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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.
Gerald Erchak's engaging book stakes out a position in the field of psychological anthropology. He addresses himself primarily to students in the field, and also to specialists who want a clearly presented approach. He argues that culture shapes the human self and behavior, and that the self and behavior are in turn adapted to culture. After defining basic concepts and debates in the field, Erchak takes up the topics of socialization, gender, sexuality, collective behavior, national character, deviance, behavioral disorder, cognition, and emotion (This new textbook contains more material about sexuality and gender than any other such text). For Erhcak, psychocultural adaptation is basic to h...
Explores in detail the technology of harvesting and processing the grain, the important place of wild rice in Ojibway ceremony and legend, including the rich social life of the traditional rice camps, and the volatile issues of treaty rights. Wild rice has always been essential to life in the Upper Midwest and neighboring Canada. In this far-reaching book, Thomas Vennum Jr. uses travelers' narratives, historical and ethnological accounts, scientific data, historical and contemporary photographs and sketches, his own field work, and the words of Native people to examine the importance of this wild food to the Ojibway people. He details the technology of harvesting and processing, from sevente...
While the Goose Island Ramblers are a remarkable group, they are entirely representative of the many bands who, from the 1920s through the 90s, have synthesized an array of "foreign," "American," folk, popular, and hillbilly musical strains to entertain rural, small town, working class audiences throughout the Midwest. Based on more than twenty years of field research, this study of the Goose Island Ramblers alters our perception of what American folk music really is. The music of the Ramblers - decidedly upper Midwest, multicultural, and inescapably American - argues for a most inclusive, fluid notion of American folk music, one that exchanges ethnic hierarchy for egalitarianism, that stresses process over pedigree, and that emphasizes the pluralism of American musical culture. Rootsy, constantly evolving, and wildly eclectic, the polkabilly music of the Ramblers constitutes the American folk music norm, redefining in the process our understanding of American folk traditions.
Anthropologists of the senses have long argued that cultures differ in their sensory registers. This groundbreaking volume applies this idea to material culture and the social practices that endow objects with meanings in both colonial and postcolonial relationships. It challenges the privileged position of the sense of vision in the analysis of material culture. Contributors argue that vision can only be understood in relation to the other senses. In this they present another challenge to the assumed western five-sense model, and show how our understanding of material culture in both historical and contemporary contexts might be reconfigured if we consider the role of smell, taste, touch and sound, as well as sight, in making meanings about objects.
Gerald Vizenor’s Native Provenance challenges readers to consider the subtle ironies at the heart of Native American culture and oral traditions such as creation and trickster stories and dream songs. A respected authority in the study of Native American literature and intellectual history, Vizenor believes that the protean nature of many creation stories, with their tease and weave of ironic gestures, was lost or obfuscated in inferior translations by scholars and cultural connoisseurs, and as a result the underlying theories and presuppositions of these renditions persist in popular literature and culture. Native Provenance explores more than two centuries of such betrayal of native crea...
The island of Bali has long been characterized in the West as the last “paradise” on earth, but there is far more to this small Indonesian province. Bali Tourism presents an enlightening ethnographic study of some of the most important icons—for tourists and locals alike—in Balinese culture and society and explores the growth of this island as an “exotic” vacation destination. In addition, it offers a firsthand look at many aspects of daily life, a semiotic analysis of its dominant cultural symbols, and insights into tourists’ perceptions of Bali. A thirty page photo section offers a unique glimpse at this remarkable island. Through a distinctive use of cultural analysis and ps...
In a context of rigidification of religious boundaries, especially between Hinduism and Islam, the book argues that many physical and non-physical sites of religious encountering are still at work, both in Pakistan and in India. In India, the Hindu Sindhis worshipped a god, Jhulelal, who is also venerated in Pakistan as a saint. In Sehwan Sharif, in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, there are Hindu Sufi masters who initiate Muslims to Sufism. This study is the first to involve both Muslim and Hindu communities in a comparative perspective, and to underscore that the process of constructing communities in South Asia follow the same social pattern, the patrilineal lineage (baradari or khandan). The study is based on an array of sources collected in three continents, such as manuscripts, printed and oral sources, as well as artefacts from material cultures, most of which was never published before.