JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Duke University Press and The American Society for Ethnohistory are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethnohistory.
AbstractEvidence assembled and examined in this article reviews a prehistoric revolt by the Cherokees against a priestly class or hereditary clan, the Ani-Kutain, whose members, according to legend, were massacred in a public uprising in response to their corruption and sexual improprieties. Some evidence relates the Ani-Kutani to the historic Cherokee clan, the Ani-gilohf; and some, to the historic Cherokee Fire priests. The author interprets the legend as a dramatic epitomization of Cherokee cultural processes by which tendencies towards hierarchy conflicted with tendencies towards egalitarianism.The relation between tradition and history has been the subject of endless controversy....
Fred Eggan, From History to MythThe course of Southeastern prehistory and protohistory does not reflect an orthogenic development from simple social structures to complex structures. Rather, the pattern appears to be more cyclic: a build-up of energy, a concentration of wealth, more differentiated social stratification, and increased population nucleation, followed by a seemingly entropic decline, a movement toward egalitarianism, population dispersal, and abandonment of ceremonial centers. Many explanations on many different levels have been advanced to account for this cyclicity: for instance, various ecological factors and constraints on the carrying capacity of the land; changes in modes of production, distribution, and consumption; the influence of disease; the effects of migration and warfare; Kroeberian "cultural fatigue"; the rapid diffusion of religious movements; and periodic endogenous overthrow of civil-religious authority.The last form of internal conversion or transformation-a revolt against authority-possesses great romantic appeal. Such prehistoric or protohistoric revolts are difficult to document however, especially since one person's revolution becomes another person's evolution, involution, or devolution. Nevertheless, the Cherokees possessed a persistent and fairly widespread historical legend about a priestly class or hereditary clan whose members were massacred in a public uprising in response to their corruption and sexual impropriety.The priesthood was called the An'-Kuttni. The prefix Ani indicates a group of individuals; the etymology of the root term Kutini or Kwatcni is unknown. According to James Mooney (1900, 342), knowledge of the Ani-Kutani was rapidly perishing when he did his Cherokee fieldwork in the late 19th century. He reports two native theories as to the origins of the Ani-Kutani. One theory held that they we...