Totemism

 

Totemism



Totemism



OTHER ARTICLES




From the back cover: This work is significant not only for students of anthropology but for students of philosophy and psychology as well. The distinguished anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss examines here the great variety of beliefs encompassed by totemism, the attacks to which it has been subject, and the constant attempts to restore useful meaning to it. His account deals with the views of such renowned anthropologists as Boas, van Gennep, Elkin, Fortes, Firth, Evans-Pritchard, and Radcliffe-Brown it also brings to light some neglected observations by Bergson and Rousseau. In reviewing the major theories about totemism, the author notes that it has gradually come to be understood not as a distinctive institution, but as a way of thinking which is as characteristic of our own thinking as it is of the primitives for whom totemism was an integral part of life.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How Natives Think: About Captain Cook, For Example

Image
  How Natives Think: About Captain Cook, For Example How Natives Think: About Captain Cook, For Example OTHER ARTICLES When Western scholars write about non-Western societies, do they inevitably perpetuate the myths of European imperialism? Can they ever articulate the meanings and logics of non-Western peoples? Who has the right to speak for whom? Questions such as these are among the most hotly debated in contemporary intellectual life. In How Natives Think, Marshall Sahlins addresses these issues head on, while building a powerful case for the ability of anthropologists working in the Western tradition to understand other cultures.In recent years, these questions have arisen in debates over the death and deification of Captain James Cook on Hawai'i Island in 1779. Did the Hawaiians truly receive Cook as a manifestation of their own god Lono? Or were they too pragmatic, too worldly-wise to accept the foreigner as a god? Moreover, can a non-native scholar give voice to a native po...
Read more

Uses of Heritage

Image
  Uses of Heritage Uses of Heritage OTHER ARTICLES Examining international case studies including USA, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Laurajane Smith identifies and explores the use of heritage throughout the world.Challenging the idea that heritage value is self-evident, and that things must be preserved because they have an inherent importance, Smith forcefully demonstrates that heritage value is not inherent in physical objects or places, but rather that these objects and places are used to give tangibility to the values that underpin different communities and to assert and affirm these values.A practically grounded accessible examination of heritage as a cultural practice, The Uses of Heritage is global in its benefit to students and field professionals alike.
Read more

Clovis Lithic Technology: Investigation of a Stratified Workshop at the Gault Site, Texas (Peopling of the Americas Public...

Image
  Clovis Lithic Technology: Investigation of a Stratified Workshop at the Gault Site, Texas (Peopling of the Americas Public... Clovis Lithic Technology: Investigation of a Stratified Workshop at the Gault Site, Texas (Peopling of the Americas Public... OTHER ARTICLES Some 13,000 years ago, humans were drawn repeatedly to a small valley in what is now Central Texas, near the banks of Buttermilk Creek. These early hunter-gatherers camped, collected stone, and shaped it into a variety of tools they needed to hunt game, process food, and subsist in the Texas wilderness. Their toolkit included bifaces, blades, and deadly spear points. Where they worked, they left thousands of pieces of debris, which have allowed archaeologists to reconstruct their methods of tool production. Along with the faunal material that was also discarded in their prehistoric campsite, these stone, or lithic, artifacts afford a glimpse of human life at the end of the last ice age during an era referred to as Clo...
Read more