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Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion: Poetry Songs and Great Basin Context. By Judith Vander. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Pp. xxiv + 631. Appendixes, notes, references, index. $65.00 cloth.
The threefold purpose of Judith Vander's Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion: Poetry Songs and Great Basin Context is the presentation of the music and text of 130 Ghost Dance songs; to place the Ghost Dance religion and its songs within the context of Wind River Shoshone culture, the 1890 Ghost Dance religion, and Great Basin culture generally; and to expand the analytical framework and conclusions presented in her earlier monograph Ghost Dance Songs and Religion of a Wind River Shoshone Woman (1986). Her two interrelated theses are first, that the Wind River Shoshone Ghost Dance, or Naraya, can be traced back to the Great Basin Round Dance and its religious practices, and second, that there was not a single homogeneous Ghost Dance religion, but two main forms, one in the Great Basin and another on the Great Plains, each with its own underlying orientation and network. These two forms were in turn comprised of variants that were influenced by each group's own traditions and worldview. Through her invaluable presentation of material collected from Emily Hill and Dorothy Tappay, whose belief in the Naraya continued until their deaths in the 1980s, and through her skillful use of source materials, Vander advances her theses and makes a valuable contribution to the field of ethnomusicology.
Presented in ten chapters, Vander states that "the Naraya is richly complex, the creation of cultural and individual overlays, dovetailings, congruencies, sympathetic vibrations, and overtones. The organizational form of the book will imitate its subject and use all of these components to isolate and identify the elements and essence of the Naraya" (p. 1).
Chapter 1 provides the contextual material of Great Basin culture which forms a baseline for understanding the Naraya. Chapters 2-7...