Rainmaking Rituals

Drawing on an important and newly accessed early twentieth-century manuscript from the highland Lima village of San Pedro de Casta, this article explores the linguistic landscape within which the text—an internal set of irrigation ritual regulations based on Inca precepts—emerged, and offers a highly contextualized analysis of the Quechua word waqay, which features in this predominantly Spanish-language text. The term is central to Andean conceptualizations of landscape, spirituality, and communication. In the local context, agro-pastoral production and community well-being hinge on the deliverance of this word in the annual canal-cleaning ritual.

The imperative to climate change in the African continent is a matter of livelihood and survival. To secure and maintain livelihoods, historical evidence indicates that, native African communities had rich indigenous knowledge and science of responding to instances of climate change. This study interrogates extant data on the ethnoscience of rainmaking rituals, as a prototype of African indigenous knowledge on climate change, to show not only its prevalence across the African anthropological space, but also indicate its effectual outcomes in responding to manifestations of climate change. To fully tap into the potentials and strengths of this knowledge and science, the study tenders for its marriage with modern climatological science, for both to partner in providing solutions to the ever-recurring problem of climate change in contemporary Africa.

In this paper the author deals with the problems of ritual landscape, agricultural cycle and rainmaking rituals that are associated with them and which are still carried out in Hueyapan, the Nahua village in the Highlands of Morelos situated on southern slopes of Popocatepetl volcano. He describes the orography of Hueyapan with special emphasis on Popocatepetl and the role the volcano plays in the life of this peasant community. He also deals with the space and its conceptualization in the notion of the people in Hueyapan and points out the importance of north as most of the hills and mountains of Hueyapan territory are situated on northern perimeter, from where, because of the mountains, the rains come. The paper also deals with the ritual specialists called rainmakers who are responsible for the rains and subsequent abundant harvest.

Although Tibetan rainmaking rituals speak of important aspects of both history and religion, scholars thus far have paid only biased attention to the rituals and performative aspects rather than the abundant textual materials available. To address that issue, this article analyzes a single textual manual on Tibetan rainmaking rituals to learn the significance of rainmaking in late Imperial Chinese history. The article begins with a historical overview of the importance of Tibetan rainmaking activities for the polities of China proper and clearly demonstrates the potential for studying these ritual activities using textual analysis. Then it focuses on one Tibetan rainmaking manual from the 18th century and its author, Sumpa Khenpo, to illustrate that potential. In addition to the author's autobiographical accounts of the prominence of weather rituals in the Inner Asian territory of Qing China, a detailed outline of Sumpa Khenpo's rainmaking manual indicates that the developmental aspects of popular weather rituals closely agreed with the successful dissemination of Tibetan Buddhism in regions where Tibetan Buddhist clerics were active. As an indicator of late Imperial Chinese history, this function of Tibetan rainmaking rituals is a good barometer of the successful operation of a cosmopolitan empire, a facilitator of which was Tibetan Buddhism, in the 18th century during the High Qing era.

Ngaka (the indigenous doctor and healer among Tswana speaking people) represented the spiritual priest among the Batswana and hence a great challenge to missionaries of colonial times, whose agenda was to sell a different form of spirituality.  That the modern colonial framework dismissed all other forms of spiritual knowledge(s), situated the ngaka and bongaka (the practice of ngaka) at the center of the colonial missionary displeasure.  This paper traces and analyses Robert Moffat’s rewriting of the concepts of ngaka and bongaka in his 1842 monumental volume.  It analyses Moffat’s encounter with the ngaka, his characterisation of the ngaka and his efforts to translate the ngaka from a central social welfare figure among the Batswana to a marginal if not an outright evil pretender. The paper also traces the resistance Moffat encountered in this specific endeavour.  It also examines how the Batswana began to translate Moffat and his books (the Bible) into their own spiritual categories by regarding him as ngaka and referring to his books (the Bible) as bola (the divination set).