Nicholas Griffiths – författare

Spiritual Encounters is a comparative and theoretically informed look at the religious interactions between Native and colonial European cultures throughout the Americas. Religion was one of the most contentious, dramatic, and complex arenas of confrontation between Natives and Europeans during the colonial era. This volume fully explores the significance of colonial religious encounters. Case studies, organized by theme, showcase previously unexamined sources and offer interpretations that shed new light on Native-European religious encounters in the New World. One group of studies examines the extent to which Native peoples internalized Christianity and the cultural mechanisms that enabled them to do so. Other chapters assess in detail the often uneasy relationship between Christianity and coexisting indigenous religious practices involving sorcery and healing. A third set of essays looks at the broader political and economic forces underlying Native-colonial religious encounters. An introduction and epilogue by the editors provide valuable summaries of the broad patterns characterizing the religious interactions between the West and the Other in the colonial Americas.

Debunking the so-called apotheosis myth, Nicholas Griffiths argues that Indigenous peoples in North America, Mexico, the Andes, and Hawaii during the early modern period (1492–1789) did not believe invading Europeans were gods. Instead, many perceived them as 'more-than-human' intruders of considerable spiritual power. By exploring the Indigenous context and terminology, using published primary and secondary sources, the book investigates what natives meant when they used words that Europeans translated as 'gods.' In contrast to traditional accounts, Griffiths centers native points of view and the dynamic interactions between European and Indigenous perspectives. Ultimately, both groups were fundamentally comparable since both interpreted their mutual contact in terms of their pre-existing mythology. The traditional contrast between the scientific, rational, and modern Europeans on the one hand, and the myth-bound, irrational, pre-modern Indigenous peoples on the other, is entirely misleading. The first book-length synthesis of this myth, Griffiths reinterprets ideas that have long been debated in various regional literatures.