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A History of Anthropological Theory
Reading Beyond Words: 2e Pb: The Contexts of Native History
Country Nourished 2e, a Pb
Canadian Squadrons in Coastal Command
Sink All the Shipping There: Canada's Lost Wartime Merchant Ships and Fishing Schooner Sinkings
Behind the Fence: Life as a POW in Japan: 1942-1945
History of the Canadian Coastguard, 1962-2002: Auxilio Semper
Sea Logistics: Keeping Canada's Navy Ready Aye Ready
All Tigers,No Donkeys: A Canadian Soldier in Croatia,1994-1995
Zapata of Mexico
German Historians, The: "Hitler's Willing Executioners" and Daniel Goldhagen
People as Enemy, The: The Leaders' Hidden Agenda in World War II
Pure Soldiers or Sinister Legion: The Ukrainian 14th Waffen-SS Galicia Division
And God Created the French
Dreamcatchers
Going to Ireland: A Genealogical Researcher's Guide
Principles of Black Political Economy
Seven Sons: Millionaires and Vagabonds
Pacific Troller: Life on the Northwest Fishing Grounds
Submarine Technology for the 2lst Century
Future Fish 2000: Future Fish in Century 21: The North Pacific Fisheries Handle Coming Trends, Radical Environmentalism, and Digital Cyberspace (1991-92,1994-97)
Deny, Deny, Deny: the Rise and Fall of Colin Thatcher
Getaway
The Treaty Navy: The Story of the Us Naval Service Between the World Wars
Memoirs of Lt. Camillo Vaglino: Italian Air Force 1915-1916

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An excellent author and an excellent book
Short History of Progress
A sign of the times
Insightful analysis and persuasive plea for a sustainable humanity
Everyone interested in our world shoul read

A Short History of Progress
Ronald Wright
Manufacturer: Carroll & Graf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Stolen Continents: 500 Years of Conquest and Resistance in the Americas
A Short History Of Progress: 2004 Massey Lecture (Ideas)
A Scientific Romance: A Novel
God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now
The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth

ASIN: 0786715472

From Amazon.ca

No hope, just an awareness of what's being done now and what's been done in the past, is what Ronald Wright will permit in A Short History of Progress, his grim, ammoniacal Massey Lectures, the 43rd in the series. In five lucid, meticulously documented essays, Wright traces the rise and plummet of four regional civilizations--those of Sumer, Rome, Easter Island, and the Maya--and judges that most, perhaps all, of humanity is making and will continue to make mistakes equally disastrous as theirs. He gives general reasons first for not reckoning we'll pull back from the brink. Important among them is an anthropological observation. As individuals, we live long lives. We evolve more slowly than we should, given our lack of vision and our aggressive, selfish nature. We seem to lack the collective wisdom and the insight into cause and effect to realize the limits to what Wright calls the "experiment" of civilization. What Wright calls natural "subsidies" underwrite civilizations' successes. The squandering of those gifts presages inevitable failure, but with careful, canny stewardship, a civilization can manage to muddle through eons. Wright cites Egypt's submission to the limits set by the Nile's annual floods and China's windblown "lump-sum deposit" of topsoil, used for hillside paddies instead of being put to the plough. Wright observes with unrelenting eloquence that our planetary civilization lives precariously, far beyond its means. "Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes," he acknowledges, neither claiming nor wanting to be a prophet. We certainly have the tools for change and remediation; we also know what our ancestors did wrong and what happened to them. We're faced, our author observes, with two choices: either do nothing--what he calls "one of the biggest mistakes"--or try to effect "the transition from short-term to long-term thinking." His evidence suggests we're taking the first alternative, which will include a swift, final ride into the dark future on the runaway train of progress. Wright's account tempts one to bet on the rats and roaches. --Ted Whittaker

Book Description

Each time history repeats itself, the cost goes up. The twentieth century—a time of unprecedented progress—has produced a tremendous strain on the very elements that comprise life itself: This raises the key question of the twenty-first century: How much longer can this go on? With wit and erudition, Ronald Wright lays out a-convincing case that history has always provided an answer, whether we care to notice or not. From Neanderthal man to the Sumerians to the Roman Empire, A Short History of Progress dissects the cyclical nature of humanity's development and demise, the 10,000-year old experiment that we've unleashed but have yet to control.

It is Wright's contention that only by understanding and ultimately breaking from the patterns of progress and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we avoid the onset of a new Dark Age. Wright illustrates how various cultures throughout history have literally manufactured their own end by producing an overabundance of innovation and stripping bare the very elements that allowed them to initially advance. Wright's book is brilliant; a fascinating rumination on the hubris at the heart of human development and the pitfalls we still may have time to avoid.

Customer Reviews:

An excellent author and an excellent book.......2007-03-01

As a Latino university student of history and political economy, I thought that this book was going to be another perspective from the Europan outlook. But Wright knew better. Not only is Wright a great writer and knowledgeable in history, but he writes with clarity and simplicity. He doesn't use complicated words to explain uncomplicated situations and he doesn't make the reading confusing.

The book consists of five short paragraphs that surprisingly--and this is why I gave 5 stars--IS comprehensive and amusing. But Wright sticks with his thesis which is, if a civilization--in this case us--doesn't take care of its habitat and natural resources we will collapse like other great civilization already did for the same reasons: The Maya and Roman empires.

As a history major I strongly recommend this book, it will make you think. But if I had to disagree with it, personally, it would be at the end of the book where he says that his solution is not "anti-capitalist". He spent 90% of the book making you think he disliked Capitalism to end it with saying "The reform that is needed is not anti-capitalist [...] or even deep environmentalist". Other than this disagreement, I recommend the book.

Short History of Progress.......2007-02-14

I found this book to be a wonder expose' of historic patterns in the decline and fall of great civilizations. I consider myself a well read amateur historian, and I rate this book a 5. I recommend it for everyone. Ronald Wright makes great observations and he brings them full circle by relating history's lessons to today's problems regarding fossil fuel and war in the Middle East. This is a must read.

A sign of the times.......2007-01-21

This a transcript of Wright's Massey lectures, which are lectures given on Canadian Broadcorping Castration every year. It repeats the themes of Jared Diamond's trilogy The Third Chimpanzee, Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse: it contains an extremely short history of humanity, points at the ecological vulnerabilities of our civilization, describes the collapse of a few civilizations of the antiquity (Easter Island, which Diamond has also written about, Sumeria, the classical Maya and the Romans), and warns that if things don't change radically, our civilization could easily collapse as well. Wright has also written a one-volume history of the white conquest of the Americas, Stolen Continents, from which he borrows a lot of material for A Short History of Progress.

Would it be correct to draw the following analogy? A hundred years ago, and certainly 70 years ago, it was obvious for all the right-thinking intellectuals that capitalism was on its last legs, and the future belonged to socialism. Yet the social-economic system that ultimately won was a mixture of the two, with more socialism and less capitalism in Ontario than in Texas, but plenty of both in both places. Does the current interest in environmental issues and sustainability among the educated (which gave Jared Diamond's last two books blockbuster success) point at the direction of social change over the coming century, but overstate its eventual impact?

Insightful analysis and persuasive plea for a sustainable humanity.......2007-01-17

By way of an eloquent blend of historical, anthropological and philosophical analysis the author argues that if the crises of past civilizations - such as Sumer, Rome, Easter Island and the Maya - are any indication of what lies ahead for today's global village, then we need to act now. Specifically, we must abandon our human predilection for unrestricted material/technical 'progress' and growth (read: consumption). Wright's message is that by drastically curtailing our excessive consumption of natural resources, we can still hope to avoid a global ecological disaster and thereby avert a social and human catastrophe. Only inertia, greed and short-sighted opportunism would have us foolishly seek to maintain our present rate of 'progress' and ignore the lessons that human history teaches us.

Everyone interested in our world shoul read.......2007-01-09

What ever principle you have studied or whatever profession you are in, you should know about us - human beings, and I think that this is one of the books to start with.

Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists

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Any Anthropology student should have...

Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists
Jerry D. Moore
Manufacturer: AltaMira Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History
History and Theory in Anthropology
A History of Anthropological Theory 2/e
Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory, 2nd Edition
High Points In Anthropology

ASIN: 0803970978

Book Description

An accessible, balanced undergraduate textbook on anthropological theory. Jerry D. Moore's Visions of Culture presents students with a brief, readable treatment of theoretical developments in the field from the days of Tylor and Morgan through contemporary postmodernists and cultural materialists. An ideal book for classes on the theory or the history of anthropology.

Customer Reviews:

Any Anthropology student should have..........2003-06-10

"Visions of Culture" is an essential book for any student of anthropology. It would be wrong to consider this book a textbook though. It is more of a reference on specific theorists. What Moore does is to write concise, informative chapters on each of the major anthropological theorists. He begins with biographical data, and goes on to discuss their theories. It is an indispensible reference for the student of culture. I reference it more than any other individual anthropology book.

Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture

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The RAT is still a classic for a reason

Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture
Marvin Harris
Manufacturer: Ty Crowell Co/Harper & Row
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Similar Items:

Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times
Cultural Materialism
Why Nothing Works: The Anthropology of Daily Life (Original Title America Now the Anthropology of a Changing Culture)
High Points In Anthropology
Ancient Society (Classics of Anthropology)

ASIN: 0690703228

Book Description

The best known, most often cited history of anthropological theory is finally available in paperback! First published in 1968, Harris's book has been cited in over 1,000 works and is one of the key documents explaining cultural materialism, the theory associated with Harris's work. This updated edition included the complete 1968 text plus a new introduction by the author, which discusses the impact of the book and highlights some of the major trends in anthropological theory since its original publication. RAT, as it is affectionately known to three decades of graduate students, comprehensively traces the history of anthropology and anthropological theory, culminating in a strong argument for the use of a scientific, behaviorally-based, etic approach to the understanding of human culture known as cultural materialism. Despite its popularity and influence on anthropological thinking, RAT has never been available in paperback. . . until now. It is an essential volume for the library of all anthropologists, their graduate students, and other theorists in the social sciences.

Customer Reviews:

The RAT is still a classic for a reason.......2003-06-11

The RAT may have been published over 30 years ago, but it still remains one of the most comprehensive histories of anthropological theory. Harris starts at the beginning, tracing the development of social theory which would lead to the birth of anthropology. This is something that few book do any longer, and it is very helpful. Harris cannot be said to be objective though, and he tells you this is his introduction. He is out to show the history of anthropology as a develpoment of his theory of cultural materialism. This isn't really a setback though, at least he is honest with what he is doing. Overall, the RAT is more far-ranging and comprehensive than any other history of anthropology I have come across, and I have looked.

Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History

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Pertinent and probably 'fair'.
Good book for Anthropology Theory
Decent beginning, but still flawed.
Very Good.
Good collection of readings

Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History
R. Jon McGee , and Richard Warms
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists, Second Edition
A History of Anthropological Theory 2/e
History and Theory in Anthropology
Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books Classics)
Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology

ASIN: 0073405221

Book Description

A comprehensive and accessible survey of the history of theory in anthropology, this anthology of classic and contemporary readings contains in-depth commentary in introductions and notes to help guide students through excerpts of seminal anthropological works. The commentary provides the background information needed to understand each article, its central concepts, and its relationship to the social and historical context in which it was written. Six of the 45 articles are new to this edition.

Customer Reviews:

Pertinent and probably 'fair'........2006-12-09

I bought this book as a textbook for a class of Anthropolocial Theory and Method. Except for the sociobiology section and Darwin, we read the majority of this work in class. I give this collection of original writings five stars because the commentary seems appropriate, as do the readings. I am greatful that McGee and Warms (over the objection of reviewers) inserted the E. O. Wilson material (sociobiology). I am also greatful that McGee and Warms pointed out the current attitudes toward: 1) Ruth Benedict Fulton and 2) Margaret Mead's Samoan work. I, in short, believe McGee and Warms give fair analysis. My perspective is as a graduate student in anthropology with an undergraduate degree in biology.

I can compare ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY to another compendium of original writings--Bohannan and Glazer's text which is no longer in print, High Points in Anthropology.

Bohannan and Glazer have no index!!! McGee and Warms have a 17-page index that is helpful.

The major change I would make to this book is probably a change that needs to be made to anthropological knowledge in general--I do not believe anthropologists (including McGee and Warms) understand evolution. Otherwise, there would be some additional commentary about "lineal evolution."

Good book for Anthropology Theory.......2006-03-26

I bought this for my Theory in Anthropology class. It gives a good background of the theory of major contributors to cultural anthropological theory.

Decent beginning, but still flawed........2005-12-24

I used this text for an anthropological theories course in undergraduate work. It's a pretty decent collection of work from major figures in anthropology.

Spencer, Tylor, and Morgan, Levi-Strauss, Marx, Boas, etc, etc. There is also a lot of work done to try and tie a common thread through as much material as possible. Contextualization of how a theory came to be, and what it might imply are pretty well done. Chances are, you're buying this book for a class, rather than pleasure, and though this can be kind of dry, it's fairly well done. Some selections are puzzling in terms of what they illustrate for that author, but by and large it shouldn't kill you to read this book.

There are footnotes, too. These seem like a blessing to begin with, especially if you don't have much of a foothold in the material, there is a lot that you are caught up on quickly, and it can be very helpful. On the flipside, the editors can be very heavy-handed in guiding the reading, and can be sometimes inane in their commentary. This is the major failing of the book, it's more to read, and the later in the book you get, the less useful it is.

Very Good........2005-09-09

The book was sent right away, and it was in the condition I expected it to be in.

Good collection of readings.......2003-06-10

This book contains works by most of the classic anthropological theorists. And very importantly, it contains footnotes, which are very helpful. However, it contains few current readings. Also, this edition of the book removes some of the better, more current selections from the older edition. If you are looking for a solid anthropological reader, then you can't go wrong with this text, BUT...try and get the earlier edition if you can.

To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology

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Mimetic Shmimetic
Insightful essays

To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology
René Girard
Manufacturer: The Johns Hopkins University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

History of Ideas | Historical Study | History | Subjects | Books

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Similar Items:

Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure
A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (Carthage Reprint)
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire

ASIN: 0801836557

Book Description

An individual desires an object, not for itself, but because another individual also desires it. This mimetic desire, Rene Girard contends, lies at the source of all human disorder and order. In brilliant readings of Dante, Camus, Nietzsche, Dostoevski, Levi-Strauss, Freud, and others, Girard draws out the thesis of mimetic desire -- and ponders its suppression in the West since Plato: "The historical mutilation of mimesis ... was no mere oversight, no fortuitous 'error.' Real awareness of mimetic desire threatens the flattering delusion we entertain not only about ourselves as individuals but also about the nature and origin of that collective self we call our society."

Customer Reviews:

Mimetic Shmimetic.......2003-05-13

OK, I admit that I think that everything Girard has ever written is lights out brilliant, and my unceasing mantra is "all desire is mimetic" and I'm always on the lookout for my double (I'm not in the business of being bound you see). All desire is mimetic. All desire is mimetic.

This is a superior book for someone who might care to dabble, a series of essays, all of them proverbial juggernauts, all desire is mimetic. Freud and his Oedipus complex get the bunk debunked out of them, and then there's poor Nietzsche. The poor guy went insane and killed himself, but that isn't enough for Girard. Turns out Nietzsche couldn't even figure out if he was Dionysius or the Crucified. And you think you have problems! All desire is mimetic!

The Levi-Strauss essays are VITAL, and then you even get an interview at the end. All in a couple hundred pages! All desire is mimetic! May all your triangles have happy mediators, don't forget intra-literary criticism, and most of all, don't get your subjects and objects mixed up.

Girard is the only literary critic you'll ever need, the only anthropologist you'll ever need, and also the only Frenchman you'll ever need. He is not my Richard Wagner, I prefer portly walrus-types with spectacles and tweed suits who play super-chess. All desire is mimetic. You should probably read everything by Dostoevsky and Cervantes and Proust before tackling these essays. And Camus, don't foget Camus, never forget Camus.

Insightful essays.......2003-03-03

In his introduction to this fine collection of essays, addresses, and lectures, Rene Girard asserts that the social sciences are "impotent" and that they need "the great literary masterpieces to evolve." He argues the point with great clarity and persuasiveness in pieces that deal with, among other topics, the rivalry among great intellectual figures such as Nietzsche and Wagner, the ability of Dostoevsky's novels to surpass Freud in understanding mimetic desire, and the ability of the mimetic hypothesis to elucidate myth. Girard's analysis of a late work by Albert Camus, La chute, involves a revealing look at its more famous predecessor, The Stranger. This volume concludes with a wide-ranging interview that enables Girard to define his relationship to such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Kenneth Burke. A powerful and insightful book.

Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses (New Perspectives on Anthropological and Social Demography)

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The social construction of reality....

Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses (New Perspectives on Anthropological and Social Demography)

Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics
Demography in the Age of the Postmodern (New Perspectives on Anthropological and Social Demography)
Who Counts: The Politics of Census-Taking in Contemporary America
Anthropological Demography: Toward a New Synthesis (Population and Development Series)
Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa

ASIN: 0521004276

Book Description

This study examines the ways that states have attempted to pigeon-hole the people within their boundaries into racial, ethnic, and language categories. These attempts, whether through American efforts to divide the U.S. population into mutually exclusive racial categories, or through the Soviet system of inscribing nationality categories on internal passports, have important implications not only for people's own identities and life chances, but for national political and social processes as well. The book reviews the history of these categorizing efforts by the state, offers a theoretical context for examining them, and illustrates the case with studies from a range of countries.

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The Politics of Race, Ethnicity and Language in National Censuses examines the ways that states have attempted to pigeon-hole the people within their boundaries into racial, ethnic, and language categories. These attempts, whether through American efforts to divide the US population into mutually exclusive racial categories, or through the Soviet system of inscribing nationality categories on internal passports, have important implications not only for people's own identities and life chances, but for national political and social processes as well. The book reviews the history of these categorizing efforts by the state, and offers a theoretical context for examining them, illustrating the case with studies from a range of countries.

Customer Reviews:

The social construction of reality...........2002-06-15

Many social scientists recognize self identity as a precious aspect of individuality, but most social scientists are interested in generalizing, hence the stuggle to conceptualize, define and measure the group identity. There are good legal and political reasons for categorizing people, how else for example could you measure the effects of a genocide--or commit it for that matter. The Nazis and the analysts who attempted to measure the atocities of the Nazis used administrative records with information about ethnicity and religion to do their jobs.

CENSUS AND IDENTITY is a nice compendium of essays about the attempts of governments around the world to collect and use information about race, language, and ethnicity in censuses. David Kertzer and Dominique Arel provide an overview of the book in which they state, "identity is a constructed thing and it is constructed over time and with a shifting awareness of values and meaning attached to certain categories, some of which are more meaningful than others."

Melissa Nobles' essay, "Racial categorization and the censuses" focuses on two large census efforts--Brazil and the United States. Both countries have attempted over the past two hundred years to define and measure race with mixed results.

Calvin Goldscheider compares the efforts of Israel, Canada, and the United States to categorize ethnicity in censuses. The Israeli government stresses religion, while the U.S. government eschews it.

Dominique Arel's essay, "Language categories in censuses.." covers the efforts of several countries to define and measure language fluency. Just when does one become fluent in a language. Professor Higgins told Eliza Doolittle that most English ladies could not speak English!

Alain Blum discusses the trials of the French in his essay, "Resistance to identity categorization in France." Seems the Algerian descent folks have a different idea of what it means to be French.

Peter Uvin's essay, "On counting, categorizing, and violence in Burundi and Rwanda" is a chilling example of ethnic identification gone wrong. How did the Tutsis and Hutus know who to kill? Population exchanges between the two countries seemed to be the only way to avoid additional killing. But who just who was what and how their "papers" were created became a nightmare.

My favorite essay was written by David Abramson, " Identity counts: the Soviet legacy and the census in Uzbekistan." Just what is a Tajik anyway, and when is a Tajik really an Uzbek? Some funny things happened in the censuses taken over several decades as the size of the population of Tajiks and Uzbeks changed rather dramatically. While one side pointed at the data and said it was a sure sign of genocide, social scientists aren't so sure. Sometimes people change their "official" identities when the census taker comes knocking on the door.

This is a wonderful set of essays for anyone who is interested in the difficulties associated with identifying and measuring "ethnic" groups and what happens to them.

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Not Pop Psych

Gender and Discourse
Deborah Tannen
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0195089758

Book Description

Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand has been on the New York Times Best Seller list for more than three years (in cloth and paper) and has sold over a million and a half copies. Clearly, Tannen's insights into how and why women and men so often misunderstand each other when they talk has touched a nerve. For years an internationally known and highly respected scholar in the field of linguistics, she has now become widely known for her work on how language both reflects and perpetuates the relationships between men and women. Her life work has demonstrated how close and intelligent analysis of conversation can reveal the extraordinary complexities of social relationships--including relationships between men and women. Now, in Gender and Discourse, Tannen has gathered together five of her scholarly essays--which provide a theoretical backdrop to her bestselling books--and an informative introduction which discusses her field of linguistics, describes the research methods she typically uses, and addresses the controversies surrounding her field as well as some misunderstandings of her work. (She argues, for instance, that her cultural approach to gender differences does not deny that men dominate women in society, nor does it ascribe gender differences to women's "essential nature.") The essays themselves cover a wide range of topics. In one, she analyzes a number of conversational strategies--such as interruption, topic raising, indirection, and silence--and shows that, contrary to much work on language and gender, no strategy leads inflexibly to dominance or submissiveness in conversation--interruption (or overlap) can be supportive, silence and indirection can be used to control. It is the interactional context, the participants' individual styles, and the interaction of their styles, Tannen shows, that result in the balance of power. She also provides a fascinating analysis of four groups of males and females (second-, sixth-, and tenth-grade students, and 25 year olds) conversing with their best friends, and she includes an early article co-authored with Robin Lakoff that presents a theory of conversational strategy, illustrated by analysis of dialogue in Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage. Readers interested in the theoretical framework behind Tannen's work will find this volume fascinating. It will be sure to interest anyone curious about the crucial yet often unnoticed role that language and gender play in our daily lives.

Customer Reviews:

Not Pop Psych.......2007-03-25

Gender and Discourse is not the easiest read, but if you like the nitty gritty, this is a fascinating book. If you don't, I would recommend her book You Just Don't Understand which is on the same topic but a bit more accessible to the layman.

An Interdisciplinary Study of Sport As a Symbolic Hunt: A Theory of the Origin and Nature of Sport Based on Paleolithic Hunting

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An Interdisciplinary Study of Sport As a Symbolic Hunt: A Theory of the Origin and Nature of Sport Based on Paleolithic Hunting
Douglas M. Carroll
Manufacturer: Edwin Mellen Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0773476857

Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers: Semantic Extension From the Ethnoscience Tradition (Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics ; 3)

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Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers: Semantic Extension From the Ethnoscience Tradition (Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics ; 3)
David Kronenfeld
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Linguistics | Words & Language | Reference | Subjects | Books

Semantics | Words & Language | Reference | Subjects | Books

General | Foreign Languages | Reference | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0195094085

Book Description

Meaning seems to shift from context to context; how do we know when someone says "grab a chair" that an ottoman or orange crate will do, but when someone says "let's buy a chair," they won't? Somehow, in spite of this slipperiness, we usually understand each other in conversations, and have straightforward ways of querying each other when we sense a gap in understanding. We seem capable of using ordinary language to communicate with as much precision as we are willing to take the time and effort for-- through attention to interactive feedback, and the use of paraphrastic modification, specification, and explication. In Plastic Drinking Glasses and Church Fathers, Kronenfeld offers a theory that explains both the usefulness of language's variability of reference and the mechanisms which enable us to understand each other in spite of the variability. His theory is rooted in the tradition of ethnoscience (or cognitve anthropology), a tradition which promotes an ethnography of explicit methodology and mathematically precise theory while remaining responsive to the complexity of particular cultures. Kronenfeld accomplishes three things with his theory. First, he distinguishes prototypic referents from extended referents. Second, he describes the various bases of sematic extentensions. Finally he details how we use the situational context of usage, the linguistic context of opposition and inclusion, and the conceptual context of knowledge about the world to interpret communicative events.

Indigenism: Ethnic Politics in Brazil (New Directions in Anthropological Writing)

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Indigenism: Ethnic Politics in Brazil (New Directions in Anthropological Writing)
Alcida Rita Ramos
Manufacturer: University of Wisconsin Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Politics | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

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Discrimination & Racism | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

General | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Indigenous Movements and Their Critics
The Friendly Liquidation of the Past: The Politics of Diversity in Latin America (Pitt Latin American Series)
The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity
Race And Ethnicity In Latin America (Latin American Studies)

ASIN: 0299160440

Book Description

"Indigenism is timely, original, and a valuable contribution to the subject of interethnic politics. I can think of no other current book in English that brings together so many facets on this topic in Brazil."-Catherine V. Howard, Vanderbilt University

"A gem. The chapters work together beautifully to build up a sophisticated understanding of indigenism in Brazil. . . . Ramos provides vivid detail and anecdote, but also writes in a way that links the 'indigenous culture wars' of Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s to battles over citizenship and cultural difference in many parts of the world."-Jane L. Collins, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Indigenous people comprise only 0.2% of Brazil's population, yet occupy a prominent role in the nation's consciousness. In her important and passionate new book, anthropologist Alcida Ramos explains this irony, exploring Indian and non-Indian attitudes about interethnic relations. Ramos contends that imagery about indigenous people reflects an ambivalence Brazil has about itself as a nation, for Indians reveal Brazilians' contradiction between their pride in ethnic pluralism and desire for national homogeneity.

Based on her more than thirty years of fieldwork and activism on behalf of the Yanomami Indians, Ramos explains the complex ideology called indigenism. She evaluates its meaning through the relations of Brazilian Indians with religious and lay institutions, non-governmental organizations, official agencies such as the National Indian Foundation as well as the very discipline of anthropology. Ramos not only examines the imagery created by Brazilians of European descent-members of the Catholic church, government officials, the army and the state agency for Indian affairs-she also scrutinizes Indians' own self portrayals used in defending their ethnic rights against the Brazilian state.

Ramos' thoughtful and complete analysis of the relation between indigenous people of Brazil and the state will be of great interest to lawmakers and political theorists, environmental and civil rights activists, developmental specialists and policymakers, and those concerned with human rights in Latin America.

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