LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature.
Donald R. Wehrs, Auburn University
In recent decades, Indigenous Studies has emerged as a vibrant field of academic scholarship, but one whose theoretical underpinnings and research agenda seem to put in question the concept of literary universals and thus its interpretative value. Making the recovery and delineation of indigenous ontologies and epistemologies its primary focus, Indigenous Studies argues that both diverge categorically from Eurocentric, post-Enlightenment notions of rationality and modern Western conceptualizing of experience. Highlighting the central roles played by Western forms of rationality and conceptualizing in justifying and orchestrating European colonizing violence, Indigenous Studies suggests that politically and morally dubious effects follow predictably from viewing “nature” as separate from and ontologically inferior to “culture,” and that among the most prominent of these effects is universalizing Eurocentric constructions of reason and “civilization.” Discourse in the field further contends that the very ontological-epistemological premises that underlay settler and resource-extractive European colonization continue to inform the theoretical assumptions and analytical practices through which contemporary academic discourse typically “sees” indigenous societies and cultures.
Much Indigenous Studies scholarship aims to recover and explicate modes of conceptualizing that have been partially lost or distorted. It also seeks to document the continuing relevance of retrieved or clarified ontologies and epistemologies for the people shaped historically by them, as well as to demonstrate indigenous thought’s abiding practical, political, and moral value (see Henne 2020; Vizenor 2019; Barker 2017; Lee 2017; Emberley 2014; Schwarz 2001). Critical Indigenous Studies, the field’s theoretical, methodological extension, works to expose, correct, and redress the hegemonic effects of academic discourse perceived as reading into radically different conceptual worlds supposed “universals” that are really modern Western notions and constructions. Aileen Moreton–Robinson describes Critical Indigenous Studies’ goal as that of “mobiliz[izing] Indigenous epistemologies to serve as foundations of knowledge informed by the cultural domains of Indigenous peoples” (2016, 4; also see Watchmán 2024; McCall et al. 2017; Lee 2014). Because the theorizing of “universals” is taken to be a central feature of the Eurocentric bent of dominant academic discourse, critique of such thought is identified with decolonizing scholarly interventions.
Indigenous Studies understands the ontologies and epistemologies it explores to differ among diverse peoples in multifarious ways. Still, the use of “Indigenous” as a collective noun implies that what is so identified shares certain features, above all ways of thinking that preclude separations of nature from culture as well as other Western binary, hierarchical intellectual legacies and assumptions. Indigenous thought is instead characterized as positing interactive reciprocities that shape relations among humans and nonhumans, thus bringing cosmic-divine, ecological-natural, and social-cultural agents or forces into diverse interconnecting networks (for representative discussions, see Henne 2020, 185-89; Rice 2004; Preuss 1988; McPherson 2014, 10-11; Watchmán 2024, 3-21; Werito 2014).
Allied with discourses in Indigenous Studies that associate scientific understandings of nature with Eurocentric marginalization or distortion of indigenous ontologies and epistemologies is an influential current of contemporary anthropological theory. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro argues that in contrast to Western notions of being/truth and rationality “a set of ideas and practices found throughout indigenous America” may be described as “perspectivism”—a “cosmology” that “imagines a universe peopled by different types of subjective agencies, human as well as nonhuman, each endowed with the same generic type of soul, that is, the same set of cognitive and volitional capacities”: jaguars are understood to see as beer what humans see as blood, and what humans see as “a muddy salt-lick on a river bank, tapirs see as their big ceremonial house, and so on” (2015, 58). The French anthropologist Philippe Descola, like Viveiros de Castro an Amazonia expert, builds on his Brazilian colleague’s work and his own studies, but also augments it with research from Australia, Siberia, Mesoamerica, Africa, and the Artic. On this comparative basis, Descola distinguishes what he calls “naturalism” (Eurocentric rationalist-scientific hierarchical separations of culture and nature that may be traced back to Genesis and Plato) from three distinct indigenous ontologies: animism, which attributes human-like souls to nonhuman life forms and objects; totemism, which traces group identity and attributes to an ancestral progenitor; and analogy, which views different entities as interrelated by common qualities and distinguished by minute differences or degrees. Descola argues that each of these ontologies figure identity, self-other relations, and world ordering differently, with significant consequences for cosmology, material and social life, and inter-communal relations (2013a, esp. 112-231; also see 2013b).
Despite sharing with Indigenous Studies a focus on ontology as central to conceptualizing and experiencing life in ways that Eurocentric universalizing occludes, Viveiros de Castro and Descola differ from one another on certain points. Whereas Viveiros de Castro, much influenced by Deleuze, is primarily concerned with viewing ontologies as expressions of culturally specific, communally distinctive perspectives, Descola stresses shared features among the ontologies he elaborates while noting permutations, and their causes and implications, within each type.
Still, Indigenous Studies and this current of anthropological theory concur in suggesting that radically disjunctive ontologies and epistemologies tend to fashion emotional-motivational systems likewise disjunctive and communally-ethnically circumstanced. This view diverges from scholarship in social and cognitive anthropology that regards diverse human cultures to be the products of different ways of interacting with and interpreting a nature whose internal processes are affected by cultural constructions but nonetheless distinct from them (see esp. Boyer 2018, 2001; Bloch 2013, 2012, 1998). The theorizing of literary universals likewise ascribes a degree of universality and autonomy to nature. For Descola such ascriptions are characteristic of “naturalist” (Western, scientific) ontology, for Viveiros de Castro they efface the primacy of difference, and for Critical Indigenous Studies they are associated with Eurocentric colonizing thought and discourse. But for theorizing of literary universals they underlie the postulating of evolutionarily honed, species-wide emotional-motivational systems, to which are attributed recurrences in separate traditions of literary features such as prototypical plot structures of heroism, romance, and sacrifice (Hogan 2024, 2022, 2018, 2011, 2003).
Notable ambiguities or internal tensions attend the contrasting accounts of Indigenous Studies, Viveiros de Castro, and Descola. The more determinate ontological-epistemological formulations are identified with particular peoples and societies, the more homogenous collective worldviews seem to be implied. This not only conflicts with evidence that group identities are never monolithic (see Appiah 2018) but also recalls Herder’s and Fichte’s notion that different ethnic-linguistic collectives have their own distinctive, signature Volkgeist—itself a Eurocentric legacy. Conversely, the more ontological-epistemological formulations overlap or resemble one another in related or unrelated cultures, the more reasonable it appears to understand them as following from shared, evolutionarily derived emotional-motivational systems interacting with specific ecological and socio-historical conditions.
Indeed, animist ontologies as Viveiros de Castro and Descola present them presume that souls have “universal” attributes, “the same set of cognitive and volitional capacities” (Viveiros de Castro 2015, 58), whether these “souls” are those of in-group humans, jaguars, tapirs, or out-group humans. To have a “soul,” for these ontologies, is to view what is encountered in terms of threats and affordances, to distinguish an interiority from exteriority, to be constrained to live from material in the environment, to have social affections, to seek status, and to regard as good what advantages oneself and those affiliated with oneself. Natural and social scientific accounts of human experience of consciousness, subjectivity, emotions, and motivations concur with indigenous accounts of souls on all these points. That others have emotional-volitional systems that are like one’s own but different in perspective entangles one with them in ways that are necessarily socially and ethically fraught.
This is especially the case because interdependence involves flourishing at another’s expense. It does so in relation to game animals for hunter-gatherer societies and out-group humans targeted by inter-communal raiding just as it does so in relation to peoples dispossessed and depopulated by settler colonialism and those whose low wages subsidize affordable computers for others. The degree to which ecological, biological, and social interdependence brings with it flourishing at a cost to others may vary, of course, and may be made more or less. Still, it is naïve to think that wellbeing in this life can ever be made free from indebtedness and prioritizing that is troubling because it cannot be entirely disinterested, equitable, or just. On the most basic level, children survive through the care and physical wear-and-tear expended by the generations they will displace, biological existence demands constant assimilation of energy and resources, and for those endowed with “souls” (or subjective self-awareness) there is no escaping giving some interests or perspectives more attention and value than others. However much hunter-gatherer societies feel kinship with and even apologize to the animals they hunt, they will continue to kill them if their own survival is perceived to depend on it (see Humphrey with Onon 1996, 91-92; Wewa and Gardner 2017, 44-47). Even when reluctance to do harm is raised to the level of a stringent ethics, as in Jainism, there is recognition that to exist is to “be there” instead of or at cost to something else (for amplification, see Wehrs 2024, 151-90). In most cases, individuals and communities do what they perceive as necessary for their own flourishing, albeit with varying degrees of regret, remorse, rationalization, symbolic or notional reparation, and selective contractions of empathy (see Zaki and Ochsner 2012, 2011). The way hunting societies view the game they live from is close to how James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, for example, encourage readers to think of native North Americans.
Because entanglement with others, human and nonhuman, is a “universal” exigency, not an effect of particular modes of conceptualizing, theorizing risks becoming disingenuous if it evades the question of whether an ontology should be valued simply because it is one’s people’s tradition (or another people’s tradition) or because it discloses insights or promotes moral tendencies that are transculturally valid or good. This particularly becomes a pressing matter when indigenous ontologies, identified with reciprocity and cooperation, are contrasted with Eurocentric ones, identified with hierarchy and domination. If any articulated ontology can be subjected to ethical critique on grounds other than internal self-contradiction, then no ontology can be presumed to be self-justifying—or open to evaluation only from within its own terms.
Ontological valorization of reciprocity and cooperation can extend ethical consideration to nonhuman forms of life and even ecological systems, but it can also support violent and appropriative practices, as in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societies where thinking of the gods as renewing the life-sustaining cosmological order in exchange for humans providing them blood motivated warfare to harvest captives for human sacrifice (see Fredrick 2024; Rice 2004; Preuss 1988, esp. 73-94). Similarly, valorization of difference—according it metaphysical irreducibility—can take problematic forms. Descola notes that for the Jivaro tribe of Amazonia “[b]y dint of shrinking” an enemy’s head, his “individuality” is “preserved” in ways that are “culturally usable yet at the same time perceived as different” (338). The very difference of perspective or “soul” associated with another’s head, and the worth accorded it, make collecting and shrinking heads an activity viewed as something “good,” socially conscientious members of the community ought to and will “naturally” want to participate in.
Additionally, the theoretical prioritizing of conceptualization prominent within Critical Indigenous Studies and allied discourses might be suspected of betraying unwarranted intellectualist assumptions about how humans, as individuals and members of societies, experience life, assess what is desirable, and make decisions. Such prioritizing notably gives pride of place to activities and spheres over which professors, and before them priests and scribes, claim expert knowledge. What people say they believe, however, and what notions and motives actually govern practical thought and action are often quite different. Literary art and storytelling craft are adept at calling these discrepancies to mind, and they do so in ways that guardians of regulative ontological-epistemological orthodoxies in various societies tend to find disconcerting, if not threatening (see Wehrs 2024, 11-43).
Indeed, consideration of the nature of the literary itself, rather than pointing out internal tensions within alternative academic discourses or appealing to “universality” as it is operative in scientific accounts of nature, offers the best defense of literary universals’ conceptual and interpretative value. Certainly, reading indigenous literary discourses for information about the normative ontological-epistemological notions of the societies from which they emerge is a legitimate and worthwhile scholarly activity, just as is reading non-indigenous literary works for the purpose of documenting prevalent social practices, attitudes, and topical controversies. But this is rather like reading Shakespeare to cull information about the “Elizabethan world picture,” except that E. M. W. Tillyard’s 1959 study of that title is notably not confused about its subject of study. Its interest in the ontological notions evoked for Elizabethans by words such as “dolphin” is in service of understanding the literary use Shakespeare made of them, as when Cleopatra calls Antony “dolphin-like.”
Literature that is of interest as literature, rather than of interest primary as a source of sociological-historiographical data or as one of many examples of a general abstract claim, does not simply express a people’s ontology (or a culture’s monolithic ideology), but rather invites critical reflection on what a given ontology (or its selective and often varied deployment) makes visible and occludes. While discursive techniques and forms may be deployed for various purposes (propaganda, invective, advertising, cheerleading), they become literary in a qualitative sense when made intrinsic to a work’s exploration of endemic and intractable human concerns (conflicts between generations, tensions between genders, dissonance between personal and communal interests, clashes among various motives and plausible notions of what is good). Because human emotional-volitional systems are species-wide evolutionary inheritances, the stories they give rise to assume the shapes of prototypical plots that are intelligible and meaningful across cultures. Even so, heroic, romantic, and sacrificial figurations (often interfused) may take on highly individuated forms which allows them to become nuanced means of eliciting critical reflection on the interplay between what is endemic and what is socio-culturally and psychologically peculiar. When this interplay is developed in strikingly artful and revelatory ways, the literary work survives the contexts of its creation and engages the moral imaginations of those whose conceptualized worlds are radically different from but uncannily receptive to those the work presumes and evokes.
It is best to conclude with brief example. In the Popol Vuh (or Popol Wuj), a narrative the moves from the creation of a pre-human world to the Spanish Conquest of the Quiché (or K’iche) Mayan people of Guatemala, two proto-human boys who are also gods defeat a giant bird, Seven Macaw. Surviving in an early 18th-century alphabetic Quiché manuscript with accompanying Spanish translation in the hand of a Spanish Catholic priest, the text hasgenerally been taken to be the work of mid-sixteenth-century Quiché nobles. They are thought to have transcribed or redacted the contexts of a much earlier hieroglyphic codex in an effort to preserve what they could of their culture from Spanish destruction. The narrative relates that the gods’ first efforts to create humans failed, causing them to destroy proto-humans by a great flood, after which was left a cosmic-natural order where there is not yet a sun but instead the overbearing Seven Macaw, whose self-enclosed, antisocial propensities made human life ecologically impossible (Tedlock 1996, 73-74).
Fully realized humans were acutely needed, however. Within Mayan ontological-cosmological frameworks,gods are not immortal. Since humans “alone bear the burden of carrying out life-renewing ceremonies so that rebirth can follow death naturally and at its proper time,” the gods (k’abawil) need humans to be their “providers and sustainers” (Christenson 2021, 21; 2007, 80). Indeed, the word for “sustainer,” q’o’l, denotes both “one who provides sustenance, primarily in the form of nourishment, but also in any other way—such as a mother caring for an infant” (21). The Quiché word thus interconnects organic, material wellbeing with affective, sociable moral actions and attitudes. Its use in the narrative implies that a world capable of sustaining human life binds together biological, ecological and social, moral dimensions of being.
“[D]efeat and destruction” (Tedlock 1996, 77) of Seven Macaw is attributed to “two boys,” Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who are also “gods.” Tedlock’s translation describes them as viewing as “evil” Seven Macaw’s attempted “self-magnification,” a judgment that accords with widespread oral discursive motifs, especially in trickster tales, that condemn and make comic sport of pomposity and bullying. Companionable cooperation against egoistic bullying likewise is often valorized, across cultures, as deliberative and morally sanctioned “virtuous” violence” (see Wrangham 2019, 222-72; Fiske and Rai 2015, esp. 1-34). Both English- and Spanish-language scholarship has long viewed the text as expressing moral condemnation of Seven Macaw’s pride or self-aggrandizement, most recently Fredrick’s 2024 study. Much in the manner of Critical Indigenous Studies, however, Nathan C. Henne argues that such readings project on the narrative a supposedly “universal” but really Eurocentric binary conceptualization of good/bad.
Henne suggests that the word translated as “evil,” itzel, more properly denotes “broken,” as in something not working right or effectively, and that what is rendered as “self-magnification,” nimarisaj rib, denotes “making oneself big.” On his account, the narrative does not imply a moral critique of antisocial self-aggrandizement, but simply relates that Seven Macaw’s time of acting as the sun has come to an end, for his brightness is insufficient for the world than will succeed the present one (2020, 99-138). Focusing on culturally distinctive ontology, Henne suggests, should disclose the Eurocentric, colonialist effects of projecting a supposed “universal” ethical framework on the narrative. By implication, viewing the Seven Macaw episode in terms of literary universals, as a variant of heroic plot structures in which, typically, a people’s wellbeing is threatened by invasion or tyranny but successfully defended, is unwittingly colonizing by being undiscerning of ontological difference.
It is certainly true that Mesoamerican and more broadly Native American creation accounts commonly posit a succession of worlds. It is also true that “making oneself big” in Maya contexts is not necessarily negative. Indeed, responsibility is associated with bearing a burden, as Allen J. Christenson notes in describing how humans are conceived as “alone bear[ing] the burden of carrying out life-renewing ceremonies so that rebirth can follow death naturally and at its proper time.” But whether a particular instance of making oneself big is viewed as good or not depends, across cultures, on what one makes oneself big for. Within Maya contexts, efficiency in managing burdens of responsibility is linked to enabling and maintaining ontological-ecological conditions on which human and nonhuman life depends. Responsibilities include assuring the reappearance of the sun and other celestial-temporal phenomena (see Rice 53, 58, 60, 99, 149), and sustaining prosperity from which the whole community benefits (Iannone, Houk, and Schwake 2016).
Because the good is so configured, to be “broken” in the sense of not working adequately to ensure ecological-social wellbeing may not in itself be “evil,” but to cling to a position of responsibility under such circumstances makes one an impediment or threat to intermingled natural-human-divine flourishing, and thus one’s actions and attitudes become “evil.” It is not necessary to presume an absolute, extramundane perspective (that of Plato’s forms or a transcendent monotheistic god) to view an effect or intention as “evil,” for what merits praise or warrants condemnation can be relative to this-worldly concerns and goals but nonetheless involve moral-social measures of value. If Seven Macaw’s time as sun has come to an end, his insistence on maintaining his position indefinitely is a form of “self-magnification” that blocks the making of the kind of world needed by k’abawil, humans, and nonhumans in order to thrive. For that reason, making oneself big when one is “broken” is to act “evilly.”
Further, the world being forestalled, on Henne’s own account, is one in which moral-sociable dimensions of humanly experienced life are taken to be ontologically-cosmologically structuring principles. The desired, optimal world is one in which “[a]ll beings and things transact continually with other realms that coincide in place (or that share some other transactional relationship)” (Henne 2020, 188). This characterization is consonant with others, such as Mary H. Preuss’s 1988 study, which stresses that Maya ontology associates the need and thus moral imperative of maintaining an appropriate equilibrium in the universe (“un equilibrio apropriado en el universo”), for all parts of the natural or existent world (“todos los sectores de la naturaleza”) need to work together (“juntos”) (14).
To the extent that Seven Macaw impedes the making of such a world, the Heroic Twins (as they are usually called) have good reasons (at once ontological-practical and moral-social) to remove him from power. Moreover, the violence they direct against Seven Macaw and his family, and the apparent reasons for it, much resembles patterns of violent removal of kings and elites perceived as failing to sustain communal wellbeing that may have been a recurrent feature of pre-European contact Maya political life, and that recent historiographical and archaeological studies have identified as occurring with particular intensity in the 800-830 CE era. The relation of those removals to “effectively bringing an end to Classic [Maya] style of kingship governance” (c. 250-900 CE) is a current area of scholarly inquiry (Iannone, Houk, and Schwake 2016, 21). Notably, sculptural iconographic representation of what appears to be the Heroic Twins’ attack on a large predatory bird deity can be traced back to Late Preclassic times (c. 400 BCE-100 CE), but in such depictions the bird deity’s dominant position and glorious apparel are emphasized, in contrast to the Popol Vuh text’s stress on Seven Macaw’s defeat and humiliation (see Guersey 2021, 268-94).
Recognizing that the Popol Vuh’s Seven Macaw episode draws on and reworks heroic prototypical plot structures that are literary universals is the beginning, not the end, of analysis. The twins defeat a threat to communal flourishing, but one that is not an invader whose aggression is a matter of territorial expansion, but one whose desire to perpetuate his own primacy threatens temporal-cosmological development, and thus the coming into existence of forms of combined ecological-social interaction that enable human (and nonhuman) wellbeing. The emphasis in Indigenous Studies on culturally distinctive ontologies and epistemologies contributes valuably to more nuanced, discerning, and appreciative readings of indigenous literary works, but it does so as a companion rather than alternative to interpretative work informed by consideration of the role literary universals play in giving works their distinctive tenor, texture, network of associations, evocations of emotions, and eliciting of reflection. In the Seven Macaw episode, intoxication with one’s own primacy is depicted as both a moral-social failing and an ontological-cosmological threat, one whose “heroic” overcoming is linked to subordinating making oneself big to ensuring that others can flourish. That separates the self-assertions of the twins from those of Seven Macaw, and provides “universal” ethical standards by which variously conceptualized and constructed worlds (those of gods, Quiché Mayan kingdoms, and Spanish colonizers) may with reason and in justice be assessed.
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