Download or read book Animal Myths and Metaphors in South America written by Gary Urton and published by University of Utah Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What similarities and differences do humans see between themselves and animals? Why do people commonly make metaphorical comparisons between human beings or social groups and animals, and to what degree are people's attitudes and beliefs about animals parallel to or contingent upon their attitudes and beliefs about human beings and human society? This collection of articles considers these issues. The issues are basic in any study of "totemism," or human and animal relationships, and they have been discussed in anthropological literature since the time of Lewis Henry Morgan's work on Iroquois social organization. The contributors to this anthology have not limited themselves to the notion that clans and moieties are the only sources and objects of metaphorical comparisons between humans and animals. They suggest a shift in perspective that has metaphorical comparisons generated by conceived similarities and differences between animals and particular types of human beings. Some examples of this include macaw fledglings as adolescents; pumas as fully initiated men, and foxes as young married men. With this shift of emphasis, a significantly different analytic focus in the study of human-animal relations is produced.

Download or read book Exhibiting Animals in Europe and America written by M. Elizabeth Boone and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-11-29 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume, written by historians of art and visual culture who are working in the field of animal studies, seeks to understand how our ways of positioning (and ex-positioning) animals have separated us from the other-than-human animals that are an integral part of our interconnected world. Bringing together the visual and material culture of display with recent theoretical study on human–animal relations, the book draws attention to ways in which we might rethink this history and map pathways for the future. Defining the idea of exhibition and display broadly, chapters consider a diverse range of media, including paintings, anatomical sculpture, books, prints, and clothing; exhibition venues that take place in both the public and private realms; and key ideas such as looking at/looking back, seeing/being seen, and interspecies recognition. The authors cover topics that span the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries and focus geographically on Europe and America, with significant content related to Canada, Indigenous America, and Latin America. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, museum studies, animal studies, and environmental humanities.

Download or read book Maize Cobs and Cultures History of Zea mays L written by John Staller and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-12-02 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our perceptions and conceptions regarding the roles and importance of maize to ancient economies is largely a product of scientific research on the plant itself, developed for the most part out of botanical research, and its recent role as one of the most important economic staples in the world. Anthropological research in the early part of the last century based largely upon the historical particularistic approach of the Boasian tradition provided the first evidence that challenged the assumptions about the economic importance of maize to sociocultural developments for scholars of prehistory. Subsequent ethnobotanic and archaeological studies showed that the role of maize among Native American cultures was much more complex than just as a food staple. In Maize Cobs and Cultures, John Staller provides a survey of the ethnohistory and the scientific, botanical and biological research of maize, complemented by reviews on the ethnobotanic, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary methodologies.

Download or read book Nature and Society written by Philippe Descola and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-12-16 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this book focus on the relationship between nature and society from a variety of theoretical and ethnographic perspectives. Their work draws upon recent developments in social theory, biology, ethnobiology, epistemology, sociology of science, and a wide array of ethnographic case studies -- from Amazonia, the Solomon Islands, Malaysia, the Mollucan Islands, rural comunities from Japan and north-west Europe, urban Greece, and laboratories of molecular biology and high-energy physics. The discussion is divided into three parts, emphasising the problems posed by the nature-culture dualism, some misguided attempts to respond to these problems, and potential avenues out of the current dilemmas of ecological discourse.

Download or read book Icons of Power written by Nicholas J. Saunders and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Icons of Power investigates why the image of the cat has been such a potent symbol in the art, religion and mythology of indigenous American cultures for three thousand years. The jaguar and the puma epitomize ideas of sacrifice, cannibalism, war, and status in a startling array of graphic and enduring images. Natural and supernatural felines inhabit a shape-shifting world of sorcery and spiritual power, revealing the shamanic nature of Amerindian world views. This pioneering collection offers a unique pan-American assessment of the feline icon through the diversity of cultural interpretations, but also striking parallels in its associations with hunters, warriors, kingship, fertility, and the sacred nature of political power. Evidence is drawn from the pre-Columbian Aztec and Maya of Mexico, Peruvian, and Panamanian civilizations, through recent pueblo and Iroquois cultures of North America, to current Amazonian and Andean societies. This well-illustrated volume is essential reading for all who are interested in the symbolic construction of animal icons, their variable meanings, and their place in a natural world conceived through the lens of culture. The cross-disciplinary approach embraces archaeology, anthropology, and art history.

Download or read book Landscape and Politics in the Ancient Andes written by Scott Cameron Smith and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Front Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- 1: Biographies of Place -- 2: Place-Making and Politics -- 3: The Lake Titicaca Basin, Past and Present -- 4: The Site of Khonkho Wankane -- 5: Making Ritual Places: Caravan Routes and the Founding of Khonkho Wankane -- 6: Experiencing Ritual Places: Stelae, Sunken Courts, and the Creation of an Axis Mundi -- 7: The Power of Ritual Places: Politics and Social Difference through Time -- 8: The Political Cartography of an Axis Settlement -- Appendix -- Notes -- References -- Index -- Back Cover

Download or read book Perishable Material Culture in Prehistory written by Linda M. Hurcombe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perishable Material Culture in Prehistory provides new approaches and integrates a broad range of data to address a neglected topic, organic material in the prehistoric record. Providing news ideas and connections and suggesting revisionist ways of thinking about broad themes in the past, this book demonstrates the efficacy of an holistic approach by using examples and cases studies. No other book covers such a broad range of organic materials from a social and object biography perspective, or concentrates so fully on approaches to the missing components of prehistoric material culture. This book will be an essential addition for those people wishing to understand better the nature and importance of organic materials as the ’missing majority’ of prehistoric material culture.

Download or read book Gender in Pre Hispanic America written by Cecelia F. Klein and published by Dumbarton Oaks. This book was released on 2001 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender in Pre-Hispanic America offers rich opportunities for comprehending current trends and considering future directions in research. It is unique in that it puts social theory at the forefront of the discussion. The book has a special intellectual presence and contemporary relevance in its engagement with the social lives and constructs of its authors and readers alike. The consideration of the role of gender in our daily lives, including in our professions, becomes inescapable when reading this book. It is not simply a question of men's roles having been possibly overemphasized and overstudied to the detriment of women's. The fact that genders, as opposed to sexes, are socially constructed categories focuses our attention on the ways in which these and other social constructs have shaped our present understanding of the past and informed past peoples' understand of their present. In various articles in this book, the reader will not find unanimity in what is meant by "gender" or how to go about studying it. What will be found, however, is a collection of interesting, informed, thought-provoking, and often lively essays. It is hoped that this volume will mark a stage in an evolving study of this field and provoke new research in the future.

Download or read book Metaphor II written by Jean-Pierre Noppen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphor, though not now the scholarly “mania” it once was, remains a topic of great interest in many disciplines albeit with interesting shifts in emphasis.Warren Shibles' Metaphor: An Annotated Bibliography and History (Bloomington, Ind. 1971) recorded the initial interest. Then Metaphor: A Bibliography of Post-1970 Publications, published by John Benjamins, continued the record through the mania years up to 1985 when writings proliferated as metaphor was seen to be a fundamental category in human thought and language.Five years later, there is a need for a report on the newest thinking and tendencies in the field. This need is fulfilled by Metaphor II which offers a comprehensive view of information which would otherwise remain scattered throughout a numbing plethora of resources, including many sometimes-hard-to-find publications from Eastern Europe.Metaphor II systematically collects references of books, articles and papers published between 1985 and May 1990, and includes for completeness corrections and additions to the earlier bibliographies. Abstracts are given for many of the titles, while four indices (disciplines, semantic fields, metaphor theory and names) multiply the number of access points to the information.

Download or read book To Weave and Sing written by David M. Guss and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1990-08-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To Weave and Sing is the first in-depth analysis of the rich spiritual and artistic traditions of the Carib-speaking Yekuana Indians of Venezuela, who live in the dense rain forest of the upper Orinoco. Within their homeland of Ihuruna, the Yekuana have succeeded in maintaining the integrity and unity of their culture, resisting the devastating effects of acculturation that have befallen so many neighboring groups. Yet their success must be attributed to more than natural barriers of rapids and waterfalls, to more than lack of "contact" with our "modern" world. The ethnographic history recounted here includes not only the Spanish discovery of the Yekuana but detailed indigenous accounts of the entire history of Yekuana contact with Western culture, revealing an adaptive technique of mythopoesis by which the symbols of a new and hostile European ideology have been consistently defused through their incorporation into traditional indigenous structures. The author's initial point of departure is the Watunna, the Yekuana creation epic, but he finds his principal entrance into this mythic world through basketry, focusing on the eleborate kinetic designs of the round waja baskets and the stories told about them. Guss argues that the problem of understanding Yekuana basketry is the problem of understanding all traditional art forms within a tribal context, and critiques the cultural assumptions inherent in our systems of classification. He demonstrates that the symbols woven into the baskets function not in isolation but collectively, as a powerful system cutting across the entire culture. To Weave and Sing addresses all Yekuana material culture and the greater reality it both incorporates and masks, discerning a unifying configuration of symbols in chapters on architectural forms, the geography of the body, and the use of herbs, face paints, and chants. A narrow view of slash-and-burn gardens as places of mere subsistence is challenged by Guss's portrait of these exclusively female spaces as systematic inversions of the male world, "the sacred turned on its head." Throughout, a wealth of narrative and ritual materials provides us with the closest approximation we have to a native exegesis of these phenomena. What we are offered here is a new Poetics of Culture, ethnography not as a static given but as a series of shifting fields, wherein culture (and our image of it) is constantly recreated in all of its parts, by all of its members.

Download or read book Dictionary of Nature Myths written by Tamra Andrews and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprehensive and cross-referenced, this informative volume is a rich introduction to the world of nature as experienced by ancient peoples around the globe. 51 halftones.

Download or read book Contexts of Metaphor written by Michiel Leezenberg and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study presents an approach to metaphor that takes contextual factors into account. It analyses how metaphors depend on and change the context in which they are uttered, and how metaphorical interpretation involves the articulation of asserted, implied and presupposed materials.

Download or read book The Gift of Birds written by Ruben E. Reina and published by UPenn Museum of Archaeology. This book was released on 1991 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting 10 essays by experts in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and ornithology on the native peoples of South America and their use of birds, this volume offers a fascinating view into the lives and customs of some of the indigenous peoples living in the rainforest and coastal areas of Brazil and Peru. This book includes color photographs of South American natives in festival and ritual celebrations and everyday activities, along with spectacular objects of featherwork, textiles, and pottery. Contributors: Ruben E. Reina, Kenneth M. Kensinger, Kay L. Candler, Virginia Greene, Elizabeth Netto Calil Zarur, Catherine V. Howard, Patricia J. Lyon, Jon F. Pressman, Peter T. Turst, and Mark Robbins. University Museum Monograph, 75

Download or read book A Culture of Stone written by Carolyn Dean and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-21 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major contribution to both art history and Latin American studies, A Culture of Stone offers sophisticated new insights into Inka culture and the interpretation of non-Western art. Carolyn Dean focuses on rock outcrops masterfully integrated into Inka architecture, exquisitely worked masonry, and freestanding sacred rocks, explaining how certain stones took on lives of their own and played a vital role in the unfolding of Inka history. Examining the multiple uses of stone, she argues that the Inka understood building in stone as a way of ordering the chaos of unordered nature, converting untamed spaces into domesticated places, and laying claim to new territories. Dean contends that understanding what the rocks signified requires seeing them as the Inka saw them: as potentially animate, sentient, and sacred. Through careful analysis of Inka stonework, colonial-period accounts of the Inka, and contemporary ethnographic and folkloric studies of indigenous Andean culture, Dean reconstructs the relationships between stonework and other aspects of Inka life, including imperial expansion, worship, and agriculture. She also scrutinizes meanings imposed on Inka stone by the colonial Spanish and, later, by tourism and the tourist industry. A Culture of Stone is a compelling multidisciplinary argument for rethinking how we see and comprehend the Inka past.

Download or read book Earth s Insights written by J. Baird Callicott and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-11-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The environmental crisis is global in scope, yet contemporary environmental ethics is centered predominantly in Western philosophy and religion. Earth's Insights widens the scope of environmental ethics to include the ecological teachings embedded in non-Western worldviews. J. Baird Callicott ranges broadly, exploring the sacred texts of Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Zen Buddhism, as well as the oral traditions of Polynesia, North and South America, and Australia. He also documents the attempts of various peoples to put their environmental ethics into practice. Finally, he wrestles with a question of vital importance to all people sharing the fate of this small planet: How can the world's many and diverse environmental philosophies be brought together in a complementary and consistent whole?

Download or read book Art Information and the Internet written by Lois Swan Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first book of its kind, art information expert Lois Swan Jones discusses how to locate visual and textual information on the Internet and how to evaluate and supplement that information with material from other formats--print sources, CD-ROMS, documentary videos, and microfiche sets--to produce excellent research results. The book is divided into three sections: Basic Information Formats; Types of Websites and How to Find Them; and How to Use Web Information. Jones discusses the strengths and limitations of Websites; scholarly and basic information resources are noted; and search strategies for finding pertinent Websites are included. Art Information and the Internet also discusses research methodology for studying art-historical styles, artists working in various media, individual works of art, and non-Western cultures--as well as art education, writing about art, problems of copyright, and issues concerning the buying and selling of art. This title will be periodically updated.

Download or read book Keepers of the Sacred Chants written by Jonathan D. Hill and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wakuenai of the upper Rio Negro region in southern Venezuela employ a form of singing called malikai for ceremonies of childbirth, initiation, and healing. This ritual chanting is a rich amalgam of myth and music, and serves as a means of integrating individuals into a vertical hierarchy of power relations between mythic ancestors and human descendants. Jonathan Hill here shows how the musical and semantic transformations of everyday discourse in malikai integrate the everyday world into a poetic process of empowerment.