Best of
Anthropology

1981

Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind


Donald C. Johanson - 1981
    Bursting with all the suspense and intrigue of a fast paced adventure novel, here is Johanson’s lively account of the extraordinary discovery of “Lucy.” By expounding the controversial change Lucy makes in our view of human origins, Johanson provides a vivid, behind-the-scenes account of the history of pealeoanthropology and the colorful, eccentric characters who were and are a part of it. Never before have the mystery and intricacy of our origins been so clearly and compellingly explained as in this astonighing and dramatic book.

Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution


Ken Wilber - 1981
    New Foreword by the author.

The Reenchantment of the World


Morris Berman - 1981
    Focusing on the rise of the mechanistic idea that we can know the natural world only by distancing ourselves from it, Berman shows how science acquired its controlling position in the consciousness of the West. He analyzes the holistic, animistic tradition--destroyed in the wake of Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--which viewed man as a participant in the cosmos, not as an isolated observer. Arguing that the holistic world view must be revived in some credible form before we destroy our society and our environment, he explores the possibilities for a consciousness appropriate to the modern era. Ecological rather than animistic, this new world view would be grounded in the real and intimate connection between man and nature.

Think of These Things


Edgar Evans Cayce - 1981
    Readers often find themselves sharing these hopeful words with others.

The Way We Lived: California Indian Reminiscences, Stories, and Songs


Malcolm Margolin - 1981
    "An engaging portrait of our predecessors in California. Their stories, here brilliantly illuminated by Margolin's comments, contain beauty, humor, and wisdom" -Harold Gilliam, San Francisco Chronicle.

The Woman That Never Evolved


Sarah Blaffer Hrdy - 1981
    Surprising to those feminists who mistakenly think that biology can only work against women. And surprising to those biologists who incorrectly believe that natural selection operates only on males.In The Woman That Never Evolved we are introduced to our nearest female relatives competitive, independent, sexually assertive primates who have every bit as much at stake in the evolutionary game as their male counterparts do. These females compete among themselves for rank and resources, but will bond together for mutual defense. They risk their lives to protect their young, yet consort with the very male who murdered their offspring when successful reproduction depends upon it. They tolerate other breeding females if food is plentiful, but chase them away when monogamy is the optimal strategy. When promiscuity is an advantage, female primates--like their human cousins--exhibit a sexual appetite that ensures a range of breeding partners. From case after case we are led to the conclusion that the sexually passive, noncompetitive, all-nurturing woman of prevailing myth never could have evolved within the primate order.Yet males are almost universally dominant over females in primate species, and Homo sapiens is no exception. As we see from this book, women are in some ways the most oppressed of all female primates. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is convinced that to redress sexual inequality in human societies, we must first understand its evolutionary origins. We cannot travel back in time to meet our own remote ancestors, but we can study those surrogates we have--the other living primates. If women --and not biology--are to control their own destiny, they must understand the past and, as this book shows us, the biological legacy they have inherited.

Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880-1922


David A. Corbin - 1981
    These events resulted in an untold number of deaths, indictments of over 550 coal miners for insurrection and treason, and four declarations of martial law. Corbin argues that these violent events were collective and militant acts of aggression interconnected and conditioned by decades of oppression. His study will go a long way toward breaking down the old stereotypes of Appalachian and coal-mining culture.

Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought? The Traditional View of Art, Revised Edition with Previously Author's Unpublished Notes


Ananda K. Coomaraswamy - 1981
    This new edition of Coomaraswamy's classic book, considered his most important work on the philosophy of art, includes all of the revisions Coomaraswamy had wanted to add to the original edition.

The Origin of Language: A New Edition


Eric Gans - 1981
    “Mysteries should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” The Origin of Language remains as completely original and unprecedented (and intellectually demanding and satisfying) today as when it was originally published, so much so as to constitute a kind of intellectual scandal.

Journeys to the Past: Travels in New Guinea, Madagascar, and the Northern Territory of Australia


David Attenborough - 1981
    He watched a tribe making stone axes and met a pygmy people who wore extraordinary bulbous hats made from their hair clippings and woven to their scalps. On the island of Pentecost he marvelled at the courage of the sensational land-divers who jumped head first from a tower over eighty feet high with vines tied round their ankles. On Tanna he observed a cargo cult and talked to its leader, and on Tonga he filmed the Royal Kava ceremony, the most important and sacred of all the surviving ancient rituals.David Attenborough describes Madagascar as "one of Nature's lumber rooms, a place where antique outmoded forms of life that have long since disappeared from the rest of the world still survive in isolation". Here he observed many species of lemur, including the enchanting snow-white sifakas and the 'dog-headed man', the indris, about whom there are many legends; he collected fragments of the largest eggs in the world laid by the now extinct Aepyornis, and saw the ritual of the turning the dead.Finally, in the Northern Territory of Australia he filmed the aborigines' way of life, examined the remarkable rock paintings which parallel the first drawings made by mankind, learnt about the legends in which they describe their myths of the creation of the world, and met an old man who lived a hermit's life in a remote part of the outback in an upturned water tank.Vivid descriptions, hilarious incidents, and extraordinary encounters makes this book superb family reading.

Every Goy's Guide to Common Jewish Expressions


Arthur Naiman - 1981
    For one thing, my mother was nothing like the stereotype. She used to abandon me on our cabin floor for days at a time while she went out deer hunting...

Psychic Wholeness and Healing: Using All the Powers of the Human Psyche


Conrad W. Baars - 1981
    A spiritual approach to wholistic psychology.

Victims of Progress


John H. Bodley - 1981
    It shows how these small-scale societies have survived by organizing politically to defend their basic human rights, and shows that they are now being impacted by oil and natural gas development and tropical deforestation, as well as global warming. This compelling account of the effects of technology and development on indigenous peoples throughout the world examines major issues of intervention: social engineering, economic development, self-determination, health and disease, and ecocide. Victims of Progress provides a provocative context in which to think about civilization and its costs. In this new fifth edition, Bodley provides extensive new discussions on the increased political power of the Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic, the role of indigenous people in the Arctic Council, shifts in Aboriginal rights in Australia, and many new developments on the impact of global warming on indigenous populations around the world.

The Ethnic Phenomenon


Pierre L. van den Berghe - 1981
    While social classes are grouped according to common material interests, ethnic groups are organized by real or putative common descent--ultimately on the basis of common interests. The author argues that ethnic nepotism is, at its very foundation, biological. This new approach is expanded further, taking into account how ethnicity is responsive to a wide spectrum of environmental factors. He analytically relates his own ideological biases to the substance of his work. What results is an intensely personal book of monumental scope and admirable intellectual honesty.

Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk Healing


Robert T. Trotter II - 1981
    This is the first book to describe the practice from an insider's point of view, based on the authors' three-year apprenticeships with curanderos (healers).Robert T. Trotter and Juan Antonio Chavira present an intimate view of not only how curanderismo is practiced but also how it is learned and passed on as a healing tradition. By providing a better understanding of why curanderos continue to be in demand despite the lifesaving capabilities of modern medicine, this text will serve as an indispensable resource to health professionals who work within Mexican American communities, to students of transcultural medicine, and to urban ethnologists and medical anthropologists.

Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality


Peggy Reeves Sanday - 1981
    How does the culturally approved interaction between the sexes originate? Why are women viewed as a necessary part of political, economic, and religious affairs in some societies but not in others? Why do some societies clothe sacred symbols of creative power in the guise of one sex and not of the other? Professor Sanday offers solutions to these cultural puzzles by using cross-cultural research on over 150 tribal societies. She systematically establishes the full range of variation in male and female power roles and then suggests a theoretical framework for explaining this variation. Rejecting the argument of universal female subordination, Professor Sanday argues that male dominance is not inherent in human relations but is a solution to various kinds of cultural strain. Those who are thought to embody, be in touch with, or control the creative forces of nature are perceived as powerful. In isolating the behavioural and symbolic mechanisms which institute male dominance, professor Sanday shows that a people's secular power roles are partly derived from ancient concepts of power, as exemplified by their origin myths. Power and dominance are further determined by a people's adaptation to their environment, social conflict, and emotional stress. This is illustrated through case studies of the effects of European colonialism, migration, and food stress, and supported by numerous statistical associations between sexual inequity and various cultural stresses.

The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City


Nicole Loraux - 1981
    Arguing that the ceremony of public burial began circa 508-460 BCE, Loraux demonstrates that the institution of the funeral oration developed under Athenian democracy. A secular, not a religious phenomenon, a literary genre with fixed rhetoric effects, the funeral oration was inextricably linked to the epainos--praise of the city--rather than to a ritualized lament for the dead as is commonly assumed. Above all, the funeral oration celebrated the city of Athens and the Athenian citizen.Loraux interprets the speeches from literary, anthropological, and political perspectives. She explains how these acts of secular speech invented an image of Athens often at odds with the presumed ideals of democracy. To die in battle for the city was presented as an act of civic choice--the -fine- death that defined the citizen-soldier's noble, aristocratic ethos. At the same time, the funeral oration cultivated an image of democracy at a time when there was, for example, no formal theory of a respect for law and liberty, the supremacy of the collective and public over the individual and the private, or freedom of speech.This new edition of The Invention of Athens includes significant revisions made by Nicole Loraux in 1993. Her aim in editing the original text was to render this groundbreaking work accessible to nonspecialists. Loraux's introduction to this revised volume, as well as important revisions to the 1986 English translation, make this publication an important addition to scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences.

Skywatchers


Anthony F. Aveni - 1981
    Aveni, one of the pioneers in this new interdisciplinary field, couples basic astronomy with archaeological and ethnological data to present a readable and entertaining synthesis of what is known of ancient astronomy in this hemisphere.

Words of the Lagoon: Fishing and Marine Lore in the Palau District of Micronesia


R.E. Johannes - 1981
    Words of the Lagoon is an account of the pioneering work of a marine biologist to discover, test, and record the knowledge possessed by native fisherman of the Palau Islands of Micronesia.

The Soccer Tribe


Desmond Morris - 1981
    A coffeetable book around the sport of soccer and the world cup.

The Flowering of Ireland: Saints, Scholars and Kings


Katharine Scherman - 1981
    This book traces the era between the 5th & 12th centuries, when Ireland became the repository of classical Western civilization. Examining the meeting of two disparate cultures--the pagan Celts & the Christian saints & scholars--the author discusses how illuminated manuscripts, monastic libraries, and Romanesque churches preserved culture until the rest of Europe awakened from the Dark Ages.

The Rwala Bedouin Today


William Lancaster - 1981
    The author and his family spent several years with the Rwala Bedouin of the Arabian peninsula, living as they did. Lancaster's analysis focuses on Rwala social organization and the way in which the Rwala manipulate their social environment to cope with changing conditions. Like nomads everywhere, the Rwala are under pressure to come to terms with sedentarism and modernization; Lancaster examines the way in which they cope with what they see as an attack on their identity and autonomy.

Beyond Adversary Democracy


Jane J. Mansbridge - 1981
    Several rounds of enthusiastic applause, then, are due Jane Mansbridge . . . for having produced a dense and well written book whose subject is nothing less ambitious than the theory of democracy and its problems of equality, solidarity, and consensus. Beyond Adversary Democracy, however, is not simply a work of political theory; Mansbridge explores her abstract subject matter by close studies (using ethnographic, documentary, and questionnaire methods) of two small actual democracies operating at their most elemental American levels (1) a New England town meeting ("Selby," Vermont) and (2) an urban crisis center ("Helpline"), whose 41 employees shared a New Left-Counterculture belief in participatory democracy and consensual decision-making. [Mansbridge] is a force to contend with. It is in our common interest that she be widely read."—Bennett M. Berger, Contemporary Sociology

The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World


Pierre Vidal-Naquet - 1981
    Audacity has been characteristic of Vidal-Naquet's career from the start; it marked his activities as a historian engagé in the political struggle; it is visible at work in every page of this book."—Bernard Knox, from the ForewordThe black hunter travels through the mountains and forests of Greek mythology, living on the frontier of the city-state, of adulthood, of class, of ethics, of sexuality. Taking its title from this figure, The Black Hunter approaches the Greek world from its margins and charts the elaborate system of oppositions that pervaded Greek culture and society: cultivated and wild, citizen and foreigner, real and imaginary, god and man. Organizing his discussions around four principle themes—space and time; youth and warriors; women, slaves, and artisans; and the city of vision and of reality—Pierre Vidal-Naquet focuses on the congruence of the textual and the actual, on the patterns that link literary, philosophical, and historical works with such social activities as war, slavery, education, and commemoration. The Black Hunter probes the interplay of world view, language, and social practice "to bring into dialogue that which does not naturally communicate according to the usual criteria of historical judgement.

Waheenee: An Indian Girl's Story


Gilbert Livingstone Wilson - 1981
    In 1906 Gilbert L. Wilson first visited the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation and began to study the remnants of the Hidatsa tribe. He returned in 1908, sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, and for every summer of the next ten years he worked among the Hidatsas, making notes of all he saw. One of his chief informants was Waheenee-wea, or Buffalo-Bird Woman, who told him this, her life story.

Indian Running: Native American History and Tradition


Peter Nabokov - 1981
    The book describes many Indian running traditions and includes historical photos and 1980 photos by Karl Kernberger. Anthropologist Nabokov's books include "Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior and "Native American Testimony.

Indian Healing


Wolfgang G. Jilek - 1981
    The author aims at dispelling misconceptions and negative opinions by showing the traditional rituals to have well-defined and integrated therapeutic effects.

A Crack in the Mirror


Jay Ruby - 1981
    Embedded within it are clues to the personality of anthropology itself: the attitudes, approaches, even prejudices that at any given stage in history are inextricable from the ideology of the anthropologist. Therefore, the mirror he holds up to show us another culture can never be a perfect one. His own professional attitude toward his subject, as well as his choice of medium, are factors that create cracks in the mirror of anthropology through which we believe we view the life of other cultures.Hence, the concept of reflexivity and the striving to recognize how it warps in the portrayal of anthropological truth lie at the core of the twelve finely wrought essays collected in this volume. Wide ranging in geography as well as viewpoint, they highlight various methods and media (film, ethnography, text) through which an anthropologist chooses to portray a culture, and the various forms, such as art, theater, and ritual, through which a culture portrays itself. Recognizing the link between these two processes provides the key to cultural and methodological self awareness.Reflexivity is defined and clarified in the introduction and in three of the essays, and the remaining nine essays evince the principle through fieldwork and startling case studies. Essays by Jay Ruby and Eric Michaels shed new light on the enormous potential of film and video, showing how a form generally thought to be nonscientific can in fact give fresh insight into the scientific premises underlying the discipline's methodology. Essays by Barbara Babcock and Carol Ann Parssinen focus on the novel and ethnography, examining existing works.Anthropologists, as well as students of film, art, and theater, will find that this intriguing work begins to redefine traditional distinctions between science and the arts and brings to light fresh resources that are utilized in the search for anthropological truth.Contributors: Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Barbara Myerhoff, Jay Ruby, Eric Michaels, Dennis Tedlock, George Marcus, Paul Rabinow, Barbara Babcock, Carol Ann Parssinen, and Dan Rose.

Frankincense and Myrrh: A Study of the Arabian Incense Trade


Nigel Groom - 1981
    

Falkland Road: Prostitutes of Bombay


Mary Ellen Mark - 1981
    It is like any busy lower-class street in Bombay, densely populated by vendors, merchants and shops, but also overcrowded with girls, from 11-year-olds to 65-year-old ex-madams. The street is lined with old wooden buildings, which teem with prostitutes hanging out of the windows, in the viewing cages on the ground floor, and on the steps. From sunrise to sunset the customers pass down the street to survey the girls. Mary Ellen Mark's extraordinary portrait of Falkland Road was first published in 1981 and has long been recognized as one of the major bodies of work in the canon of this significant Magnum photographer. The book contains 65 photographs made over six weeks that show the daily life lived by the women (and men) of the street. Mark's images are beautiful, electric, shocking and remarkable for their emotional power and for the visceral brilliance of their color. Together with Mark's captions and introductory text, Falkland Road is an astonishing work of insight into a raw and frightening world, made accessible by the completeness of the photographer's involvement, by her humanity, and by the way she captures the variety of individual life and the color, passion and tenderness that still abide there.

Cultural Atlas of Africa, Revised Edition


Jocelyn Murray - 1981
    The CULTURAL ATLAS series aims to evoke the spirit and vitality of the world's great civilisations, past and present, through photography, maps and supporting text.

Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor


Lars Thunberg - 1981
    580-662) exerted a powerful formative influence on the Church when it was still one and undivided. Maximus left his stamp on Christianity as it is now recognized by all three broad streams of Christian faith: Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant. Yet for centuries the detailed study of Maximus's writings was neglected. The first edition of Thunberg's Microcosm and Mediator (1965) helped to transform this situation of indifference into one of intense interest in Maximus and the subtleties of his thinking. This new edition has been revised and expanded, with updated references and bibliographies. The focus of Microcosm and Mediator is Maximus's anthropology, his highly developed general reflections on human nature. Maximus understands man as, not only a being - a microcosm - who reflects the constitution of the created universe, but also as a being - a mediator - created in the image of God, whose task it is, in Christ, to reconcile the spiritual and the sensible into one homogeneous unity.

Eat Not This Flesh: Food Avoidances from Prehistory to the Present


Frederick J. Simoons - 1981
    Frederick J. Simoons's research remains original and invaluable, the only attempt of its kind to reconstruct the origin and spread of food avoidances while challenging current Western explanations. In this expanded and updated edition, Simoons integrates new research as he examines the use and avoidance of flesh foods—including beef, pork, chicken, and eggs, camel, dog, horse, and fish—from antiquity to the present day.    Simoons suggests that Westerners are too ready, even in the absence of supporting evidence, to cite contemporary thinking about disease and environmental factors to explain why certain cultures avoid particular kinds of meat. He demonstrates how historical and archaeological evidence fails to support such explanations. He examines the origin of pork rejection in the Near East, explores the concept of the sacred cow in India and the ensuing ban on beef, and reveals how some African women abstain from chicken and eggs, fearing infertility.      While no single explanation exists for food taboos, Simoons finds that the powerful, recurrent theme of maintaining ritual purity, good health, and well-being underlies diet habits. He emphasizes that only a full range of factors can explain eating patterns, and he stresses the interplay of religious, moral, hygienic, ecological, and economic factors in the context of human culture. Maps, drawings, and photos highlighting food avoidance patterns in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific provide additional information throughout the book.

Worship and Conflict Under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case


Arjun Appadurai - 1981
    Professor Appadurai develops such a framework in this ethnohistorical case study, in which he interprets the politics of worship in the Sri Partasarati Svami Temple, a famous ancient Sri Vaisnava shrine in India. The author uses the methods and concepts of both cultural anthropology and social history to construct a model of institutional change in South Asia under colonial rule. Focusing on the problem of authority as a cultural concept and as a managerial reality, Professor Appadurai considers some classic problems of South Asian anthropology: problems of deference, sumptuary symbolism, and religious organization. In addition, he addresses such issues as the nature of conflict under a hybrid colonial legal system, the political implications of sumptuary disputes, and the structure of relations between polity and religion in pre-modern South Asia. These aspects of the study should interest a broad range of scholars.

Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures


Eric Rofes - 1981
    From Dry Bones Breathe, you'll gain a deeper understanding of current community debates focused on circuit parties, unprotected sex, and gay men's sexual cultures, and you will learn how social, political, and biomedical changes are dramatically transforming gay identities and cultures.Dry Bones Breathe is Eric Rofes'explosive follow-up to Reviving the Tribe, a book which broke open debates in gay communities around the world about sex, identity, and gay men's relationship to AIDS. In this volume, Rofes contends that most gay men no longer experience AIDS as the crisis they did during the 1980s. Gay men often attribute this shift to the advent of protozoa inhibitors, but Rofes explains how other factors, including the epidemic's predicted trajectory, new treatments for opportunistic infections, the passage of time, and the increasing diversity of gay men inhabiting communities throughout the country have set in motion the transformation of gay life. AIDS organizations and gay leaders, however, continue to assert that gay men experience AIDS as an emergency, resulting in a tremendous dissonance between gay leaders and their communities. In the midst of this controversy, Dry Bones Breathe lets you share in stories of hope and recovery and a new vision for AIDS work that demands a radical redesign of prevention, care, and activism. Dry Bones Breathe tackles several other issues concerning the powerful shifts occurring in gay communities and cultures by:explaining why an understanding of the terms "post-AIDS" and "post-crisis" is crucial to interpreting contemporary gay male cultures and what Australian prevention theorists have to offer gay men in the United Statesdescribing the "Protozoa Moment" and exploring how a dangerous obsession with pharmaceuticals is leading many to mistakenly attribute all changes in gay men's cultures to combination therapiesexamining the writings of Larry Kramer, Andrew Sullivan, Michelangelo Signorile, and Gabriel Rightly to illustrate how the crisis construct has unleashed a backlash against gay sexual culturesdiscussing the dramatic diminution in gay men's AIDS-related deaths in epicenter cities and the impact of shrinking obituary pages on gay men's mental healthexploring the diverse relationships to the epidemic forged by young gay men, gay men of color, gay men from rural or small towns, and middle-aged men not infected with HIdetailing how HI prevention and service organizations targeting gay men must redesign their mission and restructure their work In response to continuing efforts to direct gay men back into a state of emergency, Dry Bones Breathe suggests that long-term prevention efforts must be constructed around something other than a crisis. While AIDS organizations look at gay men's diminished participation in AIDS activism, Rofes argues that these organizations should face how they have distanced themselves from the reality of most gay men's lives. From stories and experiences full of hope, anger, sadness, and strength, Dry Bones Breathe will teach you about gay men who no longer base their identities and cultures solely around AIDS.

The Hunters or the Hunted?: An Introduction to African Cave Taphonomy


Charles Kimberlin Brain - 1981
    K. Brain stands out as the pioneer; this impressive book is a statement of his investigations. . . . The Hunters or the Hunted? is a very important book for paleoanthropology. It presents the first thorough analysis of the Sterkfontein Valley assemblages, contributes significantly to the resolution of lingering controversies and, by placing the old information in a fresh perspective, enables new and more sophisticated questions to be asked not only of the South African material but of similar assemblages elsewhere. Another contribution is that it reinforces the recent change in feelings as to what constitutes data, for the value of looking at fossil and contemporary bones as closely as this is clear. Brain urges the necessity of recovering fossils with a high regard for subtle detail. I hope excavators of any vertebrate fossil site will be persuaded to follow his advice and pay more attention to these features of bone accumulations that have been previously neglected; for taphonomy can be a powerful tool in elucidating the problems of fossil assemblages, especially when handled with the care and caution that Brain brings to the subject."-Andrew Hill, Nature

Fei Xiaotong and Sociology in Revolutionary China


R. David Arkush - 1981
    Trained in London under Malinowski, Fei Xiaotong achieved eminence in the 1930s and 1940s for his pioneering studies of Chinese peasant life and for his popular articles, which stirred a wide audience in China to an awareness of social and political problems. A non-Marxist who came to sympathize with the Communists, Fei was gradually constrained in his activities after the Revolution until, in the 1950s, a massive propaganda campaign vilified him as a bourgeois rightist intellectual. Almost twenty years of silence and disgrace followed. Only recently, following the death of Mao, has Fei suddenly reemerged as a leader in the effort to revitalize the social sciences in China. The story of Fei's life told here is, in a sense, the story of Westernized intellectuals in China at a time of peasant revolution. His writings enunciate the views of a sensitive observer of Chinese and Western society during that period of dramatic change.