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Constance Goddard Du Bois (1889-1934) was an American novelist and an ethnographer, writing extensively between 1899 and 1908 about the native peoples and cultures of southern California. Her published fiction included several short stories plus six novels. Her most enduring contribution was as a self-taught ethnographer, doing pioneering studies in a period when professional academic anthropology was just becoming established in the United States. Starting in the late 1890s, she made summer trips out west to see her sister who lived in the San Diego area. She began making treks into the San Diego backcountry, to meet the surviving communities of Diegueno and Luiseno Indians. Soon she was writing about their traditional and contemporary lifeways, promoting traditional crafts (particularly basketry), and helping with financial and political assistance. Her longest ethnographic work was a detailed monograph on The Religion of the Luiseno Indians of Southern California (1908). In addition, she published 23 shorter articles about the region's native peoples, with particular emphases on their mythology, ceremonies, and crafts.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, indigenous communities in the United States and Australia suffered a common experience at the hands of state authorities: the removal of their children to institutions in the name of assimilating American Indians and protecting Aboriginal people. Although officially characterized as benevolent, these government policies often inflicted great trauma on indigenous families and ultimately served the settler nations? larger goals of consolidating control over indigenous peoples and their lands. White Mother to a Dark Racetakes the study of indigenous education and acculturation in new directions in its examination of the key roles white women...
Sigrid Anderson focuses on the Southern California magazine Land of Sunshine, a publication that featured authors such as Edith Eaton, Mary Austin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to explore how regional periodical fiction offered agency to women--and the implications for the region and its populace.
"Founded in the late nineteenth century, the Women's National Indian Association was one of several reform associations that worked to implement the government's assimilation policy directed at Native peoples. While male reformers worked primarily in the political arena, the women of the WNIA combined political action with efforts to improve health and home life and spread Christianity on often remote reservations. During its more than seventy-year history, the WNIA established over sixty missionary sites in which they provided Native peoples with home-building loans, supported the work of government teachers and field matrons, founded schools, built missionary cottages and chapels, and work...
The foundational work on shamanism now available as a Princeton Classics paperback Shamanism is an essential work on the study of this mysterious and fascinating phenomenon. The founder of the modern study of the history of religion, Mircea Eliade surveys the tradition through two and a half millennia of human history, moving from the shamanic traditions of Siberia and Central Asia—where shamanism was first observed—to North and South America, Indonesia, Tibet, China, and beyond. In this authoritative survey, Eliade illuminates the magico-religious life of societies that give primacy of place to the figure of the shaman—at once magician and medicine man, healer and miracle-doer, priest, mystic, and poet. Synthesizing the approaches of psychology, sociology, and ethnology, Shamanism remains the reference book of choice for those interested in this practice.