History & Philosophy Books - Page 11

American Anthropology, 1888-1920: Papers from the "American Anthropologist"

American Anthropological Association

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Editorial Review:

The formative years of American anthropology were characterized by intellectual energy and excitement, the identification of key interpretive issues, and the beginnings of a prodigious amount of fieldwork and recording. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) was born as anthropology emerged as a formal discipline with specialized subfields; fieldwork among Native communities proliferated across North America, yielding a wealth of ethnographic information that began to surface in the flagship journal, the American Anthropologist; and researchers increasingly debated and probed deeper into the roots and significance of ritual, myth, language, social organization, and the physical make-up and prehistory of Native Americans.

The fifty-five selections in this volume represent the interests of and accomplishments in American anthropology from the establishment of the American Anthropologist through World War I. The articles in their entirety showcase the state of the subfields of anthropology—archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology—as they were imagined and practiced at the dawn of the twentieth century. Examples of important ethnographic accounts and interpretive debates are also included. Introducing this collection is a historical overview of the beginnings of American anthropology by A. Irving Hallowell, a former president of the AAA.

Cushing at Zuni: The Correspondence and Journals of Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1879-1884

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Cushing's Vindication 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Cushing's contemporaries were critical of his efforts and activities in Zuni, primarily because of what they considered the lack of published material that Cushing produced during his tenure at the Pueblo. This fact has also been lamented by anthropologists since that time, and the lack of writings may well be the source of the general opinion that the material he made available is tainted and superimposed with "poetic overtones". Granted, Cushing's grandiose is evident in many of his publications that appeared in periodicals during his lifetime. However, in order to be fair one should consider that Cushing was writing to an audience of the Victorian Era and he spoke in terms that he knew they would understand and wanted to hear. In this regard we can only criticize him for the forfeiture of his science to what was popular at the time. He created the objects of his research by a temporal distancing that was reflected in a terminology that at that time was not only popular, but was also scientific. Thus, subsequent criticisms such as Barbara Tedlock's portrayal of "wrong-headedness" and "wrong-heartedness" are in themselves wrong headed and wrong hearted, and Cushing's methodology is based upon concepts that even a so-called ethnologist should understand.

Jesse Green's compilation is an extremely important body of work for any student of the Zuni culture. There is a great amount of material here that reflects Cushing's theories on Zuni semantics and mathematics (counting), and stories by Cushing that can be found no where else. Many of the letters he wrote to his sympathetic colleagues are rich in information as to the sources of the folklore and myth that he documented, and revealing on many aspects of his membership in the Priesthood of the Bow. Would you like to know Cushing's side of the story in his feud with the Stevensons? It is here.

What is also here to a certain extent is Cushing's vindication. Next generation Zuni anthropologists such as Ruth Bunzel and Franz Boas were highly critical of Cushing's findings. While Bunzel's work at Zuni is nothing less than important, it has as its source those Zuni denizens who were or had been intent on implementing the demise of the Bow Priesthood, a secret society of which Cushing was a member and was his source of much folklore and myth, including those of the Zuni origin.

Cushing's letters and journal entries are very readable and incredibly enjoyable. He was a poet at heart and it is reflected in his writing style. The book is worth its weight in gold simply for Jesse Green's lengthy and informative notes, occasional insights, and his extensive bibliography.

The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Choose Domestication

Stephen Budiansky

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Thought provoking contribution to a contentious issue. 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Budiansky, standing nearly alone among the many works on the ethics of human to animal relationships, sees domestication not as an unnatural evil, forced upon animals, to our benefit and their detriment. In a refreshing view of the world he does not apologize for domestication, but attempts to show that it is neither unnatural, forced, nor lacking in benefits for non-human animals. Furthermore, he calls into question many of the fundamental world views held by popular authors who hold that domestication is morally wrong. Budiansky may not have everything right, but this book is a much needed perspective in the debate of animal rights and human welfare. I strongly recommend it.

Udder Nonsense 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful.

The Covenant of the Wild is an example of anti-animal rights propaganda masquerading as science. For readers with an interest in this genre, it is worth reading.

Readers with a limited knowledge of natural history or who are unused to careful critical thinking will likely come away with a gross misunderstanding of the history of domestication and a biased view of the animal rights and the environmental movements. It is unclear whether Budiansky sets out to deceive his audience or is just poorly informed.

There is good evidence in the psychology literature that one's early childhood experiences can have a lasting effect on one's outlook. Budiansky explains that he was raised without exposure to animals. This might explain his bias and his projection that no one knows the source of meat or how animals behave other than farmers or hunters. He now feels, after moving to a farm and raising sheep, that he is an expert on animal behavior and animals' desires.

In the preface to the 1999 paperback edition, Budiansky writes:

"...we are the only species capable of conceiving of the pain and suffering of another; ... we are the only species capable of understanding the consequences of our actions or our inaction."

Writers in this genre uniformly struggle to name the characteristics that somehow set us apart from other animals and give us a right to hurt them. Budiansky's claim is illustrative of the scientific illiteracy, or selective consideration of evidence that afflicts writers in this area. The premier example of members of other species being aware of, being concerned with, and acting to protect others may the 1964 paper published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, "`Altruistic' Behavior in Rhesus Monkeys." Budiansky must be unaware of the research in this area.

Budiansky sprinkles similar ignorant claims throughout his text. He revisits the claim that monkeys were necessary to the development of the polio vaccine but doesn't mention the fact that in 1984, Albert Sabin, who developed the oral polio vaccine, swore under oath to the U.S. House of Representatives' Subcommittee on Hospitals and Health Care of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs that "the work on [polio] prevention was long delayed by an erroneous conception of the nature of the human disease based on misleading experimental models of the disease in monkeys."

Overall, even if one discounts his factual errors as simple ignorance, his argument that domestic animals were, in some twisted sense, willing participants in our early domestication of them is poorly argued and fraught with internal inconsistency and contradiction. I'm amazed that such gibberish came from the pen of a past editor at the journal Nature, but maybe this helps explain the journal's unwillingness to examine the ethical implications of our discoveries about other animals' minds and emotions.

For anyone other than a student of the anti-animal propaganda, or someone seeking to salve his or her own dislike of progressive views, this book will largely be a waste of time.

Editorial Review:

A reevaluation of human beings' relationship to animals analyzes the emotional debate over animals' rights and humans' ethical responsibilities, discussing how humans and animals were linked at the end of the Ice Age. 25,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo.

Awakening Earth: Exploring the Evolution of Human Culture and Consciousness

Duane Elgin

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Just as there are relatively distinct stages that characterize the development of an individual from infancy to early adulthood, so too are there discernible stages in the development of our species as we move toward a planetary-scale civilization. Awakening Earth brings together views from science and spirituality, East and West, the practical and the visionary to present a new picture of human evolution. Based upon twenty years of research, this book explores the human journey from the initial awakening of hunter-gatherers roughly 35,000 years ago, through the agrarian era and industrial revolution, and then goes on to describe three additional stages of development essential for realizing our initial maturity as a global species-civilization.

A disoriented world civilization faced with dwindling resources, mounting pollution and exploding population is a recipe for ecological collapse and social anarchy. It is imperative that the human family begin to make rapid and profound changes in how we live together on the Earth. To accomplish this, we must now ask ourselves fundamental questions: Who are we? What are we doing here? Where are we going as a species? Awakening Earth provides a catalyst for this conversation with its integrative vision and inspiring map of the journey towards a sustainable, compassionate, and creative future.

While not predicting a sudden "new age" of social enlightenment, Awakening Earth does present the promising view that humanity is roughly halfway through seven major transformations in culture and consciousness required to build a planetary civilization that can endure into the deep future.

Questions of Anthropology (London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology)

Rita Astuti, Jonathan Parry, Charles Stafford

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Editorial Review:

Anthropology today seems to shy away from the big, comparative questions that ordinary people in many societies find compelling. Questions of Anthropology brings these issues back to the centre of anthropological concerns. Individual essays explore birth, death and sexuality, puzzles about the relationship between science and religion, questions about the nature of ritual, work, political leadership and genocide, and our personal fears and desires, from the quest to control the future and to find one's "true" identity to the fear of being alone. Each essay starts with a question posed by individual ethnographic experience and then goes on to frame this question in a broader, comparative context.

An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds (Mestizo Spaces / Espaces Metisses)

Marc Auge

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Editorial Review:

Under what conditions is anthropology possible today, when a crisis of social meaning—a crisis that makes it more difficult to conceive and manage our relation to the other—makes the need for anthropology appear more clearly than ever before? This book sets forth at least the beginning of an answer to this question.

The volume’s title combines a singular noun, anthropology, with a plural one, contemporaneous worlds. It aims to register the double movement of universalization and particularization that is simultaneously affecting the entire planet. Social anthropology has always taken into account the context of the groups and phenomena it studied. Today, while multiplicity is being maintained or, more precisely, renewed, that context has become, in all cases, planetary.

Positioned in opposition not only to political theories of universalization and uniformization more or less tied to the theme of “the end of history,” but also to “postmodernist” versions of anthropological theories of multiplicity and relativism, the author argues that social anthropology, through its self-critical tradition, is fully capable of adapting to the accelerated change that is continuously recomposing relations between universalism and particularisms. It is for social anthropology to select, analyze, and understand the new modes of sociality and the new spaces in which (not without calamities and contradictions) these utterly new recompositions, a major aspect of our contemporary world, manifest themselves.

Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays in Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition (History of Anthropology)

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Editorial Review:

back cover-Stocking, Volksgeist as Method paperback

Volume 8, Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition

Franz Boas, the major founding figure of anthropology as a discipline in the United States, came to America from Germany in 1886. This volume in the highly acclaimed History of Anthropology series is the first extensive scholarly exploration of Boas' roots in the German intellectual tradition and late nineteenth-century German anthropology, and offers a new perspective on the historical development of ethnography in the United States.

Other volumes in the History of Anthropology series

Volume 7, Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge

Volume 6, Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility

Volume 5, Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology

Volume 4, Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality

Volume 3, Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture

Volume 2, Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology

Volume 1, Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork

"A splendid series."-Joan Mark, Isis

"Among the most distinguished publications in anthropology, as well as in the history of social sciences."-George Marcus, Anthropologica Contributors: Judith Berman, Thomas Buckley, Matti Bunzl, Ira Jacknis, Julia E. Liss, Benoit Massin

Margaret Mead and the Heretic: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth

Derek Freeman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Derk Freeman has taken a lifetime to become an overnight sen 4 out of 5 stars.
16 of 17 people found this review helpful.

Although he is a New Zealander I had not heard of Derek Freeman until the play about his work appeared in Wellington as part of an arts festival.

His published findings then got rehearsed through the media and were attacked sufficiently to persude me to buy the book through Amazon.

In part his book is an examination of the theoretical upbringing of Margaret Mead, one of the icons of Anthropology. It is clear that she did not have an open mind and failed to find an approprite historical context for her work in Samoa.

Freeman spent a lot longer than Mead in Samoa. He has held his fire for a long time, which is rather a pity as I am persuaded that Margaret Mead's conclusions were based on seriously flawed research.

At times I felt that Freeman was getting a bit obsessive about trivia, but one part of his work which is very good indeed is the study of violence in Samoa. Freeman comes at this from several perspectives in what I think should be a handbook for social workers and policy analysts.

Freeman writes well. His theoretical work is concise and coherent. His practical examples and other evidence from Samoa are excellent. I take care here not to tell his story for him , buy it and read it .

He has a light touch once he gets over Margaret Mead's lapses and gets on to his own work.

I think if ever there was a spare place at a dinner table then Derek Freeman would have to be an excellent choice to fill it.

Editorial Review:

The late renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead's major field-work study COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA became the key text in the nature-nurture controversy and a reference point for the social and sexual revolution of the 1960s. Derek Freeman's book, updated here with a new Foreword, refutes Mead's work, claiming she was misinformed by Samoan natives regarding the sexual proclivities of their culture.

Settlement And Society: Essays Dedicated to Robert Mccormick Adams (Ideas, Debates and Perspectives) (Ideas, Debates and Perspectives)

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Editorial Review:

This volume of essays dedicated to Robert McCormack Adams reflects both the breadth of his research and the select themes upon which he focused his attention. These essays, written by his students and disciples, focus on issues in Near Eastern archaeology but range as far afield as the Indus Valley and Mesoamerica. They also concentrate on aspects of early complex society, but some refer back to the late Neolithic and others forward to Islamic times.

The Smithsonian and the American Indian: Making a Moral Anthropology in Victoria America

HINSLEY CURTIS M

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