Laura M. Ahearn shows that young Nepalese people are applying their newly acquired literacy skills to love-letter writing, fostering a transition that involves not only a shift in marriage rituals, but also a change in how villagers conceive of their own ability to act and attribute responsibility for events. These developments have potential ramifications that extend far beyond the realm of marriage and well past the Himalayas.The love-letter correspondences examined by Ahearn also provide a deeper understanding of the social effects of literacy. While the acquisition of literary skills may open up new opportunities for some individuals, such skills can also impose new constraints, expectations, and disappointments. The increase in female literacy rates in Junigau in the 1990s made possible the emergence of new courtship practices and facilitated self-initiated marriages, but it also reinforced certain gender ideologies and undercut some avenues to social power, especially for women. Scholars, and students in such fields as anthropology, women's studies, linguistics, development studies, and South Asian studies will find this book ethnographically rich and theoretically insightful. Laura M. Ahearn is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University.

    As the source of this oil, the Ecuadorian Amazon has borne the far-reaching social and environmental consequences of a growing U.S. demand for petroleum and the dynamics of economic globalization it necessitates. Crude Chronicles traces the emergence during the 1990s of a highly organized indigenous movement and its struggles against a U.S. oil company and Ecuadorian neoliberal policies. Against the backdrop of mounting government attempts to privatize and liberalize the national economy, Suzana Sawyer shows how neoliberal reforms in Ecuador led to a crisis of governance, accountability, and representation that spurred one of twentieth-century Latin America’s strongest indigenous movements.Through her rich ethnography of indigenous marches, demonstrations, occupations, and negotiations, Sawyer tracks the growing sophistication of indigenous politics as Indians subverted, re-deployed, and, at times, capitulated to the dictates and desires of a transnational neoliberal logic. At the same time, she follows the multiple maneuvers and discourses that the multinational corporation and the Ecuadorian state used to circumscribe and contain indigenous opposition. Ultimately, Sawyer reveals that indigenous struggles over land and oil operations in Ecuador were as much about reconfiguring national and transnational inequality—that is, rupturing the silence around racial injustice, exacting spaces of accountability, and rewriting narratives of national belonging—as they were about the material use and extraction of rain-forest resources.

    Why people behave as they do is as much a focus as is their actual behavior. Through instructions given to Farrer by Bernard Second, her Apache teacher for fourteen years, readers gain insight into the importance of narrative, not just in ceremony but especially in everyday living on a contemporary Indian reservation in the American Southwest. Sights and smells are almost palpable as the author provides the best in reflexive ethnography by allowing readers to see her as a person rather than an all-knowing anthropologist. She neither romanticizes nor patronizes the Apachean people, who are presented as people with foibles as well as possessing much worthy of admiration.

    Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over a period of seven years, Paige West focuses on the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, the site of a biodiversity conservation project implemented between 1994 and 1999. She describes the interactions between those who ran the program—mostly ngo workers—and the Gimi people who live in the forests surrounding Crater Mountain. West shows that throughout the project there was a profound disconnect between the goals of the two groups. The ngo workers thought that they would encourage conservation and cultivate development by teaching Gimi to value biodiversity as an economic resource. The villagers expected that in exchange for the land, labor, food, and friendship they offered the conservation workers, they would receive benefits, such as medicine and technology. In the end, the divergent nature of each group’s expectations led to disappointment for both.West reveals how every aspect of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area—including ideas of space, place, environment, and society—was socially produced, created by changing configurations of ideas, actions, and material relations not only in Papua New Guinea but also in other locations around the world. Complicating many of the assumptions about nature, culture, and development underlying contemporary conservation efforts, Conservation Is Our Government Now demonstrates the unique capacity of ethnography to illuminate the relationship between the global and the local, between transnational processes and individual lives.

    It seeks to clarify such questions as: does correctness matter?; and is it more important to speak fluently and write imaginatively or to communicate one's message?

    Portraits of 'the Whiteman': linguistic play and cultural symbols among the Western Apache investigates a complex form of joking in which Apaches stage carefully crafted imitations of Anglo-Americans and, by means of these characterizations, give audible voice and visible substance to their conceptions of this most pressing of social 'problems'. Keith Basso's essay, based on linguistic and ethnographic materials collected in Cibecue, a Western Apache community, provides interpretations of selected joking encounters to demonstrate how Apaches go about making sense of the behaviour of Anglo-Americans. This study draws on theory in symbolic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and the dramaturgical model of human communication developed by Erving Goffman. Although the assumptions and premises that shape these areas of inquiry are held by some to be quite disparate, this analysis shows them to be fully compatible and mutually complementary.

    Based on four years of fieldwork among the Runa of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, Eduardo Kohn draws on his rich ethnography to explore how Amazonians interact with the many creatures that inhabit one of the world’s most complex ecosystems. Whether or not we recognize it, our anthropological tools hinge on those capacities that make us distinctly human. However, when we turn our ethnographic attention to how we relate to other kinds of beings, these tools (which have the effect of divorcing us from the rest of the world) break down. How Forests Think seizes on this breakdown as an opportunity. Avoiding reductionistic solutions, and without losing sight of how our lives and those of others are caught up in the moral webs we humans spin, this book skillfully fashions new kinds of conceptual tools from the strange and unexpected properties of the living world itself. In this groundbreaking work, Kohn takes anthropology in a new and exciting direction–one that offers a more capacious way to think about the world we share with other kinds of beings.

    This book includes one of the sanest and most convincing arguments that I have read for experimentation in the writing of ethnography, which is supported by the text itself as an exemplar of a modest, theoretically unpretentious experiment that works very well indeed." George E. Marcus, Rice University"While a few Californians may be aware of the Tongan immigrant population in their midst, most Americans are unaware that the United States is a major terminus for the people of Tonga, an island nation in the South Pacific. Small examines Tongan migration to the United States in a 'transnational' perspective, stressing that many of the new migrant populations seem successfully to manage dual lives, in both the old country and the new. To that end, she describes life in contemporary Tongan communities and in U.S. settings." Library JournalThis book documents the momentous social phenomena of mass migration from agricultural ex-colonies and ex-protectorates to the industrial world. Cathy A. Small provides the poignant perspective of one extended family and one village in the Kingdom of Tonga, an independent island nation in the South Pacific which has lost one third of its population to migration since the mid-1960s. Moving between Tonga and California, Small chronicles the experiences of a family from the village of 'Olunga. Some members stayed and some migrated to California, in successive waves in the 1960s-1990s. Through their lives, she presents a striking picture of Tongan culture in the United States. Returning to 'Olunga with family members and their American-born children, Small shows what happened to village life and to kin relationships thirty years after migration began.

    Cavalli-Sforza and others have answered this question—anticipated by Darwin—with a decisive yes. Genes, Peoples, and Languages comprises five lectures that serve as a summation of the author's work over several decades, the goal of which has been nothing less than tracking the past hundred thousand years of human evolution.Cavalli-Sforza raises questions that have serious political, social, and scientific import: When and where did we evolve? How have human societies spread across the continents? How have cultural innovations affected the growth and spread of populations? What is the connection between genes and languages? Always provocative and often astonishing, Cavalli-Sforza explains why there is no genetic basis for racial classification.

    This brief introduction shows how psycholinguistic research can act as a window to the workings of the human mind and the study of consciousness.

    In fact, at least half of the world's languages may die out in the next century. What has happened to these voices?Should we be alarmed about the disappearance of linguistic diversity? The authors of Vanishing Voices assert that this trend is far more than simply disturbing. Making explicit the link between language survival and environmental issues, they argue that the extinction of languages is part of the larger picture of near-total collapse of the worldwide ecosystem.Indeed, the authors contend that the struggle to preserve precious environmental resources-such as the rainforest-cannot be separated from the struggle to maintain diverse cultures, and that the causes of language death, like that of ecological destruction, lie at the intersection of ecology andpolitics. And while Nettle and Romaine defend the world's endangered languages, they also pay homage to the last speakers of dying tongues, such as Red Thundercloud, a Native American in South Carolina, Ned Mandrell, with whom the Manx language passed away in 1974, and Arthur Bennett, an Australian, the last person to know more than a few words of Mbabaram. In our languages lies the accumulated knowledge of humanity. Indeed, each language is a unique window on experience. Vanishing Voices is a call to preserve this resource, before it is too late.

    This is the book that brought gender differences in ways of speaking to the forefront of public awareness. With a rare combination of scientific insight and delightful, humorous writing, Tannen shows why women and men can walk away from the same conversation with completely different impressions of what was said.Studded with lively and entertaining examples of real conversations, this book gives you the tools to understand what went wrong -- and to find a common language in which to strengthen relationships at work and at home. A classic in the field of interpersonal relations, this book will change forever the way you approach conversations.

    I'm sure it will be ...

    Everett, then a Christian missionary, arrived among the Pirahã in 1977–with his wife and three young children–intending to convert them. What he found was a language that defies all existing linguistic theories and reflects a way of life that evades contemporary understanding: The Pirahã have no counting system and no fixed terms for color. They have no concept of war or of personal property. They live entirely in the present. Everett became obsessed with their language and its cultural and linguistic implications, and with the remarkable contentment with which they live–so much so that he eventually lost his faith in the God he’d hoped to introduce to them. Over three decades, Everett spent a total of seven years among the Pirahã, and his account of this lasting sojourn is an engrossing exploration of language that questions modern linguistic theory. It is also an anthropological investigation, an adventure story, and a riveting memoir of a life profoundly affected by exposure to a different culture. Written with extraordinary acuity, sensitivity, and openness, it is fascinating from first to last, rich with unparalleled insight into the nature of language, thought, and life itself.

    The book-call it the zen of salmon restoration-traces the evolution of the Mattole River Valley community in northern California as it learns to undo the results of rapacious logging practices; to invent ways to trap wild salmon for propagation; and to forge alliances between people who sometimes agree on only one thing-that there is nothing on earth like a Mattole king salmon. House writes from streamside: "I think I can hear through the cascades of sound a systematic plop, plop, plop, as if pieces of fruit are being dropped into the water. Sometimes this is the sound of a fish searching for the opening upstream; sometimes it is not. I breathe quietly and wait." Freeman House's writing about fish and fishing is erotic, deeply observed, and simply some of the best writing on the subject in recent literature. House tells the story of the annual fishing rituals of the indigenous peoples of the Klamath River in northern California, one that relies on little-known early ethnographic studies and on indigenous voices-a remarkable story of self-regulation that unites people and place. And his riffs on the colorful early history of American hatcheries, on property rights, and on the "happiness of the state" show precisely why he's considered a West Coast visionary.Petitions to list a dozen West Coast salmon runs under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act make saving salmon an issue poised to consume the Pacific West. "Never before, said Federal officials, has so much land or so many people been given notice that they will have to alter their lives to restore a wild species" (New York Times, 2/27/98). Totem Salmon is set to become the essential read for this newest chapter in our relations with other wild things.