Rolling in Ditches with Shamans

Rolling in Ditches with Shamans
Author: Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0803229542

Rolling in Ditches with Shamans charts American anthropology in the 1920s through the life and work of one of the amateur scholars of the time, Jaime de Angulo (1887?1950). Although he earned a medical degree, de Angulo chose to live on an isolated ranch in Big Sur, California, where he participated fully in the lives of the people who were his ethnographic informants. The period of his most extensive research coincides almost perfectly with the professionalization of anthropology, and de Angulo provides a link between those who are generally recognized as the most important figures of the day: Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, and Edward Sapir. ø The fields of salvage ethnography and linguistics, which Boas emphasized, were aimed at recording the culture, language, and myths of the Native groups before they became completely acculturated. In keeping with these dictates, de Angulo recorded data from thirty groups, mostly in California, which otherwise might have been lost. In an unusual move for that time, he also wrote fiction and poetry describing the modern lives of the people he studied, something of little interest to Boas but of great interest today. His most enduring work is Indian Tales, a fictional synthesis of myths learned from various California Indians. De Angulo?s range of interests, originality, and expertise exemplified the curiosity and brilliance of those who pioneered American anthropology at this time.

American Anthropology and Company

American Anthropology and Company
Author: Stephen O. Murray
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2018-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496209907

In American Anthropology and Company, linguist and sociologist Stephen O. Murray explores the connections between anthropology, linguistics, sociology, psychology, and history, in broad-ranging essays on the history of anthropology and allied disciplines. On subjects ranging from Native American linguistics to the pitfalls of American, Latin American, and East Asian fieldwork, among other topics, American Anthropology and Company presents the views of a historian of anthropology interested in the theoretical and institutional connections between disciplines that have always been in conversation with anthropology. Recurring characters include Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Redfield, W. I. and Dorothy Thomas, and William Ogburn. While histories of anthropology rarely cross disciplinary boundaries, Murray moves in essay after essay toward an examination of the institutions, theories, and social networks of scholars as never before, maintaining a healthy skepticism toward anthropologists' views of their own methods and theories.

Golden Dreams

Golden Dreams
Author: Kevin Starr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 601
Release: 2011-09-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199924309

A narrative tour de force that combines wide-ranging scholarship with captivating prose, Kevin Starr's acclaimed multi-volume Americans and the California Dream is an unparalleled work of cultural history. In this volume, Starr covers the crucial postwar period--1950 to 1963--when the California we know today first burst into prominence. Starr brilliantly illuminates the dominant economic, social, and cultural forces in California in these pivotal years. In a powerful blend of telling events, colorful personalities, and insightful analyses, Starr examines such issues as the overnight creation of the postwar California suburb, the rise of Los Angeles as Super City, the reluctant emergence of San Diego as one of the largest cities in the nation, and the decline of political centrism. He explores the Silent Generation and the emergent Boomer youth cult, the Beats and the Hollywood "Rat Pack," the pervasive influence of Zen Buddhism and other Asian traditions in art and design, the rise of the University of California and the emergence of California itself as a utopia of higher education, the cooling of West Coast jazz, freeway and water projects of heroic magnitude, outdoor life and the beginnings of the environmental movement. More broadly, he shows how California not only became the most populous state in the Union, but in fact evolved into a mega-state en route to becoming the global commonwealth it is today. Golden Dreams continues an epic series that has been widely recognized for its signal contribution to the history of American culture in California. It is a book that transcends its stated subject to offer a wealth of insight into the growth of the Sun Belt and the West and indeed the dramatic transformation of America itself in these pivotal years following the Second World War.

Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938-1945

Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938-1945
Author: Anton Weiss-Wendt
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496211324

In Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1938–1945, international scholars examine the theories of race that informed the legal, political, and social policies aimed against ethnic minorities in Nazi-dominated Europe. The essays explicate how racial science, preexisting racist sentiments, and pseudoscientific theories of race that were preeminent in interwar Europe ultimately facilitated Nazi racial designs for a “New Europe.” The volume examines racial theories in a number of European nation-states in order to understand racial thinking at large, the origins of the Holocaust, and the history of ethnic discrimination in each of those countries. The essays, by uncovering neglected layers of complexity, diversity, and nuance, demonstrate how local discourse on race paralleled Nazi racial theory but had unique nationalist intellectual traditions of racial thought. Written by rising scholars who are new to English-language audiences, this work examines the scientific foundations that central, eastern, northern, and southern European countries laid for ethnic discrimination, the attempted annihilation of Jews, and the elimination of other so-called inferior peoples.

The Enigma of Max Gluckman

The Enigma of Max Gluckman
Author: Robert J. Gordon
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 519
Release: 2018-09-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0803290837

Introduction : the enigma of Max Gluckman -- Making the very model of a modern liberal -- London calling -- How the guinea pig burnt his own bridge -- Return to Oxford and intellectual ferment -- Landing and living in Livingi -- Mary, Max, and the Mongu masquerade -- Getting to grips with the Lozi -- Running the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute -- The seven year plan -- The African undertow

Tracks Along the Left Coast

Tracks Along the Left Coast
Author: Andrew Schelling
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2017-05-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 161902988X

“Tracks Along the Left Coast more than accomplishes its self–appointed task of celebrating de Angulo’s legacy.” —Rain Taxi “Schelling’s biography of Jaime de Angulo—'cattle puncher, medical doctor, bohemian, buckeroo,' among other things—presents a fascinating, full–bodied portrait of a man and an era, as well as delving deep into California’s Native history. De Angulo’s isn't a household name, but in Schelling's work the man called by Ezra Pound the 'American Ovid' comes blazing to life in all his singular brilliance.” —Stephen Sparks, Literary Hub California, with its scores of native languages, contains a wealth of old–time stories—a bedrock of the literature of North America. Jaime de Angulo's linguistic and ethnographic work, his writings, as well as the legends that cloak the Old Coyote himself, vividly reflect the particulars of the Pacific Coast. In each retelling, through each storyteller, stories are continually revivified, and that is precisely what Andrew Schelling has done in Tracks Along the Left Coast, weaving together the story of de Angulo's life with the story of the land and the people, languages, and cultures with whom it is so closely tied.

The 1870 Ghost Dance

The 1870 Ghost Dance
Author: Cora Alice Du Bois
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780803206960

The 1870 Ghost Dance was a significant but too often disregarded transformative historical movement with particular impact on the Native peoples of northern California. The spiritual energies of this ?great wave,? as Peter Nabokov has called it, have passed down to the present day among Native Californians, some of whose contemporary individual and communal lives can be understood only in light of the dance and the complex religious developments inspired by it. Cora Du Bois's historical study, The 1870 Ghost Dance, has remained an essential contribution to the ethnographic record of Native Californian cultures for seven decades yet is only now readily available for the first time. Du Bois produced this pioneering work in the field of ethnohistory while still under the tutelage of anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber. Her monograph informs our understanding of Kroeber's larger, grand and crucial salvage-ethnographic project in California, its approach and style, and also its limitations. The 1870 Ghost Dance adds rich detail to our understanding of anthropology in California before World War II

Franz Boas

Franz Boas
Author: Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2019-11-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1496217470

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 life, and the toll that the professional struggle took on him. Zumwalt guides the reader through Boas’s childhood and university education, describes his joy at finding the great love of his life, Marie Krackowizer, traces his 1883 trip to Baffin Land, and recounts his efforts to find employment in the United States. A central interest in the book is Boas’s widely influential publications on cultural relativism and issues of race, particularly his book The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), which reshaped anthropology, the social sciences, and public debates about the problem of racism in American society. Franz Boas presents the remarkable life story of an American intellectual giant as told in his own words through his unpublished letters, diaries, and field notes. Zumwalt weaves together the strands of the personal and the professional to reveal Boas’s love for his family and for the discipline of anthropology as he shaped it.

The Lariat

The Lariat
Author: Jaime De Angulo
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1582435960

One of the most colorful and captivating writers of the 20th century, Jaime de Angulo came to America to become a cowboy, not an author. And he did become a cowboy—and a doctor, and a psychologist, and a highly regarded anthropologist. However, it was as a writer that he ultimately found his true calling. His stories uniquely represented the bohemian sensibility of the time, and he was known for infusing intellectualism into his coyote tales and shamanic mysticism. So vivid were his tales that Ezra Pound called him "the American Ovid," and William Carlos Williams claimed that de Angulo was "one of the most outstanding writers that I have ever encountered." The Lariat, which may well be his most important piece of fiction, is highlighted in this prize collection, along with other writings that have long been unavailable.

Centering the Margins of Anthropology's History

Centering the Margins of Anthropology's History
Author: Regna Darnell
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2021-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496226291

The series Histories of Anthropology Annual presents diverse perspectives on the discipline’s history within a global context, with a goal of increasing the awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. The series includes critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology. Volume 14, Centering the Margins of Anthropology’s History, focuses on the conscious recognition of margins and suggests it is time to bring the margins to the center, both in terms of a changing theoretical openness and a supporting body of scholarship—if not to problematize the very dichotomy of center and margins itself. The essays explore two major themes of anthropology’s margins. First, anthropologists and historians have long sought out marginalized and forgotten ancestors, arguing for their present-day relevance and offering explanations for the lack of attention to their contributions to theory, analysis, methods, and findings. Second, anthropologists and their historians have explored a range of genres to present their results in provocative and open-ended formats. This volume closes with an experimental essay that offers a dynamic, multifaceted perspective that captures one of the dominant (if sometimes marginalized) voices in history of anthropology. Steven O. Murray’s career developed at the institutional margins of several academic disciplines and activist discourses, but his distinctive voice has been, and will remain, at the center of our history.