Cosmological and Natural Categories in Mvskoke Ritual and Medicine

Any ethnoecological understanding of the world is necessarily shaped by the composition and organization of culturally constructed categories developed through time and sustained through direct and continued experiences within distinct social and natural environments. Drawing from data derived from the author’s thesis fieldwork, this paper examines how the culturally implicit categories of Mvskoke peoples provide the cultural landscape upon which constructions of the self and one’s comprehension of the world is understood, shared, and rendered meaningful. Specifically, this paper shows how cosmological, ecological, and social categories interpenetrate to influence how Mvskoke people derive meaning from ceremonial rituals and behaviors, including the significance of the making and taking of certain traditional medicines.