Abstract
In the mid-1500s, soon after the small army of conquistador Francisco Vazquez de Coronado conquered the Zuni people of present-day New Mexico, there must have been occasions in November or December when Spanish visitors to the Zuni pueblo would have seen a communal ritual centered on the performance of larger-than-life Shalako puppets. Shalako figures are giant rod-puppets about twelve-feet tall whose prominent feature is a large wooden birdlike head with goggle eyes, a feathered crown, and a moveable two-piece beak that clacks like a slapstick to produce its distinctive percussive sound. The head is attached to a single vertical pole held at the waist by the puppet’s solo operator, and colorful blankets hanging from the puppet head conceal the puppeteer all the way down to his shins.
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Notes
Matilda Coxe Stevenson, The Zuni Indians: Their Mythology, Esoteric Fraternities, and Ceremonies (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1970) Plate LX.
Eliza McFeely, Zuni and the American Imagination (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001) 12.
Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (New York: Henry Holt, 1907) vi.
See Vincent Scully, Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)
Barbara Tedlock, The Beautiful and the Dangerous: Encounters with the Zuni Indians (New York: Viking, 1992).
Frank Hamilton Cushing, My Adventures in Zuni (Palmer Lake, CO: Filter Press, 1998) 24.
Frank Hamilton Cushing, My Adventures in Zuni (Palmer Lake, CO: Filter Press, 1998) 24.
Jesse Walter Fewkes, “A Theatrical Performance at Walpi,” Proceedings of the Washington Academy of Sciences 2 (1900): 605.
Frank Cushing, “Zuñi Fetiches,” Zuñi: Selected Writings of Frank Hamilton Cushing, ed. Jesse Green (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976) 196.
Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1992) 252, 98.
Jesse Walter Fewkes, Hopi Katchinas (New York: Dover, 1985) 106
Richard Huelsenbeck, ed. Dada Almanac (London: Atlas Press, 1994) 23.
Quoted in John Bell, “From Übermarionettes to Television Puppetry: Percy Mackaye and Remo Bufano,” Puppetry International 12 (Fall 2002): 40.
Edmund Wilson, “Zuni: Shálako,” The Edmund Wilson Reader, ed. Lewis Dabney (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997) 607.
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© 2008 John Bell
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Bell, J. (2008). Shalako Puppets and Nineteenth-Century Ritual. In: American Puppet Modernism. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613768_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613768_3
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