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The heyday of anthropological collecting on the Northwest Coast took place between 1875 and the Great Depression. The scramble for skulls and skeletons, poles, canoes, baskets, feast bowls, and masks went on until it seemed that almost everything not nailed down or hidden was gone. The period of most intense collecting on the coast coincided with the growth of anthropological museums, which reflected the realization that time was running out and that civilization was pushing the indigenous people to the wall, destroying their material culture and even extinguishing the native stock itself.
Those unfamiliar with the prehistory of North America have a general perception of the cultures of the continent that includes Native Americans living in tipis, wearing feathered headdresses and buckskin clothing, and following migratory bison herds on the Great Plains. Although these practices were part of some Native American societies, they do not adequately represent the diversity of cultural practices by the overwhelming majority of Native American peoples. Media misrepresentations shaped by television and movies along with a focus on select regions and periods in the history of the United States have produced an extremely distorted view of the indigenous inhabitants of the continent an...
An Introduction to Native North America provides a basic introduction to the native peoples of North America, including both the United States and Canada. It covers the history of research, basic prehistory, the European invasion and the impact of Europeans on Native cultures. Additionally, much of the book is written from the perspective of the ethnographic present, and the various cultures are described as they were at the specific times noted in the text.
Recent Western European Mesolithic research has greatly augmented our understanding of the time and space parameters of material derived from settlements. Perusals of those regularities have led to a renewed scrutiny of the ethnographic literature in an attempt to perceive the resulting temporal and spatial units as anthropologically relevant regional groups. The proposition that the breeding population was identical to the ethnic identity of the participants is untenable. After a review of the physical anthropological composition of that population and its forms of social and spatial organization, the emic relevance of decorative ornamentation and costume is established in terms of society-specific styles. Proceeding from a series of tenets of processual ethnographic analogy, the ornaments extant in the post- glacial hunter-fisher-gatherer cultures of Western Europe are examined for their formal properties and time and space parameters. By means of an explicit set of postulates they are tested for the identification, definition and territorial placement of mesolithic social, ethnic and linguistic groups.
Over the past three decades, Ralph T. Coe has traveled extensively throughout the United States and Canada to assemble this collection of Native American art, one of the finest in private hands today. Immersed in the cultures of Native America, he has come to know artists and artisans, traders, dealers, and shop proprietors, selecting the very best they have to offer. The Ralph T. Coe Collection includes representative pieces from most Native American geographic regions and historical periods, beginning with objects dating back to the fourth millennium B.C. Many examples-men's shirts with ermine fringe, weapons, and button blankets-evoke the heroic lifestyle of the past, while small objects,...
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Museums in the Material World seeks to both introduce classic and thought-provoking pieces and contrast them with articles which reveal grounded practice. The articles are selected from across the full breadth of museum disciplines and are linked by a logical narrative, as detailed in the section introductions. The choice of articles reveals how the debate has opened up on disciplinary practice, how the practices of the past have been critiqued and in some cases replaced, how it has become necessary to look beyond and outside disciplinary boundaries, and how old practices can in many circumstances continue to have validity. Museums in the Material World is about broadening horizons and moving museum studies students, and others, beyond the narrow confines of their own disciplinary thinking or indeed any narrow conception of collections. In essence, this is a book about the practice of interpretation and will therefore be of great use to those students and museum practitioners involved in the field of material culture in museums.
Exploring magic as a creative necessity in contemporary business, this book clarifies the differences between magic as an organizational resource and magic as fakery, pretence and manipulation. Using this lens, it highlights insights into the relationship between anthropology and business, and organizational studies.
In Faces of Your Soul, Elise Dirlam Ching and Kaleo Ching combine art and archetypes, meditation and acupressure, guided imagery, journaling, and many different creative processes in a collage of healing knowledge and wisdom. The authors start by stressing the balance of complementary opposites—left brain/right brain, challenge/comfort, practicality/the sacred—as crucial to beginning the journey. Then through guided imagery, they lead readers through subconscious realms to connect with archetypal sources of inner wisdom. This process frees the creative and healing spirit, connecting explorers with the body's instinctive intelligence, which expresses itself through the creation of art. Central to this process is a detailed description of maskmaking—including how to work with a partner to mold each other's gauze mask—balanced with self-explorations of the inner experience of this event. Poetry, personal stories, photographs, and a gallery of Kaleo Ching's evocative totemic masks expand the reader's experience of this richly resonant journey to self.
Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt tells the remarkable story of Franz Boas, one of the leading scholars and public intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first book in a two-part biography, Franz Boas begins with the anthropologist's birth in Minden, Germany, in 1858 and ends with his resignation from the American Museum of Natural History in 1906, while also examining his role in training professional anthropologists from his berth at Columbia University in New York City. Zumwalt follows the stepping-stones that led Boas to his vision of anthropology as a four-field discipline, a journey demonstrating especially his tenacity to succeed, the passions that animated his l...