The Power of Feasts

The Power of Feasts
Author: Brian Hayden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2014-09-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107042992

In this book, Brian Hayden provides the first comprehensive, theoretical work on the history of feasting in societies ranging from the prehistoric to the modern.

Tribal and Chiefly Warfare in South America

Tribal and Chiefly Warfare in South America
Author: Elsa M. Redmond
Publisher: U OF M MUSEUM ANTHRO ARCHAEOLOGY
Total Pages: 161
Release: 1994-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0915703351

This book presents new data on warfare from both ethnohistoric and ethnographic sources. The author documents principal differences between tribal and chiefly warfare; outlines the evidence archaeologists can expect to recover from warfare; and formulates testable hypotheses on the role of warfare in social and political evolution. This monograph is part of a series on Latin American Ethnohistory and Archaeology.

Privileging the Past

Privileging the Past
Author: Judith Ostrowitz
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 1999
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780774807531

Ostrowitz is an art historian and an artist who lives in New York, is affiliated with Yale University, and is a former assistant curator at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Here she presents a thorough, scholarly exploration of the complex issues of authenticity, tradition, and creative translation-carefully considering Northwest Coast dances, ceremonies, masks, painted screens, and houses, and drawing on an extensive body of interviews with tribal leaders, artists, and artisans known and respected in both Native and non-Native venues. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Tales of Ghosts

Tales of Ghosts
Author: Ronald W. Hawker
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2007-10-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0774850868

The years between 1922 and 1961, often referred to as the “Dark Ages of Northwest Coast art,” have largely been ignored by art historians, and dismissed as a period of artistic decline. Tales of Ghosts compellingly reclaims this era, arguing that it was instead a critical period during which the art played an important role in public discourses on the status of First Nations people in Canadian society. Hawker’s insightful examination focuses on the complex functions that Northwest Coast objects, such as the ubiquitous totem pole, played during the period. He demonstrates how these objects asserted the integrity and meaningfulness of First Nations identities, while simultaneously resisting the intent and effects of assimilation enforced by the Canadian government’s denial of land claims, its ban of the potlatch, and its support of assimilationist education. Those with an interest in First Nations and Canadian history and art history, anthropology, museology, and post-colonial studies will be delighted by the publication of this major contribution to their fields.

Feasts

Feasts
Author: Michael Dietler
Publisher: Washington, D.C. : Smithsonian Institution Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2001
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

"From the Ancient Near East to Modern-Day North America, communal consumption of food and drink punctuates the rhythms of human societies. Feasts serve many social purposes, establishing alliances for war and marriage, mobilizing labor, creating political power and economic advantages, and redistributing wealth." "This collection of fifteen essays combines ethnographic and archaeological perspectives to examine the cultural, economic, and political importance of feasts, considering traditional and modern practices from Africa, Southeast Asia, the Near East, Polynesia, New Guinea, and the Americas. Recording types and quantities of food, preparation techniques, and numbers of participants, the ethnographers provide a much-needed behavioral context and theoretical framework for these intricate social interactions and attempt to link feasting practices to physical evidence. The archaeologists examine the locations of roasting pits, hearths, and refuse deposits or the presence of special decorative ceramics and infer the ways in which feasting traditions reveal social structures of lineage, clan, moiety, and polity." "As practices for organizing ancient and modern societies, feasts are intimately implicated in the processes of social and cultural change. This book makes these rituals more accessible to archaeological analysis and interpretation."--Jacket.

Contesting Art

Contesting Art
Author: Jeremy MacClancy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2020-08-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000323854

Art is a major political weapon of our times. Today, peoples around the world use art to boost their own identity and to attack the ways others represent them. At a time of increasing intercultural exchange, art has become a primary means through which groups reinforce their challenged sense of culture.This pioneering book breaks with the tradition of the anthropology of art as the depoliticized study of aesthetics in exotic settings. Transcending artificial distinctions between the West and the Rest, it examines the increasingly significant relations among art, identity and politics in the modern world.Among the themes investigated by the contributors: - how African painters undermine racist stereotypes yet remain dominated by the Western art market - the role of anthropology museums in the perpetuation of the Western market in 'tribal art' - the internal and external political disputes underlying the 'repatriation' of cultural property.

Ancient Panama

Ancient Panama
Author: Mary W. Helms
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2014-03-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0292766742

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 important than economic trade in developing long-distance contact among chiefdoms. The primary data for the study are derived from sixteenth-century Spanish records by Oviedo y Valdés, Andagoya, Balboa, and others. The author also turns to ethnographic data from contemporary native people of Panama, Colombia, tropical America, and Polynesia for analogy and comparison. The result is a highly innovative study which illuminates not only pre-Columbian Panamanian elites but also the nature of chiefdoms as a distinctive cultural type.

Routes

Routes
Author: James Clifford
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 1997-04-21
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780674779600

When culture makes itself at home in motion, where does an anthropologist stand? In a follow-up to The Predicament of Culture, one of the defining books for anthropology in the last decade, James Clifford takes the proper measure: a moving picture of a world that doesn't stand still, that reveals itself en route, in the airport lounge and the parking lot as much as in the marketplace and the museum. In this collage of essays, meditations, poems, and travel reports, Clifford takes travel and its difficult companion, translation, as openings into a complex modernity. He contemplates a world ever more connected yet not homogeneous, a global history proceeding from the fraught legacies of exploration, colonization, capitalist expansion, immigration, labor mobility, and tourism. Ranging from Highland New Guinea to northern California, from Vancouver to London, he probes current approaches to the interpretation and display of non-Western arts and cultures. Wherever people and things cross paths and where institutional forces work to discipline unruly encounters, Clifford's concern is with struggles to displace stereotypes, to recognize divergent histories, to sustain "postcolonial" and "tribal" identities in contexts of domination and globalization. Travel, diaspora, border crossing, self-location, the making of homes away from home: these are transcultural predicaments for the late twentieth century. The map that might account for them, the history of an entangled modernity, emerges here as an unfinished series of paths and negotiations, leading in many directions while returning again and again to the struggles and arts of cultural encounter, the impossible, inescapable tasks of translation.

Standing Up with Ga'axsta'las

Standing Up with Ga'axsta'las
Author: Leslie A. Robertson
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 597
Release: 2012-10-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0774823860

Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las tells the remarkable story of Jane Constance Cook (1870-1951), a controversial Kwakwaka’wakw leader and activist who lived during a period of enormous colonial upheaval. Working collaboratively, Robertson and Cook’s descendants draw on oral histories and textual records to create a nuanced portrait of a high-ranked woman, a cultural mediator, devout Christian, and aboriginal rights activist who criticized potlatch practices for surprising reasons. This powerful meditation on memory and cultural renewal documents how the Kwagu’l Gixsam have revived their long-dormant clan in the hopes of forging a positive cultural identity for future generations through feasting and potlatching.

Sensible Objects

Sensible Objects
Author: Elizabeth Edwards
Publisher: Berg
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2006-08-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1845203240

Anthropologists of the senses have long argued that cultures differ in their sensory registers. This groundbreaking volume applies this idea to material culture and the social practices that endow objects with meanings in both colonial and postcolonial relationships. It challenges the privileged position of the sense of vision in the analysis of material culture. Contributors argue that vision can only be understood in relation to the other senses. In this they present another challenge to the assumed western five-sense model, and show how our understanding of material culture in both historical and contemporary contexts might be reconfigured if we consider the role of smell, taste, feel and sound, as well as sight, in making meanings about objects.