You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This new edition of Jerry D. Moore's Visions of Culture presents introductory anthropology students with a brief, readable, and balanced treatment of theoretical developments in the field. New to this edition are pieces on Sherry Ortner, Pierre Bourdieu, and Eric Wolf, an Epilogue that describes key current debates over theory. This is an ideal text for classes on the theory or the history of anthropology.
Around the year 1800, independent Native groups still effectively controlled about half the territory of the Americas. How did they maintain their political autonomy and territorial sovereignty, hundreds of years after the arrival of Europeans? In a study that spans the eighteenth to twentieth centuries and ranges across the vast interior of South America, Heather F. Roller examines this history of power and persistence from the vantage point of autonomous Native peoples in Brazil. The central argument of the book is that Indigenous groups took the initiative in their contacts with Brazilian society. Rather than fleeing or evading contact, Native peoples actively sought to appropriate what w...
In The Quest Mircea Eliade stresses the cultural function that a study of the history of religions can play in a secularized society. He writes for the intelligent general reader in the hope that what he calls a new humanism "will be engendered by a confrontation of modern Western man with unknown or less familiar worlds of meaning." "Each of these essays contains insights which will be fruitful and challenging for professional students of religion, but at the same time they all retain the kind of cultural relevance and clarity of style which makes them accessible to anyone seriously concerned with man and his religious possibilities."—Joseph M. Kitagawa, Religious Education
description not available right now.
The Histories of Anthropology Annual presents localized perspectives on the discipline's history within a global context, with a goal of increasing awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. This tenth volume of the series, Local Knowledge, Global Stage, examines worldwide historical trends of anthropology ranging from the assertion that all British anthropology is a study of the Old Testament to the discovery of the untranslated shorthand notes of pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas. Other topics include archival research into the study of Vancouver Island's indigenous languages, explorations of the Christian notion of virgin births in Edwin Sidney Hartland's The Legend of Perseus, and the Canadian government's implementation of European-model farms as a way to undermine Native culture. In addition to Boas and Hartland, the essays explore the research and personalities of Susan Golla, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and others.
Victims of Progress, now in its sixth edition, offers a compelling account of how technology and development affect indigenous peoples throughout the world. Bodley’s expansive look at the struggle between small-scale indigenous societies, and the colonists and corporate developers who have infringed their territories reaches from 1800 into today. He examines major issues of intervention such as social engineering, economic development, self-determination, health and disease, global warming, and ecocide. Small-scale societies, Bodley convincingly demonstrates, have survived by organizing politically to defend their basic human rights. Providing a provocative context in which to think about civilization and its costs—shedding light on how we are all victims of progress—the sixth edition features expanded discussion of “uprising politics,” Tebtebba (a particularly active indigenous organization), and voluntary isolation. A wholly new chapter devotes full coverage to the costs of global warming to indigenous peoples in the Pacific and the Arctic. Finally, new appendixes guide readers to recent protest petitions as well as online resources and videos.
The Wanano Indians of the northwest Amazon have a social system that differs from those of most tropical forest tribes. Neither stratified by wealth nor strictly egalitarian, Wanano society is "ranked" according to rigidly bound descent groups. In this pioneering ethnographic study, Janet M. Chernela decodes the structure of Wanano society. In Wanano culture, children can be "grandparents," while elders can be "grandchildren." This apparent contradiction springs from the fact that descent from ranked ancestors, rather than age or accumulated wealth, determines one's standing in Wanano society. But ranking's impulse is muted as senior clans, considered to be succulent (referring to both senio...