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Ulysses' Sail
What do long-distance travelers gain from their voyages, especially when faraway lands are regarded as the source of esoteric knowledge? Mary Helms explains how various cultures interpret space and distance in cosmological terms, and why they associate political power with information about strange places, peoples, and things. She assesses the diverse goals of travelers, be they Hindu pilgrims in India, Islamic scholars of West Africa, Navajo traders, or Tlingit chiefs, and discusses the most extensive experience of long-distance contact on record--that between Europeans and native peoples--and the clash of cultures that arose from conflicting expectations about the "faraway.". The author de...
Ancient Panama
Ancient Panama adds depth to our understanding of the political and religious elite ruling in Panama at the time of the European conquest. Mary W. Helms's research greatly expands knowledge of the distribution, extent, and structural nature of these pre-Columbian chiefdoms. In addition, Helms delves more deeply into select aspects of ancient Panamanian political systems, including the relationship between elite competition and chiefly status, the use of sumptuary goods in the expression of elite power, and the role of elites in regional and long-distance exchange networks. In a significant departure from traditional thinking, she proposes that the search for esoteric knowledge was more impor...
Craft and the Kingly Ideal
In ancient Mediterranean cultures, diamonds were thought to endow their owners with invincibility. In contemporary United States culture, a foreign-made luxury car is believed to give its owner status and prestige. Where do these beliefs come from? In this study of craft production and long-distance trade in traditional, nonindustrial societies, Mary W. Helms explores the power attributed to objects that either are produced by skilled artisans and/or come from "afar." She argues that fine artisanship and long-distance trade, both of which are more available to powerful elites than to ordinary people, are means of creating or acquiring tangible objects that embody intangible powers and energies from the cosmological realms of gods, ancestors, or heroes. Through the objects, these qualities become available to human society and confer honor and power on their possessors. Helms’ novel approach equates trade with artistry and emphasizes acquisition rather than distribution. She rejects the classic Western separation between economics and aesthetics and offers a new paradigm for understanding traditional societies that will be of interest to all anthropologists and archaeologists.
Access to Origins
In many non-industrial, non-Western societies, power and prestige are closely linked to the extent of an individual's or group's perceived connection to the supernatural realm, which also explains and validates tangible activities such as economic success, victories in war, or control over lucrative trade. Affines (in-laws), ancestors, and aristocrats, in particular, are connected to the realm of creative cosmological origins (i.e., to Genesis), which accords them distinctive, supernatural powers and gives them a natural and legitimate right to worldly authority. This is the hypothesis that Mary W. Helms pursues in this broadly cross-cultural study of aristocracy in chiefly societies. She begins with basic ideas about the dead, ancestors, affines, and concepts of cosmological origins. This leads her to a discussion of cosmologically defined hierarchies, the qualities that characterize aristocracy, and the political and ideological roles of aristocrats as wife-givers and wife-takers (that is, as in-laws). She concludes by considering various models that explain how societies may develop or define aristocracies.
Factional Competition and Political Development in the New World
This volume examines how factional competition in ancient New World societies led to the development of chiefdoms, states and empires.
Middle America
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War Before Civilization
The myth of the peace-loving "noble savage" is persistent and pernicious. Indeed, for the last fifty years, most popular and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric warfare was rare, harmless, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a disease of civilized societies alone. Prehistoric warfare, according to this view, was little more than a ritualized game, where casualties were limited and the effects of aggression relatively mild. Lawrence Keeley's groundbreaking War Before Civilization offers a devastating rebuttal to such comfortable myths and debunks the notion that warfare was introduced to primitive societies through contact with civilization (an idea he denounces as "the pacification of ...
A Pre-Columbian World
The articles in this book conceptualize the ancient New World through new and varied approaches, from iconography to the history of anthropology. The many essays in this volume explore the vast vista of the Pre-Columbian world, including representations of history, memory, and knowledge in Andean visual imagery and Pre-Columbian narrative, the ideology of rain making, and Maya beliefs about animal transformations.
Rethinking Materiality
What is the relationship between mind and ideas on the one hand, and the material things of the world on the other? In recent years, researchers have rejected the old debate about the primacy of the mind or material, and have sought to establish more nuanced understandings of the ways humans interact with their material worlds. In this volume alternative approaches are presented, deriving from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives. Contributors debate the significance of key thresholds in the human past, including sedentism, domestication, and the emergence of social inequality and their impact on changing patterns of human cognition, symbolic expression, and technological innovation. In its global coverage and its broad theoretical scope, this landmark volume offers an innovative and comprehensive assessment of current thinking and future directions.
