Jose R. Oliver. Caciques and cemi idols: the web spun by Taina rulers between Hispaniala and Puerto Rico.

Wilson, Samuel M.

Jose R. OLIVER. Caciques and cemi idols: the web spun by Taina rulers between Hispaniala and Puerto Rico. xx+306 pages, 35 illustrations. 2009. Tuscaloosa (AL): University of Alabama Press; 978-08173-5515-9 paperback $34.95; 978-0-8173-1636-5 hardback $59.

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When Columbus arrived in the Greater Antilles in 1492 he found a complex mosaic of indigenous polities, some of them comprising dozens of independent villages and tens of thousands of people. Researchers today call most of the people of the Greater Antilles the 'Taino'. Over the last half-century a great deal of work has gone towards trying to understand how these polities worked--how they were structured in terms of hierarchies of leaders and other important people, how kinship and succession worked and how these polities interacted with one another.

The early chroniclers and Friars all noted that the leaders or caciques of households, villages and regions all possessed and venerated sculptural idols of various forms they called cemis. These observers discussed their great importance to the caciques and their role in ritual. Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdez provides a general description of their use:

'[The caciques kept] these diabolical images in their houses [caneys], in selected dark places and locations that were reserved for prayer. There they entered to pray and ask for what they wished ... and without [consultations with] the presence of the Devil [cemi idol], they neither embarked nor did anything that was of importance' (Oviedo 1944(I): 251-2; Oliver's translation, p. 73).

These cemi idols were condemned by missionaries, but regarded by many, from the sixteenth century to the present, as extraordinary works of art. Archaeologists and others recognised that they were very important objects, but few of them came from well-documented contexts, and in general they were not seen as terribly helpful in terms of understanding Taino sociopolitical organisation and history.

Jose Oliver's volume changes all that. He looks at the indigenous people of the Greater Antilles, particularly the upper sociopolitical stratum, using the social significance of the cemis as a focus. The volume is a detailed and coherent argument that lays out the complex web of relationships among Taino caciques and non-human actors imbued with cemi power. The integrative role of cemis in the Taino worldview is carefully and logically reasoned and richly supported with detailed evidence. Indeed it is an exhaustive analysis of a range of objects from highly detailed and decorated three-point stones or trigonolitos (see vignette accompanying this review, illustration by Samuel Wilson), to stone heads or faces, stone collars or belts, and the 'elbow stones' also associated with the balL game. Oliver also discusses the smaller-guaizas or small mask representations that are found throughout much of the Caribbean.

Caciques and cemi idols is divided into 22 sections, grouped into six large parts. Part I is an introduction and theoretical orientation. Part II argues that to understand the cemis' significance in Taino society one must place them in an analytical context in which their identity as individuals makes sense, and this involves understanding identity, personhood and power. Part III lays out the network of social relations between individuals and cemis and the circulation of these objects in the Taino social world. Part IV looks in detail at stone collars, elbow stones and guaizas. Part V analyses indigenous resistance to European conquest, a time when, Oliver argues

'... these potent objects were literally allies in the resistance put up by the native leadership against the onslaught of Christendom with their icons of saints and virgins. The struggle of the Antillean natives was in many ways a battle for the rule and survival of cemi idols' (p. 4).

Oliver does not end his analysis when the indigenous political leadership ultimately collapses, but rather follows the deeply-rooted conception that powerful numinous beings can be embodied in objects, as it is combined with Christian concepts through the centuries following conquest. He finds, '... echoes of Tainoness that survived into the eighteenth century in the cult of the Virgen de la Caridad dei Cobre, and the Virgen de Guadalupe' (p. 5).

Caciques and cemi idols is masterful in bringing together archaeology, linguistics, contemporary and historical ethnography, dose readings of the accounts of early European observers, and myths--both recorded at the time by Friars such as Ramon Pane and others, and drawn from the broader corpus of South American texts. The result is a rich, internally coherent and detailed account of the worldview and culture of the Taino people.

SAMUEL M. WILSON

Department of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin (TX), USA

(Email: [email protected])