Singing for Power

Ruth Murray Underhill’s Singing for Power is a pioneering exploration of the song magic of the Papago (now Tohono O’odham) people of southern Arizona. Drawing on fourteen months of immersive fieldwork in the 1930s, Underhill presents translations of ritual songs and orations that animate Papago life—from rainmaking and planting to hunting, war, and healing. Through these songs, she demonstrates how speech and rhythm were not mere expressions but acts of power, vividly describing desired events to bring them into being. Her translations are accompanied by careful cultural context, offering insight into the ways the Papago understood rain, animals, crops, and communal bonds as interwoven with the supernatural.

At once ethnography, poetry, and historical record, Singing for Power preserves ceremonies and oral traditions that were already in transition at the time of Underhill’s visits. From the “Papago Bible” recited at winter solstice to the cactus wine rituals that called down the rains, the book captures a worldview where song was the most valuable possession a person could hold. Underhill’s sensitivity to both the artistry and the practical force of these performances situates the work as a classic in anthropology and Native American studies, one that continues to resonate with scholars of ritual, oral tradition, and the desert Southwest.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1938.