pied settlements north of Mexico, the Hopi have always been considered directly and intimately tied to one locality (Oswalt 347). Their households consisted of a core of women-grandmother, daughters, and daughters, daughters-plus unmarried sons and in-marrying husbands (Oswalt 363). When the members of the matrilineal household grew too large, a new contiguous room was built so that all could remain and the farmland could continue to be held in common. This practice also allowed the family to maintain its kinship rituals. "The ritual obligations were passed down the most direct maternal line associated with the original lineage residence,, (Oswalt 364).
The Hopi ideas of man's relationship with the gods formed an orderly system bridging life and death, with differences between these two states ideally minimized. In fact, in Hopi mythology, the spirits of the deceased played a role in many of the groups, rituals including the rainmaking ceremonies. It was believed that deceased Hopis who descended to the lower world of a two-part (upper and lower) cosmos were transformed into Kachinas (gods) and assumed the forms of clouds where they manifested themselves as rainfall (Jorgensen 258). with rain essential to the growth of crops, this ceremony completed the ties between the living and the dead, the natural and the supernatural. "F
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