"She's taken a piece of the culinary world and made herself its queen."-- "New York"

    Used by Kevin Costner as a resource text for the motion picture Dances with Wolves, this is an extraordinarily in-depth examination of the day-to-day lives of the North American plains Indians, with over one thousand illustrations and thirty-two four-color plates. Covering everything from social customs, personal qualities, and government to types of weaponry, achievement marks, and the training of Indian boys, The Mystic Warriors of the Plains is a comprehensive encyclopedia of Plains Indian lore that will delight and inform everyone interested in understanding the native peoples of the Plains. "Magnificently and accurately ... conveys both the tragic ironies and splendors of the rich plains civilization." —Newsweek "Fascinating detail that gives a better idea of the plains people than mere description can do...."—Navajo Times

    

    The effect, says Carpenter, is staggering: ""I think media are so powerful that they swallow cultures,"" encircling and destroying old environments, eroding and dissolving cultural identity. Citing his own experiences Carpenter tells of the stunning psychological disorientation he has witnessed among men who have just learned to write their names, heard their voices coming from a tape deck or seen their photograph for the first time; staring into the lens of a camera ""the terror in their eyes is the terror of being recognized as individuals"" -- for the first time each man saw himself and his environment ""and saw them as separable."" Unlike McLuhan, Carpenter is leery of ""hot"" media and openly biased toward the visual: Euclidian space, three-dimensionality, the phonetic alphabet are for him inexorably linked to the development of Western Civilization and its characteristic patterns -- lineality, causality, temporality, etc. Thus the ubiquitous use of radio in New Guinea alarms him. Radio is magic; it reinforces the separation of spirit and flesh hitherto confined to dream-myth rituals and ceremonials. He worries about its propaganda potential noting that in North Africa and Indonesia it has already been used to break down traditional tribal groupings, ""building nationalism to a feverish pitch and creating unreasonable national goals."" This sometimes smacks of Western paternalism but Carpenter pleads that no technology is neutral; the notion that electronics can simply be used to dispense information is folly; the medium is indeed the message. Some of his recommendations (government sponsored chess, crossword puzzles and ""huge mirrors erected in public places"") will make you blink but his repeated examples of media-induced distortions of human behavior are interesting enough to galvanize attention and draw feedback.

    "Determined not to let the slightest detail" escape him or to leave unanswered the many questions prompted by his personal experiences, Clastres follows the Guayaki in their everyday lives.Now available for the first time in a stunningly beautiful translation by Paul Auster, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians radically alters not only the Western academic conventions in which other cultures are thought but also the discipline of political anthropology itself.Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians was awarded the Alta Prize in nonfiction by the American Literary Translators Association.

    Young Williams won it, and went off to Oxford to study history and politics. He became an authority on West Indian history and, back home, founded the People's National Movement Party, which has repeatedly returned him to office. Mr. Williams' education has endowed him with a lucid style and, despite his dedication to his homeland, a mind that is anything but insular. This account of his efforts to make a new nation closes in 1968; one looks forward to another installment." -- The New Yorker In the meantime, this autobiography has become a classic in African-Caribbean history. This edition features an introduction by Colin Palmer (Princeton University), the author of Passageways: An Interpretive History of Black America.

    Manuel Cortes, a socialist and mayor of the village of Mijas in Andalusia, became a marked man once Franco's forces took power. Cortes stayed under cover until amnesty was decreed in 1969. This absorbing narrative, based on numerous in-depth interviews, chronicles an awe-inspiring ordeal and depicts one of Spain's darkest hours in visceral detail.

    

    As with artistic, intellectual, and scientific production, culture is immediately produced as sign and as exchange value. Hence, in modern society consumption defines the stages where the commodity is immediately produced as sign, and signs as commodities. This collection of essays attempts an analysis of the sign form in the same way that Marx's critique of political economy sought an analysis of the commodity form: as the commodity is at the same time both exchange value and use value, the sign is both signifier and signified. Thus, it necessitates an analysis on two levels, with the author confronting all of the conceptual obstacles of semiology in order to provide the same radical critique that Marx developed of classical political economy.

    Here are two classic studies by a pioneer in African American studies, one about the place of John Brown in African American history, the other about the reasons for the unique esteem in which he has been held by successive generations of blacks.This two-in-one edition features a new introduction by William S. McFeely, author of the Pulitzer Prize�winning Grant: A Biography.

    Through engagingly documented song arrangements and profiles of their singers, Jackson shows how such pieces as "Hammer Ring," "Ration Blues," "Yellow Gal," and "Jody's Got My Wife and Gone" are like no other folk music forms: they are distinctly African in heritage, diminished in power and meaning outside their prison context, and used exclusively by black convicts.The songs helped workers through the rigors of cane cutting, logging, and cotton picking. Perhaps most important, they helped resolve the men's hopes and longings and allowed them a subtle outlet for grievances they could never voice when face-to-face with their jailers.

    This landmark second edition considerably expands and updates the original, illustrating the development of American Indian political activism from the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century. Included in the fifty selections are influential statements by Indian organizations and congressional committees, the texts of significant laws, and the articulate voices of individuals such as Clyde Warrior, Vine Deloria Jr., Dennis Banks, Wilma Mankiller, Ada Deer, and Russell Means. The selections are organized around key issues: the nature of the original Red Power protest; tribal identity, self-determination, and sovereignty; land claims and economic development; cultural traditions and spirituality; education; and reservation conditions.

    . . . [His] book has real significance for today, and may well become a classic in the philosophy of culture."—Anglican Theological Review