At the Mountains’ Altar: Anthropology of Religion in an Andean Community

In high-Andean Peru, the village of Rapaz keeps a shrine to mountain beings that control water and weather. Frank Salomon takes the ritual practices and belief systems of this community as the basis for his study, bringing an unfamiliar religious world close to the reader before moving from it to theory.

Each chapter starts from core field encounters and then moves outward in a different theoretical direction. Classical approaches to rural modernity sit beside newer currents, such as cognitive-evolution accounts, critiques built on power, a rethinking of relativism in ontological terms, and the new materialism. Salomon asks why sacred ritual seems almost universal, and whether religion remains a usable category in the post-colonial world.

Readers working on Andean cultures, Latin American ethnography or religious studies will find it useful, as will students of the anthropology of religion.ISBN-13 9781138037502.