Shared Image Metaphors of the Corn Lifeway in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest

Abstract

The corn lifeway originated in Mesoamerica and spread throughout the Americas. Unresolved is the mechanism by which this lifeway entered the American Southwest. In this article I offer new kinds of evidence to support the argument that corn was brought north with migrating maize farmers (e.g., Carpenter et al. 2002; Matson 2002), in contrast to the prevailing view that corn diffused northward via a down-the-line, group-to-group process (e.g., Merrill et al. 2009). I posit that if corn moved into the Southwest with migrating farmers, one should expect to find many similarities in the way a life dependent on corn is conceptualized and ritualized and, accordingly, in the way this belief system is manifest on media from the two areas. I specifically explore representations that are based on the maize metaphor—the concept that equates human life stages with those of corn growth. I use three forms of evidence to argue for and interpret the shared presence of this metaphorical perspective that heretofore have not been considered: (1) information about corn that explicates its growth stages and how they are manifested, (2) depictions of the natural resources needed to promote these stages of corn growth, and (3) informant testimony and ritual song texts that metaphorically describe the stages of corn growth.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.