Best of
Anthropology

1996

One River


Wade Davis - 1996
    In the 1970s, he sent two prize students, Tim Plowman and Wade Davis, to follow in his footsteps and unveil the botanical secrets of coca, the notorious source of cocaine, a sacred plant known to the Inca as the Divine Leaf of Immortality.A stunning account of adventure and discovery, betrayal and destruction, One River is a story of two generations of explorers drawn together by the transcendent knowledge of Indian peoples, the visionary realms of the shaman, and the extraordinary plants that sustain all life in a forest that once stood immense and inviolable.

Spirit of the Rainforest


Mark Andrew Ritchie - 1996
    Jungleman provides shocking, never-before-answered accounts of life-or-death battles among his people -- and perhaps even more disturbing among the spirits who fight for their souls. Brutally riveting, the story of Jungleman is an extraordinary and powerful document.

Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache


Keith H. Basso - 1996
    Apache conceptions of wisdom, manners and morals, and of their own history are inextricably intertwined with place, and by allowing us to overhear his conversations with Apaches on these subjects Basso expands our awareness of what place can mean to people.Most of us use the term "sense of place" often and rather carelessly when we think of nature or home or literature. Our senses of place, however, come not only from our individual experiences but also from our cultures. "Wisdom Sits in Places," the first sustained study of places and place-names by an anthropologist, explores place, places, and what they mean to a particular group of people, the Western Apache in Arizona. For more than thirty years, Keith Basso has been doing fieldwork among the Western Apache, and now he shares with us what he has learned of Apache place-names--where they come from and what they mean to Apaches."This is indeed a brilliant exposition of landscape and language in the world of the Western Apache. But it is more than that. Keith Basso gives us to understand something about the sacred and indivisible nature of words and place. And this is a universal equation, a balance in the universe. Place may be the first of all concepts; it may be the oldest of all words."--N. Scott Momaday"In "Wisdom Sits in Places" Keith Basso lifts a veil on the most elemental poetry of human experience, which is the naming of the world. In so doing he invests his scholarship with that rarest of scholarly qualities: a sense of spiritual exploration. Through his clear eyes we glimpse the spirit of a remarkable people and their land, and when we look away, we see our own world afresh."--William deBuys"A very exciting book--authoritative, fully informed, extremely thoughtful, and also engagingly written and a joy to read. Guiding us vividly among the landscapes and related story-tellings of the Western Apache, Basso explores in a highly readable way the role of language in the complex but compelling theme of a people's attachment to place. An important book by an eminent scholar."--Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.

The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World


David Abram - 1996
    This major work of ecological philosophy startles the senses out of habitual ways of perception.For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patters) that we have only lately come to think of as inanimate. How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relation with the breathing earth?In The Spell of the Sensuous David Abram draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand of magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which--even at its most abstract--echoes the calls and cries of the earth. On every page of this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with a passion, a precision, and an intellectual daring that recall such writers as Loren Eisleley, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.

From Lucy to Language: Revised, Updated, and Expanded


Donald C. Johanson - 1996
    This discovery prompted a complete reevaluation of previous evidence for human origins.In the years since this dramatic discovery Johanson has continued to scour East Africa's Great rift Valley for the earliest evidence of human origins. In 1975 this team unearthed the "First Family", an unparalleled fossil assemblage of 13 individuals dating back to 3.2 million years ago; and in 1986 at the Rift's most famous location, Olduvai Gorge, this same team discovered a 1.8 million-year-old partial adult skeleton that necessitated a reassessment of the earliest members of our own genus Homo.Johanson's fieldwork continues unabated and recently more fossil members of Lucy's family have been found, including the 1992 discovery of the oldest, most complete skull of her species, with future research now planned for 1996 in the virtually unexplored regions of the most northern extension of the Rift Valley in Eritrea.From Lucy to Language is a summing up of this remarkable career and a stunning documentary of human life through time on Earth. It is a combination of the vital experience of field work and the intellectual rigor of primary research. It is the fusion of two great writing talents: Johanson and Blake Edgar, an accomplished science writer, editor of the California Academy of Sciences' Pacific Discovery, and co-author of Johanson's last book, Ancestors.From Lucy to Language is one of the greatest stories ever told, bracketing the timeline between bipedalism and human language. Part I addresses the central issues facing anyone seeking to decipher the mystery of human origins. In this section the authors provide answers to the basics -- "What are our closest living relatives?" -- tackle the controversial -- "What is race?" -- and contemplate the imponderables -- "Why did consciousness evolve?"From Lucy to Language is an encounter with the evidence. Early human fossils are hunted, discovered, identified, excavated, collected, preserved, labeled, cleaned, reconstructed, drawn, fondled, photographed, cast, compared, measured, revered, pondered, published, and argued over endlessly. Fossils like Lucy have become a talisman of sorts, promising to reveal the deepest secrets of our existence. In Part II the authors profile over fifty of the most significant early human fossils ever found. Each specimen is displayed in color and at actual size, most of them in multiple views. With them the authors present the cultural accoutrements associated with the fossils: stone tools which evidence increasing sophistication over time, the earliest stone, clay, and ivory art objects, and the culminating achievement of the dawn of human consciousness -- the magnificent rock and cave paintings of Europe, Africa, Australia, and the Americas.In the end From Lucy to Language is a reminder and a challenge. Like no species before us, we now seem poised to control vast parts of the planet and its life. We possess the power to influence, if not govern, evolution. For that reason, we must not forget our link to the natural world and our debt to natural selection. We need to "think deep", to add a dose of geologic time and evolutionary history to our perspective of who we are, where we came from, and where we are headed. This is the most poignant lesson this book has to offer.

México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization


Guillermo Bonfil Batalla - 1996
    Their lives and ways of understanding the world continue to be rooted in Mesoamerican civilization. An ancient agricultural complex provides their food supply, and work is understood as a way of maintaining a harmonious relationship with the natural world. Health is related to human conduct, and community service is often part of each individual's life obligation. Time is circular, and humans fulfill their own cycle in relation to other cycles of the universe.Since the Conquest, Bonfil argues, the peoples of the México profundo have been dominated by an "imaginary México" imposed by the West. It is imaginary not because it does not exist, but because it denies the cultural reality lived daily by most Mexicans.Within the México profundo there exists an enormous body of accumulated knowledge, as well as successful patterns for living together and adapting to the natural world. To face the future successfully, argues Bonfil, Mexico must build on these strengths of Mesoamerican civilization, "one of the few original civilizations that humanity has created throughout all its history."

Origins of the Human Mind: The Mind's Biological and Behavioral Roots


Edward O. Wilson - 1996
    The mind's biological and behavioral roots.

Pictorial Guide to the Living Primates


Noel Rowe - 1996
    The text of each species is comprised of basic information about habitat, diet, social structure and behavior, A range map and the current category of endangerment is provided for each species.

Women, Poverty, and AIDS: Sex, Drugs, and Structural Violence


Paul Farmer - 1996
    

Medicine of the Cherokee: The Way of Right Relationship


J.T. Garrett - 1996
    With stories of the Four Directions and the Universal Circle, these once-secret teachings offer us wisdom on circle gatherings, natural herbs and healing, and ways to reduce stress in our daily lives.

War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage


Lawrence H. Keeley - 1996
    Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of civilized societies alone. Prehistoric warfare, according to this view, was little more than a ritualized game, where casualties were limited and the effects of aggression relatively mild. Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as the pacification of the past). Building on much fascinating archeological and historical research and offering an astute comparison of warfare in civilized and prehistoric societies, from modern European states to the Plains Indians of North America, War Before Civilization convincingly demonstrates that prehistoric warfare was in fact more deadly, more frequent, and more ruthless than modern war. To support this point, Keeley provides a wide-ranging look at warfare and brutality in the prehistoric world. He reveals, for instance, that prehistorical tactics favoring raids and ambushes, as opposed to formal battles, often yielded a high death-rate; that adult males falling into the hands of their enemies were almost universally killed; and that surprise raids seldom spared even women and children. Keeley cites evidence of ancient massacres in many areas of the world, including the discovery in South Dakota of a prehistoric mass grave containing the remains of over 500 scalped and mutilated men, women, and children (a slaughter that took place a century and a half before the arrival of Columbus). In addition, Keeley surveys the prevalence of looting, destruction, and trophy-taking in all kinds of warfare and again finds little moral distinction between ancient warriors and civilized armies. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, he examines the evidence of cannibalism among some preliterate peoples. Keeley is a seasoned writer and his book is packed with vivid, eye-opening details (for instance, that the homicide rate of prehistoric Illinois villagers may have exceeded that of the modern United States by some 70 times). But he also goes beyond grisly facts to address the larger moral and philosophical issues raised by his work. What are the causes of war? Are human beings inherently violent? How can we ensure peace in our own time? Challenging some of our most dearly held beliefs, Keeley's conclusions are bound to stir controversy.

The Inward Journey: East and West


Joseph Campbell - 1996
    

Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals


Frans de Waal - 1996
    Might there he a code of ethics in the animal kingdom? Must an animal be human to he humane? In this provocative book, a renowned scientist takes on those who have declared ethics uniquely human Making a compelling case for a morality grounded in biology, he shows how ethical behavior is as much a matter of evolution as any other trait, in humans and animals alike.World famous for his brilliant descriptions of Machiavellian power plays among chimpanzees-the nastier side of animal life--Frans de Waal here contends that animals have a nice side as well. Making his case through vivid anecdotes drawn from his work with apes and monkeys and holstered by the intriguing, voluminous data from his and others' ongoing research, de Waal shows us that many of the building blocks of morality are natural: they can he observed in other animals. Through his eyes, we see how not just primates but all kinds of animals, from marine mammals to dogs, respond to social rules, help each other, share food, resolve conflict to mutual satisfaction, even develop a crude sense of justice and fairness.Natural selection may be harsh, but it has produced highly successful species that survive through cooperation and mutual assistance. De Waal identifies this paradox as the key to an evolutionary account of morality, and demonstrates that human morality could never have developed without the foundation of fellow feeling our species shares with other animals. As his work makes clear, a morality grounded in biology leads to an entirely different conception of what it means to he human--and humane.

Shamans of Prehistory


Jean Clottes - 1996
    Noting the similarity between prehistoric rock art and that created by some contemporary traditional societies, archaeologists Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams suggest that the ancient images were created by shamans, powerful individuals who were able to contact the spirit world through trance and ritual.

Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence


Richard W. Wrangham - 1996
    Why do men kill, rape, and wage war, and what can we do about it? Drawing on the latest discoveries about human evolution and about our closest living relatives, the great apes, Demonic Males offers some startling new answers. Dramatic, vivid, and firmly grounded in meticulous research, this book will change the way you see the world. As the San Francisco Chronicle said, it "dares to dig for the roots of a contentious and complicated subject that makes up much of our daily news."

The Only World We've Got: A Paul Shepard Reader


Paul Shepard - 1996
    This anthology from his work, which Shepard himself assembled not long before his death, addresses themes touched on in many of his books. Many of these themes deal in one way or another with the disastrous consequences of humankind’s increasing detachment from the natural world as a by-product of “the ecological insolence of the last century.” In Shepard’s view, the natural world—and particularly the world of animals—is the source of human intelligence and the wellspring of the imagination. He examines, for instance, the antiquity of the human eye, an organ essential to the cognitive revolution that distinguishes us from other primates; the origins of language and literature in the imitation of birdsong; and the lessons animals of many species can teach us about ourselves. Shepard delves into environmental psychology, anatomy, history, linguistics, and a host of other topics to make his strikingly original arguments, which have helped shape modern environmental thinking and influenced the writings of such successors as Barry Lopez and Terry Tempest Williams.

Forensic Taphonomy: The Postmortem Fate of Human Remains


William D. Haglund - 1996
    Forensic Taphonomy explains these links in a broad-based, multidisciplinary volume. It applies taphonomic models in modern forensic contexts and uses forensic cases to extend taphonomic theories. Review articles, case reports, and chapters on methodology round out this book's unique approach to forensic science.

How to Survive in the Chilean Jungle


John Brennan - 1996
    From the cover: An English lexicon of Chilean slang & Spanish sayings

The Way of Council


Jack M. Zimmerman - 1996
    

Tombs, Graves and Mummies: 50 Discoveries in World Archaeology


Paul G. Bahn - 1996
    In cases like Pompeii or that of the Iceman, bodies captured in the throes of death provide us with a snapshot, a freeze-frame of a moment in the distant past. Graves are a planned disposal of the dead that can conjure up the very world our ancestors inhabited, while the method of burial sheds light on belief and ritual. We can assess the wealth and status of the dead from the jewelry they are wearing, or the treasures buried with them, and we can guess at their lifestyle from the state of their teeth and bones. In exceptional circumstances, such as extremely dry, frozen or waterlogged conditions, the dead can remain virtually intact and provide a mine of information about their diet, health, genetic makeup and the cause of their death. These are not just kings and pharaohs, priests and princesses: archaeology has discovered the remains of ordinary victims of natural disaster and ritual sacrifice, of battles, storms and plagues.Continent by continent, we move from Lucy, the three-million-year-old australopithecine from Ethiopia, to Zhoukoudian and Java Man, just half her age. The Chinchorro mummies from northern Chile predate those of ancient Egypt by thousands of years, and embalming remained the fate of the chiefs of Fujiwara in Japan until the twelfth century AD. There are sites of royal sacrifice at the cemetery at Ur, and priestly sacrifice in the Aegean, while the bodies of children were among those found perfectly preserved in the mountain tops of the Andes, left out to propitiate the gods. There is evidence of Early Neolithic massacre at the mass grave of Talheim in Germany, and of violent deaths among the bog bodies of northern Europe. In this century, the skeletons found in the pit at Ekaterinburg attest to the tragic fate of the Romanovs at the hands of the Bolsheviks in 1918. Exploring fifty of the world's best documented sites of bodies and graves, we enter the past through fifty different doors, and find a mine of fascinating information.

Explaining Culture


Dan Sperber - 1996
    Suppose, it suggests, a net is cast that lets through anything but mental things, and environmental things that have mental things, both among their causes and their effects. Will peole still catch all the subject matter of the social sciences? Sperber argues that people will, and that explanations of social-cultural phenomena in this reconceptualized domain will take the form of an epidemiology of representations, grounded in evolutionary thinking and in psychology.

The Living Tradition of Yup'ik Masks: Agayuliyararput Our Way of Making Prayer


Ann Fienup-Riordan - 1996
    For the Yup'ik of southwestern Alaska, masked dancing has long been a focal point of ceremonial activity. Two hundred color plates and 100 b&w photo illustrate his

Hierarchy Theory: A Vision, Vocabulary, and Epistemology


Valerie Ahl - 1996
    This theory aims to answer the question of whether there is a basic structure to nature, comprising discreet levels of organization within an overall pattern.

In the Belly of the River


Amita Baviskar - 1996
    It focuses most specifically on the lives of the tribals who will be displaced by the construction, and at what is being destroyed in the name of `development'. The book forces us tore-examine the politics of representation within the ideology of progressive movements, and will be of equal interest to scholars and social activists concerned about development, environment, and indigenous peoples.

East to America: Korean American Life Stories


Elaine H. Kim - 1996
    In this collection of powerful, candid oral histories, a wide cross section of Korean Americans renders a portrait of a community grappling with racial tensions, class and gender differences, and differing notions of family and home.

Southwestern Pottery: Anasazi to Zuni


Allan Hayes - 1996
    There isn't a more complete southwestern pottery guide.

Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming


Robert Bosnak - 1996
    G. Jung, James Hillman, and Joseph Campbell, Bosnak meditates on the metaphoric, therapeutic, and philosophical implications of dreamwork.  This thoughtful and inspiring guide draws on Bosnak's experience as a therapist a traveler, and a dreamer, and is an invitation to look more closely at the meaning of this fundamental and common aspect of human existence -- and to contemplate the astonishing creative capacities of the soul.

The Summer Walkers: Travelling People and Pearl-Fishers in the Highlands of Scotland


Timothy Neat - 1996
    They are not gypsies, but are indigenous Gaelic-speaking Scots, who, to this day, remain heirs of a vital and ancient culture.

Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration


Jack Stuster - 1996
    In addition to polar and space explorers, he culls from diaries and other accounts of shipwreck and dis

Homeric Questions


Gregory Nagy - 1996
    Was the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey a single individual who created the poems at a particular moment in history? Or does the name "Homer" hide the shaping influence of the epic tradition during a long period of oral composition and transmission?In this innovative investigation, Gregory Nagy applies the insights of comparative linguistics and anthropology to offer a new historical model for understanding how, when, where, and why the Iliad and the Odyssey were ultimately preserved as written texts that could be handed down over two millennia. His model draws on the comparative evidence provided by living oral epic traditions, in which each performance of a song often involves a recomposition of the narrative.This evidence suggests that the written texts emerged from an evolutionary process in which composition, performance, and diffusion interacted to create the epics we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Sure to challenge orthodox views and provoke lively debate, Nagy's book will be essential reading for all students of oral traditions.

The Ghetto-Swinger: A Berlin Jazz Legend Remembers


Coco Schumann - 1996
    From his early enthusiasm for American jazz in Berlin cabarets to his membership of Terezin's celebrated Ghetto Swngers, to surviving Auschwitz through his music, to post-war appearances with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, jazz remains a constant in a remarkable life story.

Street Soldier


Joseph Marshall Jr. - 1996
    As a public school teacher, Joe Marshall grew sick and tired of watching his most promising students fall prey to the lure of gangs, drugs, and crime, and end up either dead or in prison.  Finding that neither the justice nor school system seemed willing even to try to address the underlying problems--to give the kids the kind of information and assistance they really needed--he leapfrogged right over the system and co-founded the Omega Boys Club, based upon the belief that young people of the inner city want a way out of the life they're in, but just don't know how to get out.  Since the club's inception in 1987, with a handful of kids in a community center basement, he and his small army of street soldiers have already helped 600 kids out of gang-banging and drug-dealing, and pushed, tutored, driven and even funded 140 inner-city kids into colleges around the country.Four years ago, to direct kids at risk to the Boys Club, he started a weekly radio call-in program called "Street Soldiers" that is now broadcast throughout California to an audience of over 200,000.  His callers ask tough questions about gangs, drugs, teen pregnancy, and the multiple pressures of life in the inner city today.  "Street Soldiers" not only provides callers with a lifeline and listeners with a practical resource for hope, but has repeatedly averted gang warfare and stopped "payback" violence before they occurred.Street Soldier is the story of Joe Marshall's success and, as virtually the only good news coming out of the inner city today, it is incumbent upon all of us--citizens, parents, legislators, and teachers--to listen.  From Marshall's own college days in the turbulent sixties and his early years as an idealistic young teacher, the book moves to the heartbreaking lessons that compelled him to do something.  Street Soldier then takes readers through the day-by-day trials and tribulations of his efforts in the `hood, searching for effective ways to convince gun-toting crack dealers and gang members to take pride in their race, take responsibility for their actions, and take charge of their lives.  Along the way the book goes inside the minds and lives of a handful of the kids who transform themselves in the mast dramatic way possible--and a few who sadly cannot.  In the end, Street Soldier is a call to each of us to help shape the future of this generation at risk, to help our children grow strong--to be street soldiers in our own communities.Filled with tense confrontations and joyous celebrations, Street Soldier is an uplifting story by and about one man who makes a difference--and the cure his story may well provide for the cancer eating at our nation today.

Sexual Symbolism: A History of Phallic Worship


Richard Payne Knight - 1996
    As anthropologist Ashley Montagu notes, Knight's eighteenth-century work combines seriousness of purpose with ingenuity and wit. Its companion piece, Wright's nineteenth-century survey, ranges even further in scope, embracing the worship of the female as well as of the male generative powers. Both works have long been out of print, and this new edition will prove a great benefit to students and scholars.

Celtic Women: Women in Celtic Society and Literature


Peter Berresford Ellis - 1996
    His Celtic Women provides a balanced and informed perspective on the position of women in Celtic society and asks how much of this ancient culture has filtered down through the ages. Ellis examines the concept of the "Mother Goddess" origin of the Celts as well as the pantheon of women in Celtic mythology - from Etain and Emer, and Macha and Medb, to Rhiannon and Gwenhwyvar (Guinevere). He also discusses a wide range of important historical personalities. Although Boudicca (Boadicea) is often cited as the most powerful historical Celtic female figure - the one who led southern Britain in insurrection against the Romans - Ellis shows that she was by no means unique. The results of Ellis's engaging study show that Celtic society undoubtedly maintained an order in which women were harmoniously balanced in relation to men. Beside the repressive male dominance of classic Mediterranean society, the position of women in Celtic myth, law, and early history seems to have constituted an ideal. Celtic women could govern; took prominent - sometimes the highest - roles in political, religious, and artistic life; could own property; could divorce; and were even expected to fight alongside men in battles. It was not until the Celts' encounter and conflict with the alien values of the Roman and Germanic cultures and the arrival of Western Christianity that the rights of women began to erode.

Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China


Robert P. Weller - 1996
    It challenges received wisdom about Chinese popular religion, which, until now, presented all Chinese deities as mere functionaries and bureaucrats. The essays in this volume eloquently document the existence of other metaphors that allowed Chinese gods to challenge the traditional power structures and traditional mores of Chinese society. The authors draw on a variety of disciplines and methodologies to throw light on various aspects of the Chinese supernatural. The gallery of gods and goddesses surveyed demonstrates that these deities did not reflect China's socio-political order but rather expressed and negotiated tensions within it. In addition to reflecting the existing order, Chinese gods shaped it, transformed it, and compensated for it, and, as such, their work offers fresh perspectives on the relations between divinity and society in China.

Animal Traditions: Behavioural Inheritance in Evolution


Eytan Avital - 1996
    Animal Traditions maintains the assumption that selection of genes supplies both a sufficient explanation of evolution and a true description of its course. The introduction of the behavioral inheritance system into the Darwinian explanatory scheme enables the authors to offer new interpretations for common behaviors such as maternal behaviors, behavioral conflicts within families, adoption, and helping. This approach offers a richer view of heredity and evolution, integrates developmental and evolutionary processes, suggests new lines for research, and provides a constructive alternative to both the selfish gene and meme views of the world. This book will make stimulating reading for all those interested in evolutionary biology, sociobiology, behavioral ecology, and psychology.

Shell Game: A True Account of Beads and Money in North America


Jerry Martien - 1996
    A unique and extraordinary investigation into the nature of money and the origins of our present indebtedness, Shell Game is the account of a tragic misunderstanding between colonists and native Americans and the monumental repercussions that followed.

Betty Groff's Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbook


Betty Groff - 1996
    Contains recipes on all courses, including special sections on pickles and preserves, winemaking, jams and jellies, and the use of herbs.

Dental Anthropology


Simon Hillson - 1996
    The anthropologist's specimen may be a cast that a dentist has taken from a living mouth, or actual teeth from an archaeological site or forensic case. This text introduces the complex biology of teeth and provides a practical guide to all essential aspects of dental anthropology, including excavation, identification, microscopic study, and tooth age determination. Dental Anthropology is a concise yet comprehensive resource designed for students and researchers in anthropology and archaeology.

The Germanic Hero: Politics and Pragmatism in Early Medieval Poetry


Brian Murdoch - 1996
    the hero is not a sword-wielding barbarian, bent only upon establishing his own fame; such fame-seekers (including some famous medieval literary figures) might even fall outside the definition of the Germanic hero, the real value of whose deeds are given meaning only within the political construct. Individual prowess is not enough. The hero must conquer the blows of fate because he is committed to the conquest of chaos, and over all to the need for social stability. Brian Murdoch discusses works in Old English, Old and Middle High German, Old Norse, Latin and Old French, deliberately going beyond what is normally thought of as 'heroic poetry' to include the German so-called 'minstrel epic', and a work by a writer who is normally classified as a late medieval chivalric poet, Konrad von Wurzburg, the comparison of which with Beowulf allows us to span half a millennium.

Things as They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology


Michael D. Jackson - 1996
    deep in the thickets of philosophic references. Instead, true to the spirit of phenomoenology, we are provided with provocative accounts of how such thinking flows in contemporary anthropological practice." --XCP - Cross Cultural PoeticsIn this timely collection, thirteen contemporary ethnographers demonstrate the importance of phenomenological and existential ideas for anthropology. In emphasizing the link between the empirical and the experiential, these ethnographers also explore the relationship between phenomenology and other theories of the lifeworld, such as existentialism, radical empiricism, and critical theory.

Tomorrow, God Willing: Self-made Destinies in Cairo


Unni Wikan - 1996
    Living in a poor neighborhood of Cairo, she has raised eight children with almost no help from her husband or the Egyptian government and through hardships from domestic violence to constant quarrels over material possessions.Umm Ali's story is amazing not only for what it reveals about her resourcefulness but for the light it sheds on the resilience of Cairo's poor in the face of disastrous poverty. Like countless other poor people in Cairo, she has developed a personal buoyancy to cope with relentless economic need. It stems from a belief in the ability of people to shape their own destiny and helps explain why Cairo remains virtually free of the social ills—violent street crime and homelessness—that have eroded the lives of poor people in other major cities.Unni Wikan first met Umm Ali and her family twenty-five years ago and has returned almost every year. She draws on her firsthand experience of their lives to create an intimate portrait of Cairo's back streets and the people who live there. Wikan's innovative approach to ethnographic writing reads like a novel that presents the experiences of Umm Ali's family and neighbors in their own words.As Umm Ali recounts triumphs and defeats—from forming a savings club with neighbors to the gradual drifting away and eventual return of her husband—she unveils a deeply reflective attitude and her unwavering belief that she can improve her situation. Showing how Egyptian culture interprets poverty and family, this book attests to the capacity of an individual's self-worth to withstand incredible adversity.

The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science


Steven Mithen - 1996
    On the way to showing how the world of our ancient ancestors shaped our modern modular mind, Steven Mithen shares one provocative insight after another as he answers a series of fascinating questions:Were our brains hard-wired in the Pleistocene Era by the needs of hunter-gatherers?When did religious beliefs first emerge?Why were the first paintings made by humankind so technically accomplished and expressive?What can the sexual habits of chimpanzees tell us about the prehistory of the modern mind?This is the first archaeological account to support the new modular concept of the mind. The concept, promulgated by cognitive and evolutionary psychologists, views the mind as a collection of specialized intelligences or "cognitive domains," somewhat like a Swiss army knife with its specialized blades and tools. Arguing that only archaeology can answer many of the key questions raised by the new concept, Mithen delineates a three-phase sequence for the mind's evolution over six million years—from early Homo in Africa to the ice-age Neanderthals to our modern modular minds. The Prehistory of the Mind is an intriguing and challenging explanation of what it means to be human, a bold new theory about the origins and nature of the mind.

Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City


Graeme Gilloch - 1996
    This book is a timely and lucid study of Benjamin's lifelong fascination with the city and forms of metropolitan experience.Benjamin's critical and complex account of the modern urban environment is traced through a number of key texts: the pioneering sketches of Naples, Marseilles and Moscow; his childhood reminiscences of Berlin; and his brilliant and unfinished studies of nineteenth-century Paris and the poet Charles Baudelaire.Gilloch emphasizes the importance of these writings for an interpretation of Benjamin's work as a whole, and highlights their relevance for our contemporary understanding of modernity.

Reclaiming a Scientific Anthropology


Lawrence A. Kuznar - 1996
    Lawrence Kuznar begins by reviewing the basic issues of scientific epistemology in anthropology as they have taken shape over the life of the discipline. He then describes postmodern and other critiques of both science and scientific anthropology, and he concludes with stringent analyses of these debates. This new edition brings this important text firmly into the 21st century; it not only updates the scholarly debates but it describes new research techniques-such as computer modeling systems-that could not have been imagined just a decade ago. In a field that has become increasingly divided over basic methods of reasearch and interpretation, Kuznar makes a powerful argument that anthropology should return to its roots in empirical science.

Tangible Visions: Northwest Coast Indian Shamanism and Its Art


Allen Wardwell - 1996
    Less well known but equally important is the art made for use by shamans, particularly those of the Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Haida tribes. This volume presents the first comprehensive illustrated study of the various kinds of painted and carved objects that were carried and worn by shamans as they went about their duties. In order to form alliances with animal spirits, Northwest Coast shamans deprived themselves of food, water, and sleep during long vigils in the wilderness. The spirits that came to them in dreams and visions at such times could then be summoned to assist in healing and divinatory seances. Much of the ceremonial paraphernalia represents the helping spirits in the shaman's service. Certain examples, which show complex juxtapositions of many animals and human figures, depict the dreams or trance experiences of the shaman at the time he was forming his alliances. This study places Northwest Coast shamanism in a world-wide context and demonstrates the ways its practices and beliefs are similar to those found elsewhere. Throughout the book are archival photographs--portraits of shamans and their decaying grave houses--as well as descriptions of their lives, exploits and performances. A discussion of the complex iconography, which includes such creatures as land otters, devilfish, oystercatchers, mountain goats, and drowning men. The heart of the book is a catalogue of the objects--masks, amulets, storage boxes, drinking cups, clothing, drums, rattles, figure sculptures, soul catchers, staffs, crowns, and combs--employed by shamans. More than five hundred photographs, a large number published here for the first time, show the finest examples of Northwest Coast shamanistic art in museums and private collections throughout the world. This ground-breaking study brings attention to a corpus of Northwest Coast art, that, until now, has not received the attention it merits. It will be of importance to scholars and the general reader as well as those interested in the history and practice of shamanism.

San'ya Blues: Laboring Life in Contemporary Tokyo


Edward Fowler - 1996
    The city's largest day-labor market, notorious for its population of casual laborers, drunks, gamblers, and vagrants, has been home for more than half a century to anywhere from five to fifteen thousand men who cluster in the mornings at a crossroads called Namidabashi (Bridge of Tears) in hopes of getting work. The day-labor market, along with gambling and prostitution, is run by Japan's organized crime syndicates, the yakuza. Working as a day laborer himself, Fowler kept a diary of his experiences. He also talked with day laborers and local merchants, union leaders and bureaucrats, gangsters and missionaries. The resulting oral histories, juxtaposed with Fowler's narrative and diary entries, bring to life a community on the margins of contemporary Japan.Located near a former outcaste neighborhood, on what was once a public execution ground, San'ya shows a hidden face of Japan and contradicts the common assumption of economic and social homogeneity. Fowler argues that differences in ethnicity and class, normally suppressed in mainstream Japanese society, are conspicuous in San'ya and similar communities. San'ya's largely middle-aged, male day-laborer population contains many individuals displaced by Japan's economic success, including migrants from village communities, castoffs from restructuring industries, and foreign workers from Korea and China. The neighborhood and its inhabitants serve as an economic buffer zone--they are the last to feel the effects of a boom and the first to feel a recession. They come alive in this book, telling urgent stories that personify such abstractions as the costs of modernization and the meaning of physical labor in postindustrial society.

Patterns that Connect: Social Symbolism in Ancient & Tribal Art


Edmund Carpenter - 1996
    It remained for the American art historian Carl Schuster (1904-1969) to discover a set of patterns designed by ancient peoples to illustrate their ideas about kinship. Schuster succeeded in decoding this iconography, which lasted over ten thousand years, crossed continents, & outlived most of the cultures that sheltered it.

The Magic of the State


Michael Taussig - 1996
    Set in the enchanted mountain of a spirit-queen presiding over an unnamed, postcolonial country, this ethnographic work of ficto-criticism recreates in written form the shrines by which the dead--notably the fetishized forms of Europe's Others, Indians and Blacks--generate the magical powers of the modern state.

Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature


Liz Wilson - 1996
    She argues that despite the marginal role women played in monastic life, they occupied a very conspicuous place in Buddhist hagiographic literature. In narratives used for the edification of Buddhist monks, women's bodies in decay (diseased, dying, and after death) served as a central object for meditation, inspiring spiritual growth through sexual abstention and repulsion in the immediate world.Taking up a set of universal concerns connected with the representation of women, Wilson displays the pervasiveness of androcentrism in Buddhist literature and practice. She also makes persuasive use of recent historical work on the religious lives of women in medieval Christianity, finding common ground in the role of miraculous afflictions.This lively and readable study brings provocative new tools and insights to the study of women in religious life.

Hermeneutics and the Study of History: Selected Works


Wilhelm Dilthey - 1996
    This volume is the third to be published in Princeton University Press's projected six-volume series of his most important works. Part One makes available three of his works on hermeneutics and its history: "Schleiermacher's Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant Hermeneutics" (The Prize Essay of 1860); "On Understanding and Hermeneutics" (1867-68), based on student lecture notes, and the "The Rise of Hermeneutics" (1900), which traces the history of hermeneutics back to Hellenistic Greece. All the addenda to this well-known essay are translated here, some for the first time. In them Dilthey articulates three philosophical aporias concerning hermeneutics and projects an ultimate convergence between understanding and explanation. Part Two provides translations of review essays by Dilthey on Buckle's use of statistical history and on Burckhardt's cultural history; an essay "Friedrich Schlosser and the Problem of Universal History;" and a talk recalling his early years as a student of Boeckh, Jakob Grimm, Mommsen, Ranke, and Ritter. It also contains the important historical essay "The Eighteenth Century and the Historical World," in which Dilthey reexamines the Enlightenment to show its significant contributions to the rise of historical consciousness.

Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine


Arthur Kleinman - 1996
    Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America since 1968, draws upon his bicultural, multidisciplinary background to propose alternative strategies for thinking about how, in the postmodern world, the social and medical relate.Writing at the Margin explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. Kleinman studies the body as the mediator between individual and collective experience, finding that many health problems—for example the trauma of violence or depression in the course of chronic pain—are less individual medical problems than interpersonal experiences of social suffering. He argues for an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the infrapolitical context of illness, the responses to it, the social institutions relating to it, and the way it is configured in medical ethics.Previously published in various journals, these essays have been revised, updated, and brought together with an introduction, an essay on violence and the politics of post-traumatic stress disorder, and a new chapter that examines the contemporary ethnographic literature of medical anthropology.

Making Sense of Adult Learning


Dorothy MacKeracher - 1996
    Understanding how adults learn and applying that expertise to practical everyday situations and relationships opens the window on a broader understanding of the capacity of the human mind.Dorothy MacKeracher's "Making Sense of Adult Learning" was first published in 1996, and was acclaimed for its readability and value as a reference tool. For the second edition of this essential work, MacKeracher has reorganized and revised many of the chapters to bring the text up-to-date for contemporary use. Concepts are presented from learning-centred and learner-centred perspectives, while related learning and teaching principles provide ideas about how one may enable others to learn more effectively.Written for people preparing to become adult educators, "Making Sense of Adult Learning" provides background information about the nature of adult learning and the characteristics that typify adult learners. This new edition will be quick to assert its place as the premier guide in the field.

Culture and Mental Illness: A Client-Centered Approach


Richard J. Castillo - 1996
    The American Psychiatric Association recognized the role of culture in the recent DSM-IV. But the DSM-IV leaves practitioners wondering just how they should go about assessing those cultural factors. This book picks up where the DSM-IV leaves off.

Mayan Tales From Zinacantan: Dreams and Stories from the People of Bat


Robert M. Laughlin - 1996
    

Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding


Georgia M. Green - 1996
    It is intended to make issues involved in language understanding, such as speech, text, and discourse, accessible to the widest group possible -- not just specialists in linguistics or communication theorists -- but all scholars and researchers whose enterprises depend on having a useful model of how communicative agents understand utterances and expect their own utterances to be understood.Based on feedback from readers over the past seven years, explanations in every chapter have been improved and updated in this thoroughly revised version of the original text published in 1989. The most extensive revisions concern the relevance of technical notions of mutual and normal belief, and the futility of using the notion 'null context' to describe meaning. In addition, the discussion of implicature now includes an extended explication of "Grice's Cooperative Principle" which attempts to put it in the context of his theory of meaning and rationality, and to preclude misinterpretations which it has suffered over the past 20 years. The revised chapter exploits the notion of normal belief to improve the account of conversational implicature.

Fighting for Faith and Nation


Cynthia Keppley Mahmood - 1996
    Listening to the voices of people who experience political violence--either as victims or as perpetrators--gives new insights into both the sources of violent conflict and the potential for its resolution.Drawing on her extensive interviews and conversations with Sikh militants, Cynthia Keppley Mahmood presents their accounts of the human rights abuses inflicted on them by the state of India as well as their explanations of the philosophical tradition of martyrdom and meaningful death in the Sikh faith. While demonstrating how divergent the world views of participants in a conflict can be, Fighting for Faith and Nation gives reason to hope that our essential common humanity may provide grounds for a pragmatic resolution of conflicts such as the one in Punjab which has claimed tens of thousands of lives in the past fifteen years.

Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture Since 1870,


Katherine Ott - 1996
    Now Katherine Ott chronicles how in one century a romantic, ambiguous affliction of the spirit was transformed into a disease that threatened public health and civic order. She argues that there was no constant identity to the disease over time, no core tuberculosis.

Theology in Reconstruction


Thomas F. Torrance - 1996
    

Performances


Greg Dening - 1996
    Yet he is keenly aware that the actual past remains fundamentally irreplicable. All histories are culturally crafted artifacts, commensurate with folk tales, stage plays, or films. Whether derived from logbooks and letters, or displayed on music hall stages and Hollywood back lots, history is in essence our making sense of what has and continues to happen, creating for us a sense of our cultural and individual selves.Through juxtapositions of actual events and creative reenactments of them—such as the mutiny on the Bounty in 1787 and the various Hollywood films that depict that event—Dening calls attention to the provocative moment of theatricality in history making where histories, cultures, and selves converge. Moving adeptly across varied terrains, from the frontiers of North America to the islands of the South Pacific, Dening marshals a striking array of diverse, often recalcitrant, sources to examine the tangled histories of cross-cultural clash and engagement. Refusing to portray conquest, colonization, and hegemony simply as abstract processes, Dening, in his own culturally reflexive performance, painstakingly evokes the flesh and form of past actors, both celebrated and unsung, whose foregone lives have become our history.

The Timucua


Jerald T. Milanich - 1996
    This text looks at the Native American people, the Timucua, using information gathered from archaeological excavations and from the interpretation of historical documents left behind, mainly by Spain and France, who sought to colonize Florida and to place the Timucua under their sway.Contents: Preface. 1. The Beginning. 2. Who Were the Timucua? 3. The Invasion. 4. Spanish Missions. 5. Mission Settlements and Subsistence. 6. The Organization of Societies. 7. Beliefs and Behavior. 8. The End. Bibliography.

Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America


Ruth Gay - 1996
    They were mostly young, single and uneducated, but filled with hope of a new life in a new land. The newcomers maintained a sense of community longer than most immigrant groups, although culturally they were uncertain, clinging to fading memories of home, and not yet able to enter American life.

The Psychology of Political Communication


Ann N. Crigler - 1996
    Meaning refers to what one intends to convey especially through language, as well as to what is actually conveyed and reflects the processes of message creation and interpretation. People communicate and interpret messages and meanings in the context of current and prior information according to the authors.The first part of the book focuses on the construction of political messages in the media and considers the roles played by the press, the president, political consultants, and campaign staffs. In the second part of the book, the authors look at individuals and how they construct political meanings from available messages.Contributors to the volume include Dean E. Alger, W. Lance Bennett, Timothy E. Cook, Ann Crigler, Michael X. Delli Carpini, Robert M. Entman, William A. Gamson, Doris A. Graber, August E. Grant, Roderick Hart, Marion Just, John Llewellyn, W. Russell Neuman, Richard M. Perloff, Deborah Smith-Howell, and Bruce A. Williams.". . . a laudable effort to examine political communication processes within a constructionist framework. . . . Here we have a picture of audiences who hold contradictory opinions, change their minds, get influenced by friends and colleages, draw images from the media but revise these constructions according to their own experiences and accumulated popular wisdom and select representatives as much because they've projected images of being 'nice guys' as because there are specific issues that motivate their choices. The book opens a number of doors to a better understanding of this process. . . ." --International Journal of Public Opinion ResearchAnn Crigler is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Southern California.

Showing Signs of Violence: The Cultural Politics of a Twentieth-Century Headhunting Ritual


Kenneth M. George - 1996
    No killing takes place in this ritual—no actual heads are taken—but its rhetoric of violence is unmistakable and real.Kenneth M. George vividly details the rites of pangngae, from the headhunters' secret and predatory journey downriver to the week of public festivity that follows their exuberant return. He puts special emphasis on the songs, speeches, and liturgies of the headhunt and shows how this ritual is neither a relic form of primitive violence nor an obsolete discourse on the social horizons of a remote community. In fact, the themes, purposes, and circumstances of pangngae make it the most public and community-defining form of ceremonial violence for this small mountain enclave as it confronts the dilemmas presented by Indonesian modernity and state culture.

Through nature to eternity : the bog bodies of northwest Europe


Wijnand van der Sanden - 1996
    

Shamans And Elders: Experience, Knowledge And Power Among The Daur Mongols


Caroline Humphrey - 1996
    Lavishly illustrated and containing a wealth of new information, it presents a fresh understanding of the widespread phenomenon of shamanism. It looks at gender and ritual, female shamans and goddess worship, death and funeral rituals, the importance of old men and ancestors, and Daur notions of landscape within their direct experience and beyond.

Bayaka: The Extraordinary Music of the Babenzele Pygmies and Sounds of Their Foresthome


Louis Sarno - 1996
    New Jersey native Louis Sarno now lives with the Babenzele pygmies, or Bayaka as they call themselves. Living there not as anthropologist or missionary, but as a welcome member of a cooperative community, Sarno is free to record songs and rituals previously un-heard by western ears - music he calls "one of the hidden glories of humanity." His other recordings of the cicadas, birds, frogs and countless other species that share their lush, complex forest, reveal an exquisite environmental orchestra untouched by industrial sounds. For Bayaka, renowned nature recordist Bernie Krause combines Sarno's recordings of Babenzele music and sounds of the forest, illuminating the timeless harmony that has existed between the Bayaka and their home. That relationship shines through as you hear the forest providing a dense rhythmic background for their songs and ceremonies, including a gleeful wedding song and the echoing gathering rounds of the Babenzele women. Full-color photography and extensive notes on life in the forest and Babenzele music, bring these 11 beautiful and rare recordings to life.

Treasures of the National Museum of the American Indian: Smithsonian Institute


Clara Sue Kidwell - 1996
    The museum’s collections span more than 10,000 years and—as this lavishly illustrated miniature volume demonstrates—include a multitude of fascinating objects, from ancient clay figurines to contemporary Indian paintings, from all over the Americas.

Other Half of My Soul: Bede Griffiths and the Hindu-Christian Dialogue


Beatrice Bruteau - 1996
    Bede Griffiths, the gentle Benedictine monk who traveled to India to seek the other half of his soul was one such spiritual giant. Like Mother Teresa and Thich Nhat Hanh, Father Bede's spirituality transcends sectarian labels. His Shantivanam ("Forest of Peace") monastery in India is Christian in faith but Hindu in lifestyle. The essays and stories in the moving tribute to Father Bede by such luminaries as Thomas Berry dissolve the boundaries between Christian belief and Eastern practice.

On Our Own Terms: Race, Class, and Gender in the Lives of African-American Women


Leith Mullings - 1996
    The author begins by discussing the manner in which her experience as a participant observer led her to research and write about various aspects of African-American women's experiences. She goes on to provide a critical analysis of the new scholarship on African-American women, and explores issues of race, class and gender in the arenas of work, kinship and resistance.

Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy


Kristin Luker - 1996
    Will motherhood make this young woman poorer? Will it make the United States poorer as a nation? That's what the voices raised against babies having babies would have us think, and what many Americans seem inclined to believe. This powerful book takes us behind the stereotypes, the inflamed rhetoric, and the flip media sound bites to show us the complex reality and troubling truths of teenage mothers in America today.Would it surprise you to learn that Michelle is more likely to be white than African American? That she is most likely eighteen or nineteen--a legal adult? That teenage mothers are no more common today than in 1900? That two-thirds of them have been impregnated by men older than twenty? Kristin Luker, author of the acclaimed Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, puts to rest once and for all some very popular misconceptions about unwed mothers from colonial times to the present. She traces the way popular attitudes came to demonize young mothers and examines the profound social and economic changes that have influenced debate on the issue, especially since the 1970s. In the early twentieth century, reformers focused people's attention on the social ills that led unmarried teenagers to become pregnant; today, society has come almost full circle, pinning social ills on sexually irresponsible teens.Dubious Conceptions introduces us to the young women who are the object of so much opprobrium. In these pages we hear teenage mothers from across the country talk about their lives, their trials, and their attempts to find meaning in motherhood. The book also gives a human face to those who criticize them, and shows us why public anger has settled on one of society's most vulnerable groups. Sensitive to the fears and confusion that fuel this anger, and to the troubled future that teenage mothers and their children face, Luker makes very clear what we as a nation risk by not recognizing teenage pregnancy for what it is: a symptom, not a cause, of poverty.

Rastafari: For The Healing Of The Nation


Dennis Forsythe - 1996
    

The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems


Florian Coulmas - 1996
    It provides both a fully illustrated description of over 400 writing systems and an account of the study of writing in many different disciplines, from anthropology to psychology.

Rethinking Linguistic Relativity


John J. Gumperz - 1996
    This book reexamines ideas about linguistic relativity in the light of new evidence and changes in theoretical climate. The editors have provided a substantial introduction that summarizes changes in thinking about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in the light of developments in anthropology, linguistics and cognitive science. Introductions to each section will be of especial use to students.

Designing Social Systems in a Changing World


Bela H. Banathy - 1996
    Banathy discusses a broad range of design approaches, models, methods, and tools, together with the theoretical and philosophical bases of social systems design. he explores the existing knowledge bases of systems design; introduces and integrates concepts from other fields that contribute to design thinking and practice; and thoroughly explains how competence in social systems design empowers people to direct their progress and create a truly participative democracy. Based on advanced learning theory and practice, the text's material is enhanced by helpful diagrams that illustrate novel concepts and problem sets that allow readers to apply these concepts.

Cultural Production of the Educated Person: Critical Ethnographies of Schooling and Local Practice


Bradley A. Levinson - 1996
    Examines the ways in which cultural practices and knowledges are produced in and out of schools around the world.

The Matrix Of Language: Contemporary Linguistic Anthropology


Donald Lawrence Brenneis - 1996
    The articles in this anthology, selected for their readability, present a range of methodological approaches and well-known case studies that illustrate the interconnection of language, culture, and social practice. The editors' introductory essays compare and contrast specific approaches in four broad areas: language and socialization, gender, the ethnography of speaking, and the role of language in social and political life. The book is a valuable introduction in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics courses and a resource for anyone exploring the relation of language to psychology, political theory, feminist studies, and literature and folklore.

Human Rights, Culture and Context: Anthropological Perspectives


Richard Ashby Wilson - 1996
    A rethinking of popular political movements, this book looks at new, emerging, mass visions and analyses their impact and potential in new ways.

Subaltern Studies: Writings On South Asian History And Society


Ranajit Guha - 1996
    Subaltern Studies IX carries forward the Subaltern agenda of searching for the voices and agency of the subaltern, enlarging the focus to include contemporary issues of gender, oppression, and lumpenization in metropolitan modern India.

Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy


Gunther Kress - 1996
    Through close attention to the variety of objects which children constantly produce (drawings, cuttings-out, 'writings' and collages), Kress suggests a set of principles which reveal the underlying coherence of children's actions; actions which allow us to connect them with attempts to make meaning before they acquire language and writing.This book provides fundamental challenges to commonly held assumptions about both language and literacy, thought and action. It places these challenges within the context of speculation about the abilities and dispositions essential for children as young adults, and calls for the radical decentring of language in educational theory and practice.

Weaving a World: Textiles and the Navajo Way of Seeing: Textiles and the Navajo Way of Seeing


Paul G. Zolbrod - 1996
    This book explores the patterns and irregularities often overlooked or considered "flaws" in these beautiful textiles, and it seeks to identify the mythic symbols and historic and personal stories they contain. The inclusion of objects and the use of color, pattern, and weave variations are found to be significant symbols of the way a weaver thinks about the world. A weaver may pray her way into the center of the rug, where the most intricate work and color will appear. Patterns may portray a vision of the world animated by spirits and holy people, recounting the creation of the heavens, the earth, and the loom itself. Weaving a World includes seventy rugs from the celebrated collection of the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and documentary photographs of today's weaving culture on the Navajo reservation.

Indian Art of Ancient Florida


Barbara A. Purdy - 1996
    A fine sampling of a unique native American artistic heritage is laid out before you, in text and in pictures, in this exciting book."--Gordon R. Willey, Peabody Museum, Harvard University For thousands of years, the Indians of Florida created exquisite objects from the natural materials available to them--wood, bone, stone, clay, and shell. This stunning full-color book, the first devoted exclusively to the artistic achievements of the Florida aborigines, describes and pictures 116 of these masterpieces. A brief history of the consequences of European infiltration and laterinvestigations by explorers and archaeologists sets the stage for consideration of the works themselves. They date from the Paleoindian period (ca. 9500-8000 BC) to the mid-16th century and include utilitarian creations, instruments of personal adornment and magic, objects indicating status, and those paying homage to ancestors or aiding the dead in their journey into the next world. Because European explorers took little notice of the adornment of the Florida natives and the people themselves did not survive, no enduring artistic traditions prevail from this early period. This collection, a record of the quality and beauty of their art, includes representative objects in all media used and from all cultural periods, geographic areas, and environmental settings in which the pieces functioned. Barbara A. Purdy is professor emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida, curator emerita in archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, and author of How to Do Archaeology the Right Way (UPF, 1996) and The Art and Archaeology of Florida’s Wetlands (1991). Roy C. Craven, Jr., is professor of art emeritus, founding director of the University Gallery at the University of Florida, and author of Ceremonial Centers of the Maya (UPF, 1974) and A Concise History of Indian Art (1991).

Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa


Hildi Hendrickson - 1996
    Unusual in its treatment of the body surface as a critical frontier in the production and authentification of identity, Clothing and Difference shows how the body and its adornment have been used to construct and contest social and individual identities in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, and other African societies during both colonial and post-colonial times. Grounded in the insights of anthropology and history and influenced by developments in cultural studies, these essays investigate the relations between the personal and the public, and between ideas about the self and those about the family, gender, and national groups. They explore the bodily and material creation of the changing identities of women, spirits, youths, ancestors, and entrepreneurs through a consideration of topics such as fashion, spirit possession, commodity exchange, hygiene, and mourning. By taking African societies as its focus, Clothing and Difference demonstrates that factors considered integral to Western social development—heterogeneity, migration, urbanization, transnational exchange, and media representation—have existed elsewhere in different configurations and with different outcomes. With significance for a wide range of fields, including gender studies, cultural studies, art history, performance studies, political science, semiotics, economics, folklore, and fashion and textile analysis/design, this work provides alternative views of the structures underpinning Western systems of commodification, postmodernism, and cultural differentiation. Contributors. Misty Bastian, Timothy Burke, Hildi Hendrickson, Deborah James, Adeline Masquelier, Elisha Renne, Johanna Schoss, Brad Weiss

A Natural History of Peace: With Commentary


Thomas Gregor - 1996
    Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace requires special relationships, structures, and attitudes to promote and protect it.A Natural History of Peace provides the first broadly interdisciplinary examination of peace as viewed from the perspectives of social anthropology, primatology, archeology, psychology, political science, and economics. Among other notable features, this volume offers:a major theory concerning the evolution of peace and violence through human history; an in-depth comparative study of peaceful cultures with the goal of discovering what it is that makes them peaceful;one of the earliest reports of a new theory of the organization and collapse of ancient Maya civilization;a comparative examination of peace from the perspective of change, including the transition of one of the world's most violent societies to a relatively peaceful culture, and the decision-making process of terrorists who abandon violence;and a theory of political change that sees the conclusion of wars as uniquely creative periods in the evolution of peace among modern nations.

Ritual Ground: Bent's Old Fort, World Formation, and the Annexation of the Southwest


Douglas C. Comer - 1996
    Although the raw enterprise and improvisation that characterized the American westward movement seem to have little to do with ritual, Douglas Comer argues that the fort grew and prospered because of ritual and that ritual shaped the subsequent history of the region to an astonishing extent.At Bent's Old Fort, rituals of trade, feasting, gaming, marriage, secret societies, and war, as well as the "calcified ritual" provided by the fort itself, brought together and restructured Anglo, Hispanic, and American Indian cultures. Comer sheds new light on this heretofore poorly understood period in American history, building at the same time a powerfully convincing case to demonstrate that the human world is made through ritual.Comer gives his narrative an anthropological and philosophical framework; the events at Bent's Old Fort provide a compelling example not only of "world formation" but of a world's tragic collapse, culminating in the Sand Creek massacre. He also calls attention to the reconstructed Bent's Old Fort on the site of the original. Here visitors reenact history, staff work out personal identities, and groups lobby for special versions of history by ritual recasting of the past as the present.

Human Paleobiology


Robert B. Eckhardt - 1996
    It integrates evidence from studies of human adaptability, comparative primatology, and molecular genetics to document consistent measures of genetic distance among subspecies, species, and other taxonomic groupings. These findings support the interpretation of human biology in terms of fewer number of populations characterized by higher levels of genetic continuity than previously hypothesized. Using this as a basis, Robert Eckhardt goes on to analyze problems in human paleobiology including phenotypic differentiation, patterns of species range expansion, and phyletic succession in terms of the patterns and processes still observable in extant populations. This book will be a challenging and stimulating read for students and researchers interested in human paleobiology or evolutionary anthropology.

Making Alternative Histories: The Practice of Archaeology and History in Non-Western Settings


Peter R. Schmidt - 1996
    In Making Alternative Histories, eleven scholars from Africa, India, Latin America, North America, and Europe debate and discuss how to respond to the erasures of local histories by colonialism, neocolonial influences, and the practice of archaeology and history as we know them today in North America and much of the Western world. Making Alternative Histories presents a profound challenge to traditional Western modes of scholarship and will be required reading for Western archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians.

Gender and Archaeology


Rita P. Wright - 1996
    Its contributors are primarily anthropologists but the book also includes essays by a bioanthropologist and an historian of technology. All are leading scholars who, using a range of methodologies and theoretical frameworks, integrate gender into the central questions with which archaeologists have traditionally been concerned.The book challenges archaeologists to draw on wider feminist discourses in their interpretations of past societies and feminist scholars in other disciplines to consider the new engendered approaches to archaeology presented in the volume.Contributors include: Gillian Bentley, Elizabeth Brumfiel, Margaret Conkey, Cathy Lynne Costin, Joan Gero, Rosemary Joyce, Judith McGaw, Janet Romanowicz, Ruth Tringham, and the editor.

Battlefields and Burial Grounds: The Indian Struggle to Protect Ancestral Graves in the U.S.


Roger C. Echo-Hawk - 1996
    Describes the efforts of Native Americans to rebury ancestral human remains and grave offerings held by museums and historical societies, with particular emphasis on the Pawnees and their struggle to reclaim their dead.

The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century


Guillermo Gómez-Peña - 1996
    Performance texts, poems, and essays explore America's irrational fears of otherness and hybridization.

When the Land Was Young: Reflections on American Archaeology


Sharman Apt Russell - 1996
    But as immersed as it is in the details of the dead, archaeology belongs to the living. It is a tale of peopling that in North America extends our cultural perspective back at least twelve thousand years, a story that Sharman Apt Russell brings to vibrant, contentious life as it is enacted today, revealing past and present alike. A history of archaeology in America, written with clear-eyed wit and grace, Russell's book takes the study of our ancestors out of the museum and shows us the immediate, human implications of our forays into the past. Whether eyeing the theory that humans caused the extinction of Pleistocene mega-fauna, or the demands for the repatriation of Native American remains, or the meaning of burial mounds in Ohio, Russell keeps in clear view the idea that there are multiple ways of examining the past. She interviews an array of characters who have been instrumental in reshaping modern archaeology and speaks to those, such as Pawnee activists fighting for the return of ancestral remains or a Navajo archaeologist at odds with his people's prohibition against handling the dead, who continue to wrestle with the nature and practice of archaeology today.

Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany


Kathy Stuart - 1996
    Executioners, skinners, grave-diggers, shepherds, barber-surgeons, millers, linen-weavers, sow-gelders, latrine-cleaners, and bailiffs were among the dishonorable by virtue of their trades. It shows the extent to which dishonor determined the life chances and self-identity of these people. Taking Augsburg as a prime example, it investigates how honorable estates interacted with dishonorable people, and shows how the pollution anxieties of early modern Germans structured social and political relations within honorable society.

Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire


Johannes Fabian - 1996
    It contains the paintings of a single artist depicting Zaire's history, along with a series of ethnographic essays discussing local history, its complex relationship to forms of self-expression and self-understanding, and the aesthetics of contemporary urban African and Third World societies. As a collaboration between ethnographer and painter, this innovative study challenges text-oriented approaches to understanding history and argues instead for an event- and experience-oriented model, ultimately adding a fresh perspective to the discourse on the relationship between modernity and tradition.During the 1970s, Johannes Fabian encouraged Tshibumba Kanda Matulu to paint the history of Zaire. The artist delivered the work in batches, together with an oral narrative. Fabian recorded these statements along with his own question-and-answer sessions with the painter. The first part of the book is the complete series of 100 paintings, with excerpts from the artist's narrative and the artist-anthropologist dialogues. Part Two consists of Fabian's essays about this and other popular painting in Zaire. The essays discuss such topics as performance, orality, history, colonization, and popular art.

Strategic Pragmatism: The Culture of Singapore's Economics Development Board


Edgar C. Schein - 1996
    Edgar Schein, a social psychologist with a long and celebrated research interest in organizational studies, examines the cultural history of the key intstitution that spawned this economic miracle. Through interviews and full access to Singapore's Economic Development Board (EDB), Schein shows how economic development was successfully promoted. He delves into the individual relationships and the overall structure that contributed to the EDB's effectiveness in propelling Singapore, one of Asia's "little dragons" into the modern era. In his foreword, Lester Thurrow locates Schein's organizational and case-specific account within a larger economic and comparative framework.Over a period of two years, Schein studied how the EDB was created, the kind of leadership it provided, the management structure it used, the human resource policies it pursued, and how it influenced other organizations within the Singapore government. Schein sat in on EDB meetings and extensively interviewed current and former members of the board, Singapore's leaders who created the board, and businesspeople who have dealt with the board. His book intertwines the perspective of the board's members and its investor clients in an analysis that uses both organization and cross-cultural theory.Although there are currently studies of comparable Japanese and Korean organizations, this is the first detailed analysis of the internal structure and functioning of the economic development body of Singapore, a key player in the Asian and world markets.

Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews


David M. Gitlitz - 1996
    In coping with clandestineness, crypto-Jews rapidly evolved their own idiosyncratic religion. Its Jewish core was quickly replaced with concepts and practices from the surrounding Catholic culture covered by a veneer of Jewish theology. Included in this award-winning volume are examinations of crypto-Jewish beliefs, superstitions, birth customs, education, marriage and sex, holidays, dietary laws, conversions and death, and burial practices. Secrecy and Deceit provides a comprehensive account of the customs of these secret Jews.Secrecy and Deceit provides rare glimpses into a subject that is increasingly fascinating to many different audiences.--Jane S. Gerber, Director, Institute for Sephardic Studies, CUNY Graduate CenterHistorians and students of comparative and popular religion will be drawing on this work for years.--Haym Soloveitchik, Yeshiva UniversityWinner of the National Jewish Book Award and the Lucy B. Davidowicz History Award

Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge


Laura Nader - 1996
    While the volume rests on the assumption that science is not autonomous, the book is distinguished by its global perspective. Examining knowledge systems within a planetary frame forces thinking about boundaries that silence or affect knowledge-building. Consideration of ethnoscience and technoscience research within a common framework is overdue for raising questions about deeply held beliefs and assumptions we all carry about scientific knowledge. We need a perspective on how to regard different science traditions because public controversies should not be about a glorified science or a despicable science.

Inventing the Southwest: The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art


Kathleen L. Howard - 1996
    This book is the story of the people and places of the Fred Harvey Company, which together with the Santa Fe Railway helped to bring about the craze for Native American arts and crafts that remains today Based on an exhibit of the Heard Museum.

Native American Myth & Legend


Mike Dixon-Kennedy - 1996
    In over 1,500 detailed entries, from the mysterious Mayan god Ab Kin Xoc to Zuyua (also Mayan), from the Pawnee fertility ritual known as Hako to the origins of the Alaskan Inuit (or "genuine people"), you'll find it all. People, places, artifacts, and a wealth of historical treasures present a fully dimensional view of these ancient traditions, as well as the cultures from which they came. Pick up this fascinating "dictionary-style" reference to look up the meaning of Aba, and you're not likely to put it down until you reach the Z's. 304 pages, 6 x 9 1/4.

Great Ape Societies


William C. McGrew - 1996
    We also share key features such as high intelligence, omnivorous diets, prolonged child-rearing and rich social lives. The Great Apes show a surprising diversity of adaptations, particularly in social life, ranging from the solitary life of orangutans, through patriarchy in gorillas to complex but different social organizations in bonobos and chimpanzees. As Great Apes are so close to humans, comparisons yield essential knowledge for modeling human evolutionary origins. Great Ape Societies provides comprehensive up-to-date syntheses of work on all four species, drawing on decades of international field work, zoo and laboratory studies. It will be essential reading for students and researchers in primatology, anthropology, psychology and human evolution.

Women of Mongolia


Martha Avery - 1996
    For the past several years the country has been undergoing extreme change in economic structure as well as social organization. The 30 women in this book discuss the changes in specific, pesonal terms but, as a counterpoint, confirm a tenacious sense of tradition. Weather conditions are extreme in Mongolia: winter temperatures hover between 30 to 40 degrees below zero. The high plateau that Mongolia sits on has preserved a uniquely Mongolian lifestyle. The women of Mongolia celebrate that lifestyle in this book, as they face an uncertain future with strength and optimism.