have focused on adaptation and persistence in Comanche lifestyles and on Comanche political organization and language-based alliances. Once called the Lords of the Plains, the Comanches were long portrayed as loose bands of marauding raiders who capitalized on the Spanish introduction of horses to raise their people out of primitive poverty through bison hunting and fierce warfare. ![]()
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