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As a native speaker of Russian with eighteen years of fieldwork experience among the Tlingit, Kan is uniquely qualified to relate little-known material from the archives of the Russian church in Alaska to Tlingit oral history and his own observations.
This book is a rich record of life in small-town southeastern Alaska in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It is the first book to showcase the photographs of Vincent Soboleff, an amateur Russian American photographer whose community included Tlingit Indians from a nearby village as well as Russian Americans, so-called Creoles, who worked in a local fertilizer factory. Using a Kodak camera, Soboleff, the son of a Russian Orthodox priest, documented the life of this multiethnic parish at work and at play until 1920. Despite their significance, few of Soboleff’s photographs have been published since their discovery in 1950. Anthropologist Sergei Kan rectifies that oversight in A Russian America...
In this volume some of the leading scholars working in Native North America explore contemporary perspectives on Native culture, history, and representation. Written in honor of the anthropologist Raymond D. Fogelson, the volume charts the currents of contemporary scholarship while offering an invigorating challenge to researchers in the field. The essays employ a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches and range widely across time and space. The introduction and first section consider the origins and legacies of various strands of interpretation, while the second part examines the relationship among culture, power, and creativity. The third part focuses on the cultural construction and experience of history, and the volume closes with essays on identity, difference, and appropriation in several historical and cultural contexts. Aimed at a broad interdisciplinary audience, the volume offers an excellent overview of contemporary perspectives on Native peoples.
The Northwest Coast of North America was home to dozens of Native peoples at the time of its first contact with Europeans. The rich artistic, ceremonial, and oral traditions of these peoples and their preservation of cultural practices have made this region especially attractive for anthropological study. Coming to Shore provides a historical overview of the ethnology and ethnohistory of this region, with special attention given to contemporary, theoretically informed studies of communities and issues. The first book to explore the role of the Northwest Coast in three distinct national traditions of anthropology- American, Canadian, and French-Coming to Shore gives particular consideration t...
This book focuses on anthropological questions and methods, and is offered as a supplement to textbooks on the anthropology of religion. It is designed to help students collecting and interpreting their own fieldwork or archival data and relating their findings to the work of others.
Decades after its initial publication, Symbolic Immortality retains its status as the most comprehensive analysis of the mortuary practices of the Tlingit Indians of southeastern Alaska—or any other indigenous culture of the Northwest Coast. This updated and expanded edition furthers our understanding of the potlatch (koo.éex’) as a total social phenomenon, with emotional and religious as well as economic and sociopolitical dimensions. The result is a major contribution to both Northwest Coast ethnology and theoretical literature on the anthropology of death.
"An edited volume of interdisciplinary, collaborative research on Tlingit culture, language, and history"--
Focusing on tradition, technology, and authority, this volume challenges classical understandings that mortuary rites are inherently conservative. The contributors examine innovative and enduring ideas and practices of death, which reflect and constitute changing patterns of social relationships, memorialisation, and the afterlife. This cross-cultural study examines the lived experiences of men and women from societies across the globe with diverse religious heritages and secular value systems. The book demonstrates that mortuary practices are not fixed forms, but rather dynamic processes negotiated by the dying, the bereaved, funeral experts, and public institutions. In addition to offering a new theoretical perspective on the anthropology of death, this work provides a rich resource for readers interested in human responses to mortality: the one certainty of human existence.
This book is the first to investigate the role of religious conversion in the long history of Russian state building, with geographic coverage from Poland and European Russia to the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, and Alaska.
“A remarkable achievement, demonstrating the vitality of Jewish folklore and ethnographic studies a hundred years after An-sky’s pioneering expedition.” —Folklore Taking S. An-sky’s expeditions to the Pale of Jewish Settlement as its point of departure, the volume explores the dynamic and many-sided nature of ethnographic knowledge and the long and complex history of the production and consumption of Jewish folk traditions. These essays by historians, anthropologists, musicologists, and folklorists showcase some of the finest research in the field. They reveal how the collection, analysis, and preservation of ethnography intersect with questions about the construction and delineati...