At the end of each visit, photographer and family collaborated on a remarkable portrait of the family members outside their home, surrounded by all of their possessions—a few jars and jugs for some, an explosion of electronic gadgetry for others. Vividly portraying the look and feel of the human condition everywhere on Earth, this internationally acclaimed bestseller puts a human face on the issues of population, environment, social justice, and consumption as it illuminates the crucial question facing our species today: Can all six billion of us have all the things we want?

    The story tells of his return to his people, his hard initiation back into those people, which lead to his desire to convey their knowledge to the world. "Of Water and the Spirit" is the result of that desire; it is a sharing of living African traditions, offered in compassion for those struggling with our contemporary crisis of the spirit.

    In fact, right up to the Industrial Revolution the fiber arts were an enormous economic force, belonging primarily to women.Despite the great toil required in making cloth and clothing, most books on ancient history and economics have no information on them. Much of this gap results from the extreme perishability of what women produced, but it seems clear that until now descriptions of prehistoric and early historic cultures have omitted virtually half the picture.Elizabeth Wayland Barber has drawn from data gathered by the most sophisticated new archaeological methods—methods she herself helped to fashion.

    Presents an illustrated history of North American Indians from their origins to the present, and includes contemporary interviews and excerpts from journals.

    The compelling drama of American herbologist Rosita Arvigo's quest to preserve the knowledge of Don Elijio Panti, one of the last surviving and most respected traditional healers in the rainforest of Belize.

    Penetrating, gripping, and provocative, this book combines natural history, anthropology, and ecology on an epic scale. Illustrations.

    Based on the most massive study of human mating ever undertaken, encompassing more than 10,000 people of all ages from thirty-seven cultures worldwide, The Evolution of Desire is the first book to present a unified theory of human mating behavior.Now in an updated edition with two new chapters by the author, The Evolution of Desire presents the latest research in the field, including starting new discoveries about the evolutionary advantages of infidelity, orgasm, and physical attractiveness.

    "An intellectually dazzling view of our past and future."--Time magazineContents1. How humans have repeatedly lost hope, and how new encounters, and a new pair of spectacles, revive them2. How men and women have slowly learned to have interesting conversations3. How people searching for their roots are only beginning to look far and deep enough4. How some people have acquired an immunity to loneliness5. How new forms of love have been invented6. Why there has been more progress in cooking than in sex7. How the desire that men feel for women, and for other men, has altered through the centuries8. How respect has become more desirable than power9. How those who want neither to give orders nor to receive them can become intermediaries10. How people have freed themselves from fear by finding new fears11. How curiosity has become the key to freedom12. Why it has become increasingly difficult to destroy one’s enemies13. How the art of escaping from one’s troubles has developed, but not the art of knowing where to escape to14. Why compassion has flowered even in stony ground15. Why toleration has never been enough16. Why even the privileged are often somewhat gloomy about life, even when they can have anything the consumer society offers, and even after sexual liberation17. How travellers are becoming the largest nation in the world, and how they have learned not to see only what they are looking for18. Why friendship between men and women has been so fragile19. How even astrologers resist their destiny20. Why people have not been able to find the time to lead several lives21. Why fathers and their children are changing their minds about what they want from each other22. Why the crisis in the family is only one stage in the evolution of generosity23. How people choose a way of life, and how it does not wholly satisfy them24. How humans become hospitable to each other25. What becomes possible when soul-mates meet

    Previous edition: c1994.

    Wright unveils the genetic strategies behind everything from our sexual preferences to our office politics--as well as their implications for our moral codes and public policies. Illustrations.

    He describes 16 orisha and shows us how to work with divination, to use the chakras to internalize the teachings of Yoruba, and describes howto create a sacred place of worship. Includes prayers, dances, songs, offerings, and sacrifices to honor the orisha and egun. Illustrations, charts, glossary, bibliography, and index.

    William Maples can deduce the age, gender, and ethnicity of a murder victim, the manner in which the person was dispatched, and, ultimately, the identity of the killer.  In Dead Men Do Tell Tales, Dr. Maples revisits his strangest, most interesting, and most horrific investigations, from the baffling cases of conquistador Francisco Pizarro and Vietnam MIAs to the mysterious deaths of President Zachary Taylor and the family of Czar Nicholas II.

    Through these studies, noted Egyptologist Bob Brier has unearthed the gripping stories of grave robberies and stolen mummies, the forgotten language of the pharaohs, and the tombs of the royal mummies. In an easily accesible and lively style, Brier uncovers the complete historical context of ancient Egyptian culture and offers a fascinating contemporary interpretation of it. Illuminating their mysteries, myths, sacred rituals, and heiroglyphic writing, Egyptian Mummies brings the ancients to life.

    By mapping the worldwide geographic distribution of genes for over 110 traits in over 1800 primarily aboriginal populations, the authors charted migrations and devised a clock by which to date evolutionary history. This monumental work is now available in a more affordable paperback edition without the myriad illustrations and maps, but containing the full text and partial appendices of the authors' pathbreaking endeavor.

    His work in etching spanned most of his career and embraced the wide range of subjects he pursued in his painting: portraits, landscapes, biblical scenes, pictures with allegorical and mythological themes, and more. This comprehensive collection contains Rembrandt's complete etchings — over 300 works — shown in their original size. They have been reproduced directly from a rare collection famed for its pristine condition, fresh, clean impressions, rich contrasts, and brilliant printing. Among the etchings included are: Self portrait drawing at a window (1648); Abraham's sacrifice (1655); Christ preaching ["The undered-guilder print"] (ca. 1643–49); Christ crucified between the two thieves ["The three crosses"] (1653); The return of the prodigal son (1636); The three trees (1643); Faust (ca. 1652); Jan Six (1647); The great Jewish bride (1635); The strolling musicians (ca. 1635). The etchings are reproduced in their actual size rather than from reduced photographs, which can depart significantly in quality from the originals. This handsome volume is filled with information critical to fully appreciating the extraordinary images it contains. Detailed captions point out features of special interest and provide vital information such as title, signature, date, collection, Bartsch number, state of impression reproduced, and total number of states. Also included are a chronology of Rembrandt's life and etchings, a discussion of the technique of etching in his time, and an excellent bibliography. Art lovers, scholars, students of etching, and anyone with an interest in Rembrandt and his work will find in this beautiful book a rare and exciting visual experience.

    

    The book 'multiculturalizes' media studies by looking at Hollywood movie genres such as the western, the musical and the imperial film from multicultural perspectives, examining issues from the racial politics of casting to colonialist discourse and gender and Empire.More than just a critique of Eurocentrism and racism, Unthinking Eurocentrism also confirms artistic, cultural and political alternatives, discussing a wide range of non-Eurocentric media including Third World films, rap video and indigenous media. Synthesising literary theory, meida theory and cultural studies to form a challenging interdisciplinary study, the authors argue that current debatess about Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism are merely surface manifestations of a deep-rooted shift: the decolonisation of global culture.

    David Peat went to a Blackfoot Sun Dance ceremony. Having spent all of his life steeped in and influenced by linear Western science, he was entranced by the Native American worldview and, through dialogue circles between scientists and native elders, he began to explore it in greater depth. Blackfoot Physics is the account of his discoveries. In an edifying synthesis of anthropology, history, metaphysics, cosmology, and quantum theory, Peat compares the medicines, the myths, the languages--the entire perceptions of reality of the Western and indigenous peoples. What becomes apparent is the amazing resemblance between indigenous teachings and some of the insights that are emerging from modern science, a congruence that is as enlightening about the physical universe as it is about the circular evolution of humanity's understanding. Through Peat's insightful observations, he extends our understanding of ourselves, our understanding of the universe, and how the two intersect in a meaningful vision of human life in relation to a greater reality.

    

    Indeed, as Angeles Arrien displays in this reissued edition of Signs of Life, shapes have significant psychological and mythological meanings embedded in our minds. Understanding the messages they convey and our attraction to them opens up a door to the secret workings of our inner selves and to a fuller appreciation of the art itself.As in her widely popular The Tarot Handbook, Arrien applies her background as a cultural anthropologist to the import human beings attribute to shapes. Examining her results, she has developed an effective tool to determine the connection between a person's preferences for certain shapes and the same person's inner, subjective states. In the course of using Arrien's book, individuals, parents, teachers, and therapists will experience the universal processes of growth embodied in images and myths.Life, we discover, is art, and through Arrien's fascinating journey in Signs of Life, we gain a new perception of the omnipresent patterns and symbols that surround us.Illustrated throughout with drawings and photographs

    He is directly responsible for discoveries that have forced the scientific community to recast its thinking about the nature of the mind and the origins of language. He is Kanzi, an extraordinary bonobo chimpanzee who has overturned the idea that symbolic language is unique to our species. This is the moving story of how Kanzi learned to converse with humans and the profound lessons he has taught us about our animal cousins, and ourselves.". . . The underlying thesis is informative and well argued . . . Savage-Rumbaugh's results are impressive." — The Washington Post"This popular, absorbing, and controversial account is recommended." — Library Journal

    Arlo Nimmo tells of a young man coming of age while living among a remote cluster of islands in the southern Philippines with a people unlike any he had known. Nimmo combines an anthropologist's eye for the significant detail with a storyteller's gift for bringing his characters to life. His book is a vivid narrative of a people and their culture on the brink of momentous change. The Songs of Salanda is Nimmo's deeply personal exploration of his early anthropological field experiences in the Sulu archipelago. During two years in the mid-1960s, he researched the culture of the Bajau, a small group of nomadic boat-dwellers who plied the waters off the southernmost Philippine islands in small single-family houseboats. Nimmo's stories are based on the people, places, and events he encountered. By the 1970s the Bajau way of life had largely disappeared, an indirect casualty of the Marcos regime's war against the Muslims of Sulu. Nimmo's testimony about his experience of the archipelago is thus an ethnographic treasure. Nimmo reveals the complex and sometimes dissonant diversity that characterizes Philippine island dwellers. In each story, someone new comes sharply to life and a fresh perspective is opened for the reader. A misanthropic Chinese fish buyer, a brother and sister who sell sexual favors to save the family business, an imprisoned young man believed to be possessed by demons, an American GI who senses his impending death in the battlefields of Vietnam, and a Muslim pirate rebelling against the Christian Philippine government are among the characters capturing a time and place which are now lost forever.

    This firsthand account illuminates the different logic of the Navajo and Hopi in a rough-and-tumble bygone world. 24 photos.

    Lubell's artistic and literary sources support the argument that from the earliest moments of civilization, humans have respected and revered female sexual energy, graphically symbolized in the vulva, as an indispensable force in the balance of nature. Over the ages, the images of Baubo and her sisters assumed deviant and disturbing forms, but the basic lines of her legend and its visual manifestations were not completely obscured. Nor, as this book will show, has Baubo's essential power been destroyed even in our own age.

    Anthropology's contributions explored for cross-cultural understanding of epistemology, globalism, urbanization, church planting, spiritual warfare.

    

    Calling on the new means contemporary thinkers have used to understand the body, Alphonso Lingis explores forms of power, pleasure and pain, and libidinal identity. The book contrasts the findings of theory with the practice of the body as formulated in quite different kinds of language--the language of plastic art (the artwork body builders make of themselves), biography, anthropology and literature. Lingis explains how we experience our own powers of perception, our postures, attitudes, gestures and purposive action; how our susceptibility to pain and excitability by pleasure acquiesce in and resist the ways they are identified and manipulated today; how cultures code our sensuality with phallic and with fluid identities; how others dress appeals to and puts demands on us.

    A richly diverse anthology of Native American literatures draws on the work of more than two hundred tribes across the United States and Canada and provides information on the historical and cultural contexts of the stories, songs, prayers, and orations.

    The development apparatus generated categories powerful enough to shape the thinking even of its occasional critics while poverty and hunger became widespread. Development was not even partially deconstructed until the 1980s, when new tools for analyzing the representation of social reality were applied to specific Third World cases. Here Escobar deploys these new techniques in a provocative analysis of development discourse and practice in general, concluding with a discussion of alternative visions for a postdevelopment era.Escobar emphasizes the role of economists in development discourse--his case study of Colombia demonstrates that the economization of food resulted in ambitious plans, and more hunger. To depict the production of knowledge and power in other development fields, the author shows how peasants, women, and nature became objects of knowledge and targets of power under the gaze of experts.

    Recent texts which fall under this rubric rely on unexamined notions of “sisterhood” and the recovery of “lost” voices. In these essays about her work with women in Southern India, Kamala Visweswaran addresses such troubled issues. Blurring distinctions between ethnographic and literary genres, these essays employ the narrative strategies of history, fiction, autobiography and biography, deconstruction, and post-colonial discourse to reveal the fictions of ethnography and the ethnography in fiction.

    Most linguists today believe that there is no good evidence that the Indo-European family of languages is related to any other language family, or even any other language. In like manner, the New World is deemed to contain hundreds of language families, among which there are no apparent links. Furthermore, it is claimed, there are no known connections between the languages of the Old World and those of the Americas. And finally, the strongest belief of all is that there is no trace of genetic affinity—nor could there be—among the world’s language families. The author argues that all of these firmly entrenched—and vigorously defended—beliefs are false, that they are myths propagated by a small group of scholars who have failed to understand the true basis of genetic affinity. Twentieth-century Indo-Europeanists (though not their nineteenth-century forebears) have confused the issue of genetic affinity, which derives from classification, with such traditional concerns of historical linguistics as reconstruction and sound correspondences. Once it is recognized that taxonomy, or classification, must precede these traditional concerns, the apparent conflict between the traditional view and that of Joseph Greenberg and his followers is seen to be illusory. And finally, a comparison of all the world’s languages in this new perspective leaves little doubt that all extant human languages share a common origin.

    Evocative essays describe the sites and explain the spiritual significance of each as well as its connections with religious leaders and holy figures. Color photographs, paintings, locations maps and a practical gazetteer help pilgrims and visitors find their way and offer suggestions on what to see when they arrive.

    Presents a variety of short stories, autobiographies, and other narratives by modern Native Americans that reveal how their approach to life affects the stories they tell.

    The idea of the 'world system' advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein has set the period of linkage in the early modern period. But some academics think this date is much too late and denies a much longer interconnection going back as much as five thousand years. Reframing the chronology of the world system exercises powerful influences on the writing of history. It integrates the areas of Asia and the East which were marginalized by Wallerstein into the heart of the debate and provides a much more convincing account of developments which cannot otherwise be explained. It undermines the primacy claimed for Europe as the major agent of economic change, an issue with implications far beyond the realm of history.

    They were first made in Egypt as early as 4000 BC and were essential adornments for both the living and the dead. Crafted from gold and silver, semiprecious stones, and less valuable materials, they are fine examples of Egyptian art as well as a vital source of evidence for religious beliefs.In this book, Carol Andrews offers the first comprehensive account of the types of amulets made, their symbolism, and their protective powers. An amuletic foot could be worn to ensure fleetness of foot, a hand for dexterity. The desert-dwelling hare symbolized keenness of the senses, and the hedgehog, which hibernated and survived outside the fertile valley, held connotations of rebirth and triumph over death itself. The ubiquitous amulet in the shape of the dung beetle, known as a scarab, was symbolic of new life. Amulets in the image of powerful gods would be worn for protection, and malevolent creatures, like the male hippopotamus, would be worn to ward off the evil they represented.Both a reference book and an informative account of Egyptian magical belief, this is the most complete survey of the subject to date.

    Using phenomenological and critical historical tools, Wolfson examines Jewish mystical texts from late antiquity, pre-kabbalistic sources from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and twelfth- and thirteenth-century kabbalistic literature. His work demonstrates that the sense of sight assumes an epistemic priority in these writings, reflecting and building upon those scriptural passages that affirm the visual nature of revelatory experience. Moreover, the author reveals an androcentric eroticism in the scopic mentality of Jewish mystics, which placed the externalized and representable form, the phallus, at the center of the visual encounter.In the visionary experience, as Wolfson describes it, imagination serves a primary function, transmuting sensory data and rational concepts into symbols of those things beyond sense and reason. In this view, the experience of a vision is inseparable from the process of interpretation. Fundamentally challenging the conventional distinction between experience and exegesis, revelation and interpretation, Wolfson argues that for the mystics themselves, the study of texts occasioned a visual experience of the divine located in the imagination of the mystical interpreter. Thus he shows how Jewish mystics preserved the invisible transcendence of God without doing away with the visual dimension of belief.

    His centralthesis concerning the gendering of power relations in the Oyo Empire, and its continuing expression in the cult of Sango, is brilliant and original. The symbolic analysis of contemporary initiation to the Sango cult ... shows real virtuosity ... [Also] of great value is his account of the state of religious heterogeneity in Oyo North. This book should make a significant mark outside the field of Yoruba studies, in the anthropology of gender at large." - J.D.Y. Peel, FBA, University of London "An exemplary exercise in historical anthropology ... with interpretive and forensic skill [the author] narrates how the traditions of Sango and Ogun are carried into and participate inthe post-independence political and economical developments, and how they relate to contemporary Islamic and Christian religious streams." - Stanley J. Tambiah, Harvard University"A bold and innovative study of the interplay between gender, power and religion. Its relevance to feminist theory is unquestionable ... Gender categories and all that is associated with them are changed by the negotiation of politically interested actors, both male and female ... It situates itself within a 'mythic' paradigm which, the author argues, is close to indigenous conceptualizations of the past and present; but at the same time it is unmistakably located in the real, hybrid and confusing world of contemporary Nigeria, and not in some idealized world of 'tradition'." - Karin Barber, University of Birmingham"[Matory's] richly argued text, strong with insight, strong with documents, is a classic in Yoruba studies." - Robert F. Thompson, Yale University"This second edition of the seminal [book] seems more salient in retrospect as the international interest in orisha worship and the meaning of transatlantic aesthetics that claim a Yoruba ancestry increases...Along with his theoretical guidance, Matory provides rich procedural, ritual detail that contextualizes the multifaceted aspect of orisha worship for specific sets of completed ritual communities." - International Journal of African Historical StudiesJ. Lorand Matory researches the trans-Atlantic comings and goings of Yoruba religion, as well as ethnic diversity in Black North America. With the support of the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education's Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, he has conducted extensive field research in Brazil, Nigeria, and the United States. Dr. Matory is also the author of Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candombl� (Princeton University Press). He is currently researching a book on the history and experience of Nigerians, Trinidadians, Ethiopians, black Indians, Louisiana Creoles and other ethnic groups that make up black North American society. It focuses on the creative coexistence of these groups at the United States' leading "historically Black university"-Howard University

    Mike Marqusee, an American who has lived in England for twenty years, turns the amused gaze of an outsider on to the idiosyncrasies of the English at play, delving into the interminable wrangles over coloured clothing, covered pitches and commercial sponsorship. Yet Marqusee also displays the knowledgeability and passion of a dedicated cricket follower who has watched matches on four continents. His elegant and concise accounts of the origins of the game, its romance with the British Empire, and its traumatic adjustment to the modern market lift the lid on the paradoxes and hypocrisies that have made cricket what it is: democratic and elitist, national and international, ancient and modern. In a revealing scrutiny of the long saga of South Africa''s exclusion from world cricket, Marqusee charts England''s collusion with apartheid. Spectacularly failing the Tebbit test on every point, his eye-opening account of Pakistan''s controversial ''ball-tampering'' tour of England will provoke intense debate amongst cricket fans about the role of both the media and racism in the modern game. From the phoney war over the omission of Gower from the England side to England''s women cricketers receiving the World Cup outside the Lord''s pavilion from which they are banned, Anyone But England goes where no cricket book has gone before. In so doing it sheds new light not only on cricket but also on what it means to be part of a nation for whom the game is well and truly up.

    Mary Jackman employs a unique national survey to investigate all three of the most prominent relations of inequality in the United States: gender, class, and race. Where other scholars have emphasized conflict as the emblem of intergroup oppression, Jackman proposes a theory in which both dominant and subordinate groups maneuver to avoid open hostility as they strive to control resources within the confines of their mutual relationship.Hostility, Jackman points out, creates resistance in a relationship. Dominant groups therefore try to preempt the use of force by following a velvet-glove strategy of "sweet persuasion." They are drawn especially to the ideological mold of paternalism, in which the coercion of subordinates is grounded in love rather than hate. Dominant-group members pronounce authoritatively on the needs and welfare of all and then profess to "provide" for those needs. Love, affection, and praise are offered to subordinates on strict condition that they comply with the terms of the unequal relationship. Whether in the home or in the arena of class or race relations, paternalism wraps control and authority in an ideological cocoon in which discriminatory actions are defined as benevolent and affection is made contingent on compliance.Jackman's emphasis on the practice of coercive love in race, class, and gender relations is sure to generate controversy and further research. Sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and anyone interested in group ideology will find here a provocative challenge to conventional views.

    Collects eighteen essays on various facets of traditional and modern Yoruba art, with examples of sculpture, paintings, and ritual objects.

    Radical testimonies from indigenous Pacific women on vital issues affecting their future, from nuclear experimentation and the impact of tourism to oceanic pollution and more.

    

    "These were letters written to friends," Lingis writes, "from places I found myself for months at a time, about encounters that moved me and troubled me. . . . These writings also became no longer my letters. I found myself only trying to speak for others, others greeted only with passionate kisses of parting."Ranging from the elevated Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, to the living rooms of the Mexican elite, to the streets of Manila, Lingis recounts incidents of state-sponsored violence and the progressive incorporation of third-world peoples into the circuits of exchange of international capitalism. Recalling the work of such writers as Graham Greene, Kathy Acker, and Georges Bataille, Abuses contains impassioned accounts of silence, eros and identity, torture and war, the sublime, lust and joy, and human rituals surrounding carnival and death that occurred during his journeys to India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Bali, the Philippines, Antarctica, and Latin America. A deeply unsettling book by a philosopher of unusual imagination, Abuses will appeal to readers who, like its author, "may want the enigmas and want the discomfiture within oneself."

    Wisdom of the Mythtellers uncovers four kinds of ancestral dream-mapping: Native Australian, Native America, Celtic, and Greek.

    Here Thomas Vennum brings this world to life.

    In June 1877, the Nez Perce struck back and were soon swept into one of the most devastating Indian wars in American history. The conflict culminated in an epic twelve-hundred-mile chase as the U.S. Army pursued some eight hundred Nez Perce men, women, and children, who tried to fight their way to freedom in Canada. In this enthralling account of the Nez Perce War, Bruce Hampton brings to life unforgettable characters from both sides of the conflict—warriors and women, common soldiers and celebrated generals. Looking Glass, White Bird, the legendary Chief Joseph, and fewer than three hundred warriors waged a bloody guerilla war against a modernized American army commanded by such famous generals as William Tecumseh Sherman, Nelson Miles, Oliver Otis Howard, and Philip Sheridan. Hampton also gives voice to the Native Americans from other tribes who helped the U.S. Army block the escape of the Nez Perce to Canada.

    Black Talk crosses boundaries of sex, age, religion, region, and social class, and provides definitions of words, sayings, and popular expressions from all segments of the African American community.

    The author examines the work of nine influential women writers and presents excerpts of their writings which appear here for the first time in English.

    Writing without Words challenges this orthodoxy, and with it widespread notions of literacy and dominant views of art and literature, history and geography. Asking how knowledge was encoded and preserved in Pre-Columbian and early colonial Mesoamerican cultures, the authors focus on systems of writing that did not strive to represent speech. Their work reveals the complicity of ideology in the history of literacy, and offers new insight into the history of writing. The contributors--who include art historians, anthropologists, and literary theorists--examine the ways in which ancient Mesoamerican and Andean peoples conveyed meaning through hieroglyphic, pictorial, and coded systems, systems inseparable from the ideologies they were developed to serve. We see, then, how these systems changed with the European invasion, and how uniquely colonial writing systems came to embody the post-conquest American ideologies. The authors also explore the role of these early systems in religious discourse and their relation to later colonial writing. Bringing the insights from Mesoamerica and the Andes to bear on a fundamental exchange among art history, literary theory, semiotics, and anthropology, the volume reveals the power contained in the medium of writing.Contributors. Elizabeth Hill Boone, Tom Cummins, Stephen Houston, Mark B. King, Dana Leibsohn, Walter D. Mignolo, John Monaghan, John M. D. Pohl, Joanne Rappaport, Peter van der Loo

    The Pacific islands sustained the shock with a force perhaps unequaled anywhere else in the world. Their limited size and small population, coupled with the violent epidemics that took thousands of lives, lowered Islanders' ability to resist. To keep the external world at bay, they had to create a world of their own. This personal observation of Tanna, an island in the southern part of the Vanuatu archipelago, presents an extraordinary case study of cultural resistance. Based on interviews, myths and stories collected in the field, and archival research, The Tree and the Canoe analyzes the resilience of the people of Tanna, who, when faced with an intense form of cultural contact that threatened to engulf them, liberated themselves by re-creating, and sometimes reinventing, their own kastom. Following a lengthy history of Tanna from European contact, the author discusses in detail original creation myths and how Tanna people revived them in response to changes brought by missionaries and foreign governments. The final chapters of the book deal with the violent opposition of part of the island population to the newly established National Unity government.Ultimately Tanna's story may well be a living symbol of resistance for people throughout Oceania. Are they truly convinced that the roads constructed by the west are the right ones? Do they not persist in dreaming about their own paths? The study of world cultures can still surprise us, for the tide may be changing.

    But Allman also reveals how morality, rather than being the result of arbitrary convention, is deeply rooted in our need to cooperate, which has been essential to the survival of our species through its evolution.

    Their round-trip odyssey from Hawai'i to Aotearoa (New Zealand), across 12,000 nautical miles, dramatically refuted all theories declaring that—because of their unseaworthy canoes and inaccurate navigational methods—the ancient Polynesians could only have been pushed accidentally to their islands by the vagaries of wind and current.Voyage of Rediscovery is a vivid, immensely readable account of this remarkable journey through the Pacific, including tales of a curiosity attack by sperm whales and the crew's welcome to Aotearoa by Maori tribesmen, who dubbed them their sixth tribe. It describes how Hawaiian navigator Nainoa Thompson guided the canoe over thousands of miles of open ocean without compass, sextant, charts, or any other navigational aids. In so doing, it documents the experimental voyaging approach, developed by Ben Finney, which has both transformed our ideas about Polynesian migration and voyaging and been embraced by present-day Polynesians as a way to experience and celebrate their rich ancestral heritage as premier seafarers.By sailing in the wake of their ancestors, the Hawaiians and other Polynesians who captained, navigated, and crewed Hokule'a made the journey described here a cultural as well as a scientific odyssey of exploration.

    Rather it suggests why the language is so fun to learn, and guides the beginner through some of the resources available from the Early Medieval world. The types of text surviving are discussed and a few guided exercises show how reading these is really no more difficult than studying Latin.

    The author here relates his informal conversations with Mad Bear, who died in 1985.

    As this process unfolds the fault lines created by centuries of White rule are beginning to shift and in doing so, they have released the pent-up fears of Blacks and Whites. This book examines the climate of fear as thousands die in political violence, and locates the origin of apartheid in fear. It explores how fear threatens to poison the future as it has the past. Chapters include: the Boipatong Massacre; the White middle-class; the last White Parliament; the Afrikaaner bitter-enders; the Black radical left; White working-class life; the Zulus, soldiers, spies and killers; and the ANC. The book concludes with the swearing-in of the new President - Nelson Mandela.

    A number of the authors' most important essays, thoroughly revised and updated, are introduced and framed by dialogues that supply additional context, introduce retrospective concerns, and reveal previously unseen connections. This format expresses the authors' desire for a more reflexive, experimental discourse on music and society and invites readers to join their conversations. Music Grooves ranges from jazz, blues, polka, soul, rock, world beat, rap, karaoke, and other familiar genres to major scholarly debates in music theory and popular culture studies. The authors cover vital issues in media studies, ethnomusicology, popular culture studies, anthropology, and sociology, while discussing musics from America, Greece, Cuba, Africa, and Papua New Guinea and artists as diverse as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Li'l Wally Jagiello, Bo Diddley, Walt Solek, Madonna, Paul Simon, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Billie Holiday.

    Moore begins by discussing recent feminist debates on the body and the notion of the non-universal human subject. She then considers why anthropologists have contributed relatively little to these debates, suggesting that this reflects the history of anthropology's conceptualization of "persons" or "selves" cross-culturally. The author also pursues a series of related themes, including the links between gender, identity, and violence; the construction of domestic space and its relationship to bodily practices and the internalization of relations of difference; and the links between the gender of the anthropologist and the writing of anthropology. By developing a specific anthropological approach to feminist post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theory, Moore demonstrates anthropology's contribution to current debates in feminist theory.

    This book is primarily about the priests and other kinds of sacred specialists who serve them, about the way in which they organize their business, and about their representations of death and understandings of the rituals over which they preside.

    Lavishly illustrated with full-color photographs, paintings, drawings, and artifacts.

    

    The contributors to Shamanism, History, and the State--distinguished anthropologists and historians from England, Australia, and France--show that shamanism is not static and stable, but always changing as a result of political dynamics and historical processes.Contributors are Tamsyn Barton, Sysan Bayly, Mary Beard, Maurice Bloch, Peter Gow, Roberte N. Hamayon, Stephen Hugh-Jones, Caroline Humphrey, and Nicholas Thomas."The importance of this collection lies in the painstaking, many-sided ways in which it shows 'shamanism' to be a multifarious and continuously changing 'dialogue' or interaction with specific, local contexts. . . . Thus, rather than tackling the issue in principle, this collection tries to demonstrate through 'case studies' just how different 'shamanism' becomes if seen through a lens sensitive to history and the influence of institutions, such as the state, which seem far removed from it. I think the demonstrations add up to an impressive force." --Michael Taussig"This new, ably edited volume provides . . . chapters that are rich in historic detail and that provide insights into general cultural processes and social interactions." --HistorianNicholas Thomas is Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow, Department of Prehistory and Anthropology, Australian National University, Canberra. He is the author of Out of Time: History and Evolution in Anthropological Discourse. Caroline Humphrey, author of Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm, is Fellow of King's College and Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.

    

    

    There is a section devoted to the Hopi's crafts which include pottery, weaving, jewellery and painting.

    In Chimpanzee Cultures, the world's leading authorities on chimpanzees and bonobos chronicle the animals' behaviors from one study site to the next, in both captive and wild groups, in laboratory and field settings.

    Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business-all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity.Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of guanxi stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy.

    This anthology is drawn from his writings about the memories of men and women of a past era - farm labourers, shepherds, horsemen, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, sailors, fisherman, miners, maltsters, domestic servants and many others. The anthology is edited and includes drawings by David Gentleman.'A pleasure to look at and a delight to read . . . A treasury of country folklore in words and pictures, and a monument to a great and pioneering man . . . It is right that the past should be heard of in the words of those who lived it . . . Those who actually cut the hay.' Daily Telegraph

    Combining strong visual images with stories and analysis, Brown illuminates the cultural, historic, and aesthetic roles of gravestones in both metropolitan and rural cemeteries. The art itself manifests a great many forms and subjects, including life-size limestone statuary, hovering marble angels, and ornate wrought-iron crosses, in addition to the more modest traditional motifs in etched granite and concrete. Brown also records the idiosyncratic and the bizarre - an Egyptian sphinx, a gigantic baseball, an elaborate locomotive, a converted car engine - and provides insight into the meaning of epitaphs and iconography.

    Leading scholars from the Americas and Great Britain discuss aspects of Mexico's popular culture from the seventeenth century to the present. The vast range of Mexican expression is examined, including Corpus Christi celebrations, New Spain, stone murals, and folk theater. Filling a need that becomes ever more pressing, this volume provides fresh insights.

    Kane's The Phantom Gringo Boat has been recognized as a ground-breaking piece of ethnological research. This second edition contains a new preface by the author and, reprinted in an Appendix, two supplementary essays on gender, the rain-forest and the state, and three reviews of the first edition.

    Invented by the Babylonians at the end of the fourth millennium B.C., this script, called proto-cuneiform, survives in the form of clay tablets that have until now posed formidable barriers to interpretation. Many tablets, excavated in fragments from ancient dump sites, lack a clear context. In addition, the purpose of the earliest tablets was not to record language but to monitor the administration of local economies by means of a numerical system. Using the latest philological research and new methods of computer analysis, the authors have for the first time deciphered much of the numerical information. In reconstructing both the social context and the function of the notation, they consider how the development of our earliest written records affected patterns of thought, the concept of number, and the administration of household economies. Complete with computer-generated graphics keyed to the discussion and reproductions of all documents referred to in the text, Archaic Bookkeeping will interest specialists in Near Eastern civilizations, ancient history, the history of science and mathematics, and cognitive psychology.

    Ninety-four tall tales, reminiscences, and family stories offer a colorful folk history of the people, places, day-to-day activities, and culture of the Appalachian, Ozark, and Ouachita Mountains.

    Now, no one seems to make anything, and we buy what we need from shops. Gifts and Commodities describes the cultural and historical process of these changes and looks at the rise of consumer society in Britain and the United States. It investigates the ways that people think about and relate to objects in twentieth-century culture, at how those relationships have developed, and the social meanings they have for relations with others.Using aspects of anthropology and sociology to describe the importance of shopping and gift-giving in our lives and in western economies, Gifts and Commodities: * traces the development of shopping and retailing practices, and the emergence of modern notions of objects and the self * brings together a wealth of information on the history of the retail trade * examines the reality of the distinctions we draw between the impersonal economic sphere and personal social sphere * offers a fully interdisciplinary study of the links we forge between ourselves, our social groups and the commodities we buy and give.

    'The Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology is a welcome addition to the reference literature. Bringing together authoritative, incisive and scrupulously edited contributions from some three dozen authors. The book achieves an impressive breadth of coverage of specialist areas.' - Times Higher Educational Supplement'Recommended for all anthropology collections, especially those in academic libraries.' - Library Journal'This is a marvellous book and I am very happy to recommend it.' - Reference Reviews

    Bhutan's textiles, especially the intricate brocades and complex supplementary-warp patterns, are unmatched anywhere in the world. This art, with a steadily growing and devoted following in the West and Japan, has become Bhutan's most powerful emblem abroad. This volume, first published in 1994 (now reprinted in 2008) in conjunction with a special exhibition organized by the Peabody Essex Museum of Salem, Massachusetts, covers all aspects of Bhutan's textiles and weaving heritage, from the central role of women - more than 80 percent of Bhutanese women contribute to their household's income by weaving - to fibers, dyes, and looms, to the functioning of beautiful cloth as an item of trade and an indicator of historical change and social identity. This copiously illustrated book reveals the richness, originality, and striking beauty of Bhutanese textiles. Examples come from the Peabody Essex Museum, which holds the largest such collection of any North American museum, and public and private collections in Bhutan, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The illustrations are supplemented by field photographs and rare archival images.

    

    They are encantados, or Enchanted Beings, capable of provoking death or madness, but also called upon to help shamanic healers. Male dolphins—accomplished dancers who appear dressed in dapper straw hats, white suits, and with shiny black shoes—reportedly father numerous children. The females are said to lure away solitary fishermen. Both sinister and charming, these characters resist definition and thus domination; greedy and lascivious outsiders, they are increasingly symbolic of a distinctly Amazonian culture politically, socially, economically, and environmentally under seige.Candace Slater examines these stories in Dance of the Dolphin, both as folk narratives and as representations of culture and conflict in Amazonia. Her engaging study discusses the tales from the viewpoints of genre, performance, and gender, but centers on them as responses to the great changes sweeping the Amazon today. According to Slater, these surprisingly widespread tales reflect Amazonians' own mixed reactions to the ongoing destruction of the rainforest and the resulting transformations in the social as well as physical landscape. Offering an informed view of Brazilian culture, this book crosses the boundaries of folklore, literature, anthropology, and Latin American studies. It is one of the very few studies to offer an overview of the changes taking place in Amazonia through the eyes of ordinary people."This book is a rich collection of stories about the transformation of dolphins in the city of enchantment. . . . The joy in this book is not just its vibrant analysis and careful relating of tradition and lore, but also its uncanny accurateness in capturing the very essence of Amazonia."-Darrell Posey, Journal of Latin American Studies"Slater's fluid prose reads like a novel for those interested in Amazonian culture and folklore, while her integrated approach makes this a must read for those interested in innovative methodology."-Lisa Gabbert, Western Folklore

    The new edition, now called History of Humanity, is a radical new work providing an account of cultural and scientific achievements in the light of new facts and methods of historiographical investigation. This major undertaking required an International Commission and the co-operation of some 450 distinguished specialists, in a great number of disciplines, from all over the world. A truly interdisciplinary work, the History of Humanity sheds new light on many hitherto unknown features of our common past.Forty internationally renowned specialists from various countries provide a broad introduction to the study of the eve of civilization. Starting from the origins of humankind to the first societies 5000 years ago, the events, chronologically charted, present a comprehensive picture of how civilization emerged and developed over this period. Particular attention is given to archeological aspects.

    Her findings challenge Western notions of "productive labor" and longstanding ideas about the role of culture in subsistence economies. In Labor's Lot, Povinelli shows how everyday activities shape Aboriginal identity and provide cultural meaning. She focuses on the Belyuen women's interactions with the countryside and on Belyuen conflicts with the Australian government over control of local land. Her analysis raises serious questions about the validity of Western theories about labor and culture and their impact on Aboriginal society. Povinelli's focus on women's activities provides an important counterpoint to recent works centering on male roles in hunter-gatherer societies. Her unique "cultural economy" approach overcomes the dichotomy between the two standard approaches to these studies. Labor's Lot will engage anyone interested in indigenous peoples or in the relationship between culture and economy in contemporary social practice.

    Drawing on the vast collections of the National Museum of the American Indian, Creation’s Journey retells the story of native life from the Arctic to the Tierra del Fuego, and from childhood to old age.

    The essays in this volume leave the vertical axis of hierarchy and subordination--an organizing trope in much of the literature on Japan--and focus instead on the horizontal, interpreting a wide range of cultural practices and orientations in terms of such relational concepts as uchi (inside) and soto (outside). Evolving from a shared theoretical focus, the essays show that in Japan the directional orientations inside and outside are specifically linked to another set of meanings, denoting self and society.After Donald L. Brenneis's foreword, Jane M. Bachnik, Charles J. Quinn, Jr., Patricia J. Wetzel, Nancy R. Rosenberger, and Robert J. Sukle discuss Indexing Self and Social Context. Failure to Index: Boundary Disintegration and Social Breakdown is the topic of Dorinne K. Kondo, Matthews M. Hamabata, Michael S. Molasky, and Jane Bachnik. Finally, Charles Quinn explores Language as a Form of Life.

    What is the relationship between addiction and the ecological crisis? How can we use the lessons of individual recovery to address our collective need to heal society and the Earth? Chellis Glendinning goes beyond the personal to the very heart of Western civilization to answer these questions, and she shows how we can use trauma recovery and deep ecology, along with the wisdom of native cultures, to reclaim our innate wholeness.

    Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies, and political odours. They can enforce social structures or transgress them, unite people or divide them, empower or disempower. The authors argue that the sociology of smell is repressed in the modern West, and its social history ignored. This book breaks the olfactory silence of modernity. It offers the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural role of odours in Western history - from antiquity to the present. It also covers a wide variey of non-Western societies. Its topics range from the medieval concept of the odour of sanctity, to the aromatherapies of South America, and from olfactory stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in the modern West to the role of smell in postmodernity. Its subject matter will fascinate anyone who likes to nose around in the inner workings of culture.

    Described by Richard Sennett as a major event in social theory, Postmodern Ethics subverted the pieties of subversion which rule the postmodern imagination, arguing for an ethic of being with the Other, beyond the fashionable imperative of anything goes or the deconstruction of identity through difference.

    Discusses domestic and international political contexts of the rebellion. Reports day-to-day activities of the Ej ercito Zapatista de Liberaci on Nacional. Covers period through the 1994 elections

    Chronicling the demise of things we thought would always be a part of life -- from the smell of burning leaves to wedding-night virgins -- this compendium of pop culture and history has been praised for its lively text full of intriguing trivia and retro photographs of each subject in its heyday. Whether you're old enough to remember polio scares or too young to have used a typewriter, this provocative and amusing look at the way things were offers end-of- the-century proof that the only constant in life is change.

    From 1920 to 1989, Bulgaria changed from a nearly medieval village society to a Stalinist planned industrial economy to a chaotic mix of capitalist and socialist markets and cultures.In the context of this history, Rice brings Bulgarian folk music to life by focusing on the biography of the Varimezov family, including the musician Kostadin and his wife Todora, a singer. Combining interviews with his own experiences of learning how to play, sing and dance Bulgarian folk music, Rice presents one of the most detailed accounts of traditional, aural learning processes in the ethnomusicological literature.Using a combination of traditionally dichotomous musicological and ethnographic approaches, Rice tells the story of how individual musicians learned their tradition, how they lived it during the pre-Communist era of family farming, how the tradition changed with industrialization brought under Communism, and finally, how it flourished and evolved in the recent, unstable political climate.This work—complete with a compact disc and numerous illustrations and musical examples—contributes not only to ethnomusicological theory and method, but also to our understanding of Slavic folklore, Eastern European anthropology, and cultural processes in Socialist states.

    Anthropologist and award-winning author of The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani, C. Nadia Seremetakis brings together essays by five scholars concerned with the senses and the anthropology of everyday life. Covering a wide range of topics—from film to food, from nationalism to the evening news—the authors describe ways in which sensory memories have preserved cultures otherwise threatened by urbanism and modernity. The contributors are Susan Buck-Morss, Allen Feldman, Jonas Frykman, C. Nadia Seremetakis, and Paul Stoller.C. Nadia Seremetakis is Advisor to the Minister of Public Health in Greece and visiting professor at the National School of Public Heath in Athens. She is the author of The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani, available from the University of Chicago Press.

    Long before Judaism and Christianity, long before the Greco-Roman pantheon of gods and goddesses, the peoples of Western and Central Europe and the Near East worshipped a Goddess, seen in many guises, who encompassed both the awesome power of nature and the forces of life and death. The far reaches of her power found their expression in artifacts, sculptures and carvings, and at the sites where she was venerated - caves, sanctuaries, and temples - that have slept for thousands of years. Sanctuaries of the Goddess brings once-holy places dramatically back to life and recaptures their numinous power. The spiritual and archaeological significance of these ancient sites and their artifacts is conveyed in glowing photographs, from the caves of Lascaux in France to the awe-inspiring underground chambers of the Hypogeum on Malta, the mysteries of Ireland's Dowth and Knowth, and the mountain sanctuaries of Crete. The accompanying text takes readers deep into the past, offering glimpses of rites and rituals half-hidden in the shadows of history and illuminating the mysteries of the ancient Goddess for the present day.

    Limón  works at the intersection of anthropology, folklore, popular culture, history, and literary criticism.  A native of South Texas,  he renders a historical and ethnographic account of  its rich Mexican-American folk culture.  This folk culture, he shows—whether expressed through male joking rituals, ballroom polka dances, folk healing, or eating and drinking traditions—metaphorically dances with the devil, both resisting  and accommodating  the dominant culture of Texas.     Critiquing the work of his precursors— John Gregory Bourke, J. Frank Dobie, Jovita Gonzalez, and Americo Paredes—Limón deftly demonstrates that their accounts of Mexican-Americans in South Texas contain race, class, and gender contradictions, revealed most clearly in their accounts of the folkloric figure of the devil.  Limón's own field-based ethnography follows, and again the devil appears as a recurrent motif,  signaling the ideological contradictions of folk practices in a South Texas on the verge of postmodernity.

    This is partly due to the exposure of the subject by human rights activists and organizations and partly due to the emergence of the practice in the West. Given that Female Genital Mutilation has a negative effect on both the physical and psychological health of millions of women, not just in Africa but also in Europe, North America and other parts of the world, what must be done to eradicate this practice? What are the lessons to be learned from past experience of work in this area? How can international interest be guided towards positive change? In order to answer these questions, Efua Dorkenoo presents the facts about Female Genital Mutilation. From her research in the field and her work in Britain, she then gives a comprehensive update on work in Africa together with models of good practice to show how best to deal with the very diverse experiences found in different parts of the world. Only from such models is it fully possible to explore such issues as the rights of women and of children, of the part which the well-being of women plays in the health of a nation, and also the strengths and weaknesses of the various international campaigns on the subject. By offering much new information and clarifying many grey areas, Efua Dorkenoo shows the importance of offering professional advice which is prolonged, well-monitored and co-ordinated. This, in turn, should be supported with practical help, which is underpinned by the aid of local and international bodies.

    Inhorn portrays the poignant struggles of poor, urban Egyptian women and their attempts to overcome infertility. The author draws upon fifteen months of fieldwork in urban Egypt to present moving stories of infertile Muslim women whose tumultuous medical pilgrimages have yet to produce the desired pregnancies. Inhorn examines the devastating impact of infertility on the lives of these women, who are threatened with divorce by their husbands, harassed by their husbands' families, and ostracized by neighbors.

    This collection of his writings presents his comparisons of Chinese and European civilizations and his thoughts on future relations between the two.

    It provides clear accounts of the main ideas of Nietzsche, Weber and Foucault (as well as a useful Glossary) and illustrates the relations between these thinkers at methodological, substantive and politcal levels.

    Taking issue with such writers as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, Thomas describes colonialism not so much as a discourse but a project--a project in which the interactions among colonizing and colonized people are far more variable and reveal greater ambivalence than generally imagined. In addition to his review of current literature in cultural studies, the author provides extended reflections on photographs, colonial novels, exhibits of indigenous art, ethnographic films, and recent Hollywood films in order to reveal how deep and pervasive is colonialism's culture for colonizer and colonized.Thomas proposes that historicized, ethnographic explorations of the colonial experience are the most fruitful approaches to understanding colonialism's continued effects. He draws on travel, anthropology, and government as vehicles that gave nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Europeans exposure to colonized populations and provided a language through which to discuss them. The author reveals colonialism to be a complex ongoing cultural process--one in which dominated populations are represented in ways that play upon and legitimize racial and cultural differences. A provocative book for specialists, Colonialism's Culture can also serve as a stimulating introduction for students across the social sciences and humanities interested in this multifaceted field of inquiry.

    The first Western scholars to be given permission to conduct fieldwork in Mongolia, Melvyn Goldstein and Cynthia Beall lived among a community of herders to study how they were adapting to Mongolia's transition to democracy and a market economy.Weathering temperatures below zero, living in the nomads' ger, drinking suteytsai (milk-tea), eating bordzig (a pastry made from wheat dough) and pieces of solid fat (a Mongolian delicacy), Goldstein and Beall studied the seasonal migrations and traditional lifestyle of the nomads. They also watched as a herders' collective under the Marxist-Leninist system made the difficult transition to a shareholding company through the government's privatization reforms. The book's magnificent photographs and accompanying text introduce us to a proud people undergoing enormous change as their country emerges from years under communism. The Changing World of Mongolia's Nomads promises an engaging read for anyone interested in nomads, Mongolia, East and Central Asia, and the transformation of the Soviet Union.

    By exploring the history of medical narratives, especially medical case histories, as well as the exciting work that has been done in feminist and lesbian and gay studies, Julia Epstein poses a number of provocative questions about the relations between bodies, selves, and identities. Epstein focuses on a number of diagnoses that shed light on what is at stake when cultures regulate human bodies, including hermaphroditism, birth malformations, and AIDS. She pays special attention to the regulation of sexual minorities and women and looks carefully at the ways in which cultures attempt to define and control behaviors seen as threatening or subversive.

    Local practices were turned into crimes; the social meaning of crime within the village culture was redefined by the introduction of bourgeois penal law and psychiatry. The language of the intruding agencies had created, through a wealth of written documentation, an image of village life for the outside world. Criminal investigations, however, had to be based on interrogations of the villagers themselves, and it was through this questioning process that their own views, language, and symbolic gestures went on record. Schulte provides a new and original interpretation of village power structures, gender relations, and generational rites of passage through a close reading of the trial proceedings before the penal courts of Upper Bavaria for the three most important types of rural crime: arson, infanticide, and poaching.

    Women fit neatly into this model, such books as Woman the Gatherer explained, as gatherers of plant food. In spite of evidence of hunting by women, this model--which incorporated the unexamined assumption that women in prehistory were immobilized by pregnancy, lactation, and child care and therefore needed to be left at a home base--came to dominate archaeological interpretation of the economic roles of men and women.Women in Prehistory challenges this model and undertakes an examination of the archaeological record informed by insights into the cultural construction of gender that have emerged from scholarship in history, anthropology, biology, and related disciplines. Along with analysis of burial assemblages and of representations of gendered individuals, contributors study bone chemistry, assessment of skeletal pathologies, micro- and macro-scale distributional evidence, as well as analogical arguments from ethnoarchaeology and ethnohistory to discuss pottery, shell matrix sites, skeletal material, the domestic setting, and spinning.

    In this volume, the authors take a critical step toward establishing a new environmental science by deconstructing the traditional culture/nature dichotomy and placing human/environmental interaction at the center of any new attempts to deal with global environmental change. Topics include the theorization of ecology, evolutionary theory, evaluating the nature/culture binary in practice, global climate and regional diversity, historical transformations in the landscapes of eastern Africa, extinction in Greenland, ecology in ancient Egypt, ecological aspects of encounters between agropastoral and agricultural peoples, archaeology and environmentalism, and the role of history in ecological research.