Book Description

"Culture" and "meaning" are central to anthropology, but anthropologists do not agree on what they are. Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn propose a new theory of cultural meaning, one that gives priority to the way people's experiences are internalized. Drawing on "connectionist" or "neural network" models as well as other psychological theories, they argue that cultural meanings are not fixed or limited to static groups, but neither are they constantly revised or contested. Their approach is illustrated by original research on understandings of marriage and ideas of success in the United States. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Good book for psychologists, sociologists, anthropoligists.
If youre a casual reader of cultural science, this book might come across as very dense and slow-reading. But if you are already familiar with basic cultural and evolutionary psychology theory, you could find this an interesting read. The book begins by outlining connectivist (spreading activation) models of neurology, and tries to apply them to cultural schemas. The chapters are divided between "case-study" chapters that use a particular event or set of interviews to examine one particular schema style in detail, and more theory minded chapters. The case-study chapters were more interesting and illuminating in my opinion. This book would do well if paired with the "Selfways" research paper by Kitayama and Markus, or paired with a book like 'The Moral Animal' which offers a totally different biological basis for cultural drives in psychology. ... Read more

Book Description

Ernest Gellner (1925-1995) has been described as "one of the last great central European polymath intellectuals." In this, his last book, he throws new light on two key figures of the twentieth century: the philosopher Wittgenstein, and Malinowski, founder of modern British social anthropology. Gellner shows how the thought of both men grew from a common background of assumptions about human nature, society, and language. He ties together themes that preoccupied him, epitomizing his belief that philosophy--far from "leaving everything as it is"--is about important historical, social and personal issues. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Selective explanations
This is a tremendously intelligent and well-written book. The depth and breadth of Gellner's knowledge are truly impressive. That said, I think the book is wrong-headed in at least two major ways.

Most importantly Gellner assumes that the historical-cultural situation of a society is perfectly reflected in the intellectual and psychological make-up of its citizens. He maintains this belief in spite of evidence to the contrary (e.g., that Wittgenstein never talked about culture or politics, that he was amazingly poorly read in the relevant texts, or that the Tractatus is a seamless extension of the Cartesian empirical tradition). Gellner seems to believe in an osmosis theory of learning, given the lack of evidence that people actually knew or believed things, and so he constantly falls back on ideas "being in the air" or things that "surely everyone knew."

This is some sort of Historical Distance Fallacy. Surely no one (no academic) would think it possible to reduce the social, cultural, political issues of present day America to a definitive description only a few pages long and then assume that this description was also a description of the mind of some randomly-chosen individual. (And if this is not applicable to randomly-chosen individuals, then Gellner needs to make some additional arguments as to why it applies to any specific person.)

The second weakness is that I believe Gellner completely misinterprets Wittgenstein's later work (i.e., the position he takes in Philosophical Investigations). Gellner claims that Wittgenstein replaced the logical atomism of the Tractatus with a cultural determinist/relativist position based in a romantic view of the peasantry. He believes in spite of his admission that Wittgenstein never talked about such things.

It seems to me that the view in the Tractatus was, as Gellner describes, one in which words limited what the world was. In the empiricist tradition, basically you can't get beyond the words to the world "itself." My view of the transition is that Wittgenstein shifted from this view (that words both created and limited reality) to the idea that language was something that people used as they interacted with the world. This is a shift from "given that we know we have language, what can we say about the world?" to "given that we live in the world, what can we say about language?" This is why Wittgenstein seems so obsessed with tools and workmen and it ties in to the story told about the conversation he overheard on the train in which a "meaningless" remark was understood and used in conversation.

Gellner seems to think that the Philosophical Investigations doesn't allow for error or critique, but I think that all it excludes is philosophical critique of the sort that philosophers love to engage in which allows them to claim that engineers or botanists or carpenters "don't know anything." ... Read more

Book Description

For renowned anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis, the term “ethnosphere” encompasses the wealth of human diversity and all that traditional cultures have to teach about different ways of living and thinking.

In Light at the Edge of the World, Davis—best known for The Serpent and the Rainbow—presents an intimate survey of the ethnosphere in 80 striking photographs taken over the course of his wide exploration. In eloquent accompanying text, Davis takes readers deep into worlds few Westerners will ever experience, worlds that are fading away even as he writes. From the Canadian Arctic and the rain forests of Borneo to the Amazon and the towering mountains of Tibet, readers are awakened to the rituals, beliefs, and lives of the Waorani, the Penan, the Inuit, and many other unique and endangered traditional cultures. The result is a haunting and enlightening realization of the limitless potential of the human imagination of life.

While globalization has become the battle cry of the 21st century, Davis’s magisterial work points out that the erosion of the ethnosphere will diminish us all. “The human imagination is vast, fluid, infinite in its capacity for social and spiritual invention,” he writes, and reminds us that “there are other means of interpreting our existence, other ways of being.”

Reviews (4)

World without languages
Anthropologist Margaret Mead defined a nightmare as waking up one day and not knowing what we've lost. Anthropologist Wade Davis applies this to the world's languages. Though spoken by about 300 million people, or 5 percent of everybody in the world, these languages are being lost, without having been studied or written down by experts.

From 25 years worth of photographing and traveling worldwide, Davis sees each language as showing how changing and endless are our imaginations. For example, the Micmac name trees by the sound the winds make in the branches, the hour after sunset, in the fall. Native peoples of the Amazon believe that each plant sings in a different key. They've found a way of grouping, by figuring out the keys from talking with the very plants! This works as well, for them, as what botanists have come up with.

Healers, taken from all non-industrialized parts of the world, get food and healing from 40,000 species of plants. This know-how is so great that healing has always meant power. But it wasn't always used kindly.

Healers in West African countries, around the Equator, made sure their patients kept whatever laws were supposed to be followed. They used all their know-how to make rule-breakers take deathly amounts of plants. And to think that I had thought this hardly ever happened, other than the famous cases of the deathly drinks that were forced on Socrates and Tchaikovsky.

But this killing style is still around today, not too far away from the industrialized world, in Haiti. There, sorcerors give outcasts tetrodotoxin. It's a nerve poison in the skin and organs of the tetraodontiformes order of sea fishes. A pin-head size of the poison kills. Sorcerors give enough to make the outcast look dead. When the effects wear off, the outcast appears to come back from the dead. These death and near-death experiences aren't seen the same way as in the United States. Instead, they turn the outcasts into freaks as zombies, the living dead.

LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD carefully follows the author's footsteps in ONE RIVER, RAINFOREST and SHADOWS IN THE SUN. The photography is beautiful, the organization is clear, and the writing is fascinating. Some of what's covered from the many non-industrialized cultures is chilling. So Davis doesn't get into just glorifying non-industrialized people or criticizing industrialized peoples.

From anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, he believes in finding balance in our world of opposites. The first pages told me that this approach would lead to a worthwhile read. For Davis tackles the controversial space program. It cost nearly a trillion dollars, just to bring back, in the words of a southeast Asian nomad, a basket of dust.

But a small part of that paydirt went into the stunning blood-red crystal in the stained-glass window at the National Cathedral in D.C. There, it reminds us all that it took going to the moon and back to make us change the way we look at things, for all time. Languages do that every day.

Reflections in the distant landscape
In his latest book "Light at the Edge of the World - A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures" Wade Davis is quite frank about the motivations behind his around-the-globe adventuring. He says he is driven to the ends of the earth by "simple" curiosity and a horror of boredom. A Harvard-trained botanist and anthropologist, Davis has spent 25 years finding his way into places that most of us don't even know exist . . . and would most likely hesitate about going to even if we did.

From the high Arctic, to the Amazon, to Africa, Tibet, Haiti, Peru and Sarawak, Davis turns his camera and his intelligence. In his travels, the sciences of ethnobotany and anthropology have served him well. As an explorer he takes in the whole glorious panoply of data about people and plants, medicine, language, landscapes, history, custom, and creation myths. He records it painstakingly. Then, he deftly makes sense of it. The motifs of an astonishing array of human cultures dazzle with colour and clarity. Intricate patterns of thought, belief, myth and tradition emerge. Davis calls this body of knowing the "ethnosphere."

The ethnosphere is about those peoples of the earth whose essential humanity has been defined by the landscapes in which they are nurtured. For these people of the ice, the forests, the river deltas, the jungle, the desert sands, and the high mountain plateaus, daily life is both a precise and a fully variant exercise of knowledge and understanding - a long-accumulated wisdom that this world stands much in need of.

"When asked the meaning of being human they respond with ten thousand different voices. It is within this diversity of knowledge and practice, of intuition and interpretation, of promise and hope, that we will all rediscover the enchantment of being what we are. . ." writes Davis.

Of course, it isn't just science that happened to Davis on his way to the edges the world. Like all true pilgrims Davis has continually encountered within himself that intense inner dimension of spirit that is the nature of a human journey. In the enigmatic photographs of this book and the accompanying text, a reader can trace the writer being touched by his subjects, being himself altered by those gestures of imagination, mystery and dream imminent in the people and places he so passionately studies. It is this sense of excitement and spontaneity of learning, eloquently shared, that makes the book such a good read.

In the end, Davis' curiosity is more vast than simple, as is his capacity to absorb knowledge. As for his horror of boredom, perhaps his fears are more profound. As he tells the story, one of Margaret Mead's greatest nightmares was that one day we would wake up, look around and find ourselves all to be the same, and, what's worse, in doing so we wouldn't even remember what we lost.

This book is much more than an exciting travelogue, or a romance of far away places and exotic peoples. Davis' underlying theme is urgent and challenges the complacency of daily life in an industrial and technological society. In Davis' view, the survival of the world's indigenous cultures is crucial to our communal creativity and resourcefulness, if, as he says, those "imperatives driving the highest aspirations of our species were to be the power of faith, the reach of spiritual intuition, the philosophical generosity to recognize the varieties of religious longings." Indeed, if we are to know ourselves to be who we are.

Timeless and Timeful Visions
Traveling the globe requires more than a ticket, a room and a backpack. A traveler unlike a tourist is immersed. Traveling through time and landscapes through the writings of Wade Davis is a timeless and immersive vision. Reading " Light at the Edge of the World " is a spell bounding pilgrimage under Wade Davis' guidance.

Never has the eye of the beholder held more meaning. As I gaze into the depth of his photos and ride with the resonance of his images, I am transported around the globe, immersed into the past and the future of our world. " Light at the Edge of the World " is Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and Rudyard Kipling all wrapped into one epic poem.

Even Herodotus would be provoked to wonder with envy at the worlds Wade Davis illuminates. T.E. Lawrence would ride into the desert night with adventurous hunger over this new book " Light at the Edge of the World " is a living treasure of our deepest and most cherished understandings of humanity, the stewardship of the planet, and a visionary quest for poetic diversity.

Timeless Visions
Traveling the globe requires more than a ticket, a room and a backpack. A traveler unlike a tourist is immersed. Traveling through time and landscapes through the writings of Wade Davis is a timeless and immersive vision. Reading " Light at the End of the World " is a spell bounding pilgrimage under Wade Davis' guidance.

Never has the eye of the beholder held more meaning. As I gaze into the depth of his photos and ride with the resonance of his images, I am transported around the globe, immersed into the past and the future of our world" Light at the End of the World " is Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and Rudyard Kipling all wrapped into one epic poem.

Even Herodotus would be provoked to wonder with envy at the worlds Wade Davis illuminates. T.E. Lawrence would ride into the desert night with adventurous hunger over this new book" Light at the End of the World " is a living treasure of our deepest and most cherished understandings of humanity, the stewardship of the planet, and a visionary quest for poetic diversity. ... Read more

Book Description

Rarely do science and literature come together in the same book.  When they do -- as in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, for example -- they become classics, quoted and studied by scholars and the general public alike.

Margaret Mead accomplished this remarkable feat not once but several times, beginning with Coming of Age in Samoa.   It details her historic journey to American Samoa, taken where she was just twenty-three, where she did her first fieldwork.  Here, for the first time, she presented to the public the idea that the individual experience of developmental stages could be shaped by cultural demands and expectations.  Adolescence, she wrote, might be more or less stormy, and sexual development more or less problematic in different cultures.  The "civilized" world, she taught us had much to learn from the "primitive."  Now this groundbreaking, beautifully written work as been reissued for the centennial of her birth, featuring introductions by Mary Pipher and by Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson.

Reviews (8)

Clearly I'm Clueless
I can't see what is so bad about this book. I was disappointed that she left out several things that I thought was important, but ethnographers can't thing of everything (...) What I saw was a picture of a society on the very brink (but not yet) of being toppled by the intrusion of missionaries (as so many have been and continue to be). An interesting society. I also so many similarities to Malinowski's Trobriand work which I find intriguing.

Yes, I am clueless. I enjoyed this book and used it, among other works, for research. I can't imagine why it would offend anyone. Her limitations made it impossible for this to be seen as an authoritative work, of course, but nobody is an authority, especially in the anthropological community, since culture is always in a constant state of evolution. So why the attacks? Would she be so attacked if she weren't a woman? If she weren't dead? So she blew some theories out of the water. I haven't seen anybody come up with any evidence to support those theories since.

Closer than Freeman, ironically
Freeman's nonsense aside, which seems to be taken as gospel by one or two reviewers below (apparently, Mead's Samoa is ladden with cultural intentions, but Freeman's work is not with his sociobiological intentions), this is a good book. I think Freeman is dishonest, and the fact that he couldn't attack Mead until after she was DEAD, speaks to me of a cowardly academic disgrace. For shame that he has any followers at all.

Mead is not my favorite author: her writing is discontinous, but this book is a good work. Seeing as how many people haven't even realized just how conservative this book is, they believe that the author has had a clear social agenda. The agenda is there folks, but it is not the one you think.

Mead's Samoa is probably more correct than Freeman's for a variety of reasons, but to go into various details would require several books.

For those with access to JSTOR, I would strongly urge to look at some critical reviews of Mead and Freeman. For those that have access to HRAF, I would suggest looking at short ethnographies of the area. Now, which sounds more accurate? Neither will be completely, but Freeman's work is the REAL emperor without cloths, and its followers should take a closer look at the world ethnographies before they advance either Freeman, or downright simplistic (and insulting) sociobiological nonsense that was already buried some 20 years ago.

Gilligan's Island on Friday night.
Coming of Age in Samoa is a pleasantly-written South Sea fantasy, heavy with the author's social agenda upon it. If you buy the agenda, apparently you can hardly help like the book. (See reviews below.) Even if I bought the agenda (and it is hard for me to look at American society and say the sexuality Mead encouraged has made people entirely free of guilt or conflict), I would still choke on her dishonesty. But as they say in the anthro business, different strokes for different folks.

Some of the defenses of this book below are hilarious. "Sure, it's largely untrue. But it reads well!" (And here I thought it was supposed to be science.) "It stimulated my thinking about culture! Mead really did interview thirty live Samoans! (In some language or other.) "Besides, what scholarship from that era would not sound like fiction today?" (Uh, honest scholarship? Do you want a book list?)

The interesting thing about this book, to me, is the way it illustrates human self-deception, in particular the hubris of those who claim to speak for "Science." Being interested in such curiosities, for me personally the book was worth buying. Mead's sexual fantasies are not the only instance in the 20th Century in which anthropologists sought to throw out "religious dogma" in favor of "scientific" new theories of their own cultivation. As pleasant as an idyllic trip to the islands may be, those for whom such theories hold charm should remember that honest scholarship and imagination are two different things, that vacations in Fantasy Island usually cost something, and that the one who takes the vacation is not always the person who pays the bill.

Jealous, jealous, jealous!
This is a classic example both of an anthropologist attempting to sift through hundreds of cultural indicators, and of her peers becoming incredibly uncomfortable both with her results, her success in the field, and the implications therein.
(Mead had more than thirty interviewees on the subject of sex, and for a more complete understanding of why her detractors say otherwise, see her published series of letters with a respected mentor.)
Was she impeccably unbiased? No. Could she tell a recreational liar from an honest confidante? Yes. In fact, Mead treats all of her research subjects with some skepticism and makes her own attempt to reconcile the extreme traditional prohibitions on extramarital sex, with the fact that it was indeed occurring, and frequently at that.
As was typical of the times, however, she did not appear to see the Samoans in the proper light of a fully developed culture, but rather in the manner of a Tarzan novel.
Is this offensive? Yes. Does it reveal a good deal of insular cultural ignorance? Yes. Does that mean that all parties interested in the history of anthropology, should avoid the book? No.

I am shocked to say, I really enjoyed this book.
I had to read this book for an essay I was writing, but I did not think I would enjoy it. I figured it would be the kind of book you half heartidly read because you have no choice. Boy was I wrong. I loved the book. I enjoyed reading about Meads adventures, and sure...they say that she was tricked and lied to, but I still believe she was ahead of her time and discovered a lot about the culture.
Great Read for anyone who likes to learn about society and cultures ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Excellent introduction to a fascinating field
Balick and Cox's book provides an excellent introductory text for the field of ethnobotany. It covers a wide range of material, including medical ethnobotany, the origins of foods and indigenous stewardship of crop biodiversity, materials science, plant toxins and hallucinogens, and ethnobotanical approaches to conservation. Contrary to the last reader's opinion, the authors make clear their deep concern for indigenous rights. Cox, for example, personally took out a loan for the building of a school in Samoa, as described in Nafanua, another excellent book. Other issues discussed also reveal the authors' attempt to further indigenous well-being. In work with the Akimel O'Odham in southern Arizona, Gary Paul Nabhan was able to demonstrate the nutritional value of their traditional diet, which had been largely forsaken for all-American junk food, thus leading to severe obesity and heart problems in a people biologically adapted to a harsh desert diet. Thus in many cases, the results of ethnobotanical research can have practical, beneficial effects upon the lives of indigenous peoples.

Good Information--Bad Judgements
Although this book is full of great photos, interesting information about the plants and the worlds where they come from, the authors are clearly more interested in exploiting the knowledge of the natives than attempting to appreciate the unique tribes, their customs AND the plants they use. This book should be called "The Plants We Can Take from Less Advanced People Than Ourselves". ... Read more

Book Description

Norbert Peabody analyzes changes to the foundations of royal power in the Rajasthani kingdom of Kota during the late precolonial and early colonial eras. Peabody charts these changes in relation to broader socio-economic transformations within the larger royal polity. He concludes that different societies not only establish different co-ordinates of value in their constructions of the past, but also that the very processes of social and political transformation differ from society to society. ... Read more

Book Description

Reviews (6)

Give me a break...
Quite simply, I don't buy into 90% of the authors claims, and the authors seemed to be completely blinded by their own preconcieved ideas that they can't be at all objective in their interpretation of the subject matter.

Ultimately, this books is nothing more than rhetoric about "white male dominated racist Western culture".

The authors clearly had this notion in mind when they wrote this book, and it taints virtually the entire book to the point where their conclusions aren't even remotely believable as being the result of objective research.

Ethnocentrism gleamed from the pages of National Geographic
I found this book to be thorough in its research of the geographic as an American institution. It presupposes that the reader is well aquainted with Gramsci's notion of mass media and the Frankfurt school borne out of this belief of hegemony perpectuated by a controlling elite. The author also takes liberty that the reader is aquainted with research methods using coding to differentiate subjects responses to pictures portrayed. Lastly, the author's use of interviewing technics and the subsequent interpretation of those responses enables the reader the opportunity to realize how the geographic and social background of the readers influence the perceptions people have when encountering this quasi-scientific journal. As an anthropological study this book illuminates the ethnocentric idealations of the Geographic's demographic readership, that is upper middle and middle class white euroamericans.

Good, basic points. Flawed book.
The book is about the "making and consuming of images of the non-western world." And images, after all, "have taken over from written texts the role of primary educator." The two look at a set of 600 photographs published in the magazine from 1950 to 1986 (roughly their NG -reading lifetimes). They argue the photos are selectively chosen to present a view that does not disturb middle-class American self-identities and connected views of the 3rd world. The photos usually show a gentle, peaceful, content, colorful exotic people who, though they might not be wealthy yet, are on the road to modern progress on the Western model. The non-Western world is appropriated, its description has helped maintain social hierarchies in the First World. Even worse, the NG's practice goes so far as to abet war-making on the people it purposefully misunderstands.

There three methodological steps are to look at the process of producing the images (a social endeavor over which no individuals have total say throughout the process), examine the structure and content of the images, and identify how readers view the photographs.

"We chart the tendency of the magazine to idealize and render exotic third-world peoples, with an accompanying tendency to downplay or erase evidence of poverty and violence. The photographs show these people as either cut off from the flow of world events or involved in a singular story of progress from tradition to modernity [ahem, two very different things unless you're not thinking hard about "modernity"], a story that changes with decolonization."

Their goal is make NG and other mass media "understand and historicize the differences that separate interconnected human beings," to heighten empathy without fostering stereotyping or paternalism.

Criticism: I can't deny that the writers made such a negative impression on me with their dogma and attacking hyperbole (and dripping class resentment) that their useful ideas are weakened in my view. I wouldn't assign this to students I hope will write well.

Do I need a Sociology degree to read National Geographic?
The title of this book grabbed me: READING NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. I now wish I had not grabbed up the book. Doing what the title suggests is a fairly benign activity; the only danger you face in reading the magazine is falling asleep in an inappropriate place. Let's admit it, National Geographic articles are written in a very prosaic style. This however is not news. We have been reading the magazine long enough to know the truth behind what one of it's past editors is quoted as saying: "only what is is of a kindly nature is printed about any country or people, everything unpleasant or unduly critical being avoided". Most of us have been around long enough to know that such cultural relativism, homogenization, and plain-vanilla humanism makes for some very boring reading.

That however is probably the only thing that you really need to know about NG. I certainly didn't need to know - and now knowing, don't believe, - as the authors believe that in depicting the naked breasts of native women: "the magazine and its readers are caught between the desire to play out the cultural fantasy of the oversexed native woman and the social controls of sexual morality..." This fixation which makes up an entire chapter "Women and Their Breasts" only highlights the real difficulty with the book's analysis. It is shallow and leans heavily towards a feministic cultural critique; it's also narrow in that it mostly looks at how NG depicts cultures. What about the other subjects the magazine looks at?

Boring writing aside my continued enjoyment of National Geographic comes from its explorations of wild places and its emphasis on nature. I much prefer this to what READING NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC would have me do - ponder whether the magazine is a pernicious contributor to the spread of Western supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, and the homogenizing influences of a white middle class world view.

anthropology schmanthropology
In this book, Lutz and Collins deconstruct the system of misrepresentation in which National Geographic functions as purveyor of cultural/historical fact. The authors problematize NG's systematic misrepresentation of the non-West and examine how those misrepresenations resonate with its 'American' audience through reinforcing the self-other binary. NG encodes a white, middle-class, male (straight) worldview, and as such, tells us more about the standardized/naturalized/anesthetized 'American' culture than about those it 'studies.' Through analyzing photographs and their captions and interviewing NG staff, the authors reveal the racism and paternalism that are at the heart of the National Geographic gaze. ... Read more

Book Description

This book covers the history of the Nile Valley from Nubia to the Mediterranean, during the period from the earliest hominid settlement, around 700,000 BC to the beginnings of dynastic Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium BC.

The book focuses primarily on the fifteen millennia from 18,000 to 3,000 BC, when different cultures can be identified, and the earliest forms of agriculture traced with some detail. Textile and ceramic production began at the end of the seventh millennia and were deployed with great skill and considerable sophistication by the beginning of the Old Dynastic Period at around 4,500 BC. By the time of the First Dynastic Period much that is considered characteristic of Ancient Egypt, such as cosmology, burial rites and decorated pottery, was already established tradition.

This account of prehistoric Egypt will be welcomed as an outstanding narrative, combining both scholarship and accessibility. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

If you're looking for thorough...
...this is what you need. Covering Egypt from the landmass's geological foundation right up to the end of the predynastic era. It's been freshly updated by Ian Shaw to include all of the latest arguments, especially with respect to the Paleolithic and Predynastic periods. Most Egyptologists, amateur and otherwise, will only be interested in the last two or three chapters and, in fairness, each chapter uses the lingo of the relevant field, obfuscating it to the average reader. Nonetheless, I can't think of another book which rivals this one for what it offers. ... Read more

Book Description

In his most widely appealing book yet, one of today's leading authors of popular anthropology looks at the intriguing history and peculiar nature of money, tracing our relationship with it from the time when primitive men exchanged cowrie shells to the imminent arrival of the all-purpose electronic cash card. 320 pp. Author tour. National radio publicity. 25,000 print. ... Read more

Reviews (14)

A Bit of a Flawed "History" But a Good Read
Jack Weatherford's "The History of Money" takes an interesting take on the development of money and man's evolving relationship its various forms. The book is a very good read for the lay person but it might prove a bit trying for those who are well versed in recent economic history.

Much of the information Weatherford presents is often misrepresented. One example of his misrepresentations is the US dollar has been in constant decline versus the price of gold starting from $35 an ounce in 1971 to $400 an ounce in 1995 and that gold has maintained its purchasing power. Not so. The price of gold peaked in January, 1980 at over $850 and has been in a deflationary trend along with other commodities for about fifteen years. Its early 2002 price is now about $280-290 an ounce. In the late 1930's, an American could buy a very nice mid-size car for about twenty ounces of gold or about $700.00. Even in 1995 using the $400 price, you could barely buy the cheapest new car on the market for the same weight in gold. Weatherford bemoans Nixon's actions to cut the dollar's final link with the dollar as inflationary despite the fact that it was inflation of the late 1960's and the gold drain from the treasury to other foriegn governments that would force the break in the first place. Other problems involve the supposive large declines in prices in the 19th century, with the starting points always during periods of war and high prices and the belief that the state (wildcat) banking period was really more stable than history says, which leads one to wonder what happened during the banking panics of 1819, 1837, and 1857?

Some information Weatherford presents is just wrong. For example, he states that in 1934, Roosevelt and the Congress a passed a law nationalizing silver in the manner similar to gold and as a result slowly debased or replaced the silver coinage with base coins which the result that by 1963 when the law was repealed 3.2 billion ounces was stockpiled by the government. Not quite. A proclamation by Roosevelt on August 9, 1934 (not the Silver Purchase Act of June 18, 1934 which required the government to purchase large amounts of silver from both foreign and domestic sources in order to support its price, that was the law repealed in 1963) did nationalize silver bullion but with the understanding that it would be used for coining. The intent was not to remove silver from circulation and create a reserve like gold was. In fact, the mintage of silver coinage except for silver dollars was greatly increased and the only reason that silver dollars were not minted in greater numbers was because people did not like using them and the treasury already had $500 million of them sitting unused in its vaults backing silver certificates. Unlike gold certificates which were no longer convertible to gold coin, silver certificates would remain fully convertible to silver dollars (the vast majority were minted before 1928, none after 1935) until 1963, then silver bullion until 1968. There was no gradual debasement of U.S. silver coins between 1934 and 1963. Until the Coinage Act of July 23, 1965 removed silver from dimes and quarters and reduced it in half-dollars (the rest was eliminated in 1971), the silver content in these coins remained constant from 1873 to 1964. By the way, the last vestiges of the nationalization of silver ended August 21, 1967 when silver began unrestricted trading as a normal commodity.

Other mistakes range from minor (the Bretton Woods Agreements were signed in July 22, 1944 not 1946 and the conference was held at the Mount Washington Hotel at the base of Mount Washington not Mount Deception as he wished the agreement to be named), to major (the banking and saving and loan disasters of the 1980's and early '90s were not caused by the great increase in housing prices in the postwar era but a combination of overlending to the oil and gas and the commerical real estate sectors during their respective booms then busts plus some good old-fashion banking fraud).

If Weatherford's history is shaky at times, his insight on the social aspects of money makes up for it. His observations on primitive money and its overall development through history are quite excellent as are more contemporary observations on the rich/middle class and the poor use money and the penalities the poor must endure in order perform necessary transactions. He also makes some observations about where money and society may be headed that one may or may not agree on but does make one stop and think a bit.

If you are looking for a good book on money as history, there are better volumes out there but if you interested in money as anthropology, this book will give you an good insight into that realm.

Economic history for the layman
I cannot comment on the veracity of what this book contains, being a layman in history and economics.

Other reviewers have contested particular points of scholarship (and I am similarly in no position to judge their accuracy). I can recommend this book because it provides a comprehensible survey of the development of money.

This is no small accomplishment, since it is all to easy for a history of money to get bogged down in details and to miss the big picture. Money is at once a fantastically abstract concept (try explaining it to somebody who has never used any) and so common place that it is like water to a fish, it is the very world we live within.

After reading this book, I felt for the first time that the curtains had been pulled aside, and I had a concept of what money "is". I have read few other books on economics that succeded in making understandable highly abstract concepts. That accounts for my 4 stars.

cursory history, but interesting
i've loved reading history books for the past several years. human history is so much more interesting than fiction, and well written history is (obviously) far more compelling. this book falls into that genre quite nicely.

however, it's a short book, and it's impossible to capture all of the facets of humanity's use of money in a small volume. take it at it's worth, however, and you'll see some themes that run through the book, and interesting ones nonetheless.

i'm not a historian, and so i can't discuss the accuracy of the history. if others question it, i suspect they may be right. hence, i wouldn't use this as a reference text. but the general story is interesting, even if it's just close to the truth.

by the end, weatherford spends a decent amount of time discussing how history has come to the present, with money becoming virtual for some, and hard currency for others, creating at least two classes of wealth conrol in the world. this made a profound impact on me, and one that's forced me to examine how to utilize capital with greater skill. this was quite unexpected from a history book, and welcome.

a disappointment, entertaining but questionable
This book has many little interesting tid-bits of information and they are fun to read, but by the end of reading this book I wish I had read a more serious book.

One of my biggest issues with the book is there are too many statements, speculations and presentations of material in the book that are in contradiction to what most economists or historians in the field would present. This left me with a feeling after reading the book that I didn't know whether half of what I read what complete BS or worth believing. For instance the authors presentation of currency switching off the gold standard and speculating about the future of electronic money. By the last third of the book I found myself saying "give me a break, this is pure wild speculation" or "this is BS" or "I won't be believing this, I wish I was reading an author I could take seriously".

If you are curious what Jack Weatherford thinks about these topics, this book is fine. Or if you just want to be entertained and don't care if what you read is what experts believe, this book is fine. But if you want a serious presentation of what most economists and historians believe in the field I would not recommend this book.

An Interesting Take on a Fascinating Topic
This is a pleasant essay - to call it a "history" is to give it more weight than it has - organized around the development of a truly transforming idea: money. And as innovations in money advanced those societies in which they arose, so this book must be a discussion of how money changed, and was changed by, the most "advanced" cultures of their time. Initially just the merchants needed something trans-national, and bars of raw gold and silver fit the bill. But it was the invention of coins, money that could be used by anyone, that started us down the path to the modern world, where all things - from pain and suffering to bushels of wheat - are commensurable in the one metric: money.

Jack Weatherford is an anthropologist, not an economist, so it is not surprising that he lingers over certain details that don't have a lot to do with his ostensible subject. Thus we are treated to the grisly spectacle of an Aztec human sacrifice, and how the Peruvian Indians who mine the silver that enriches others reconcile themselves to their poor and hazardous lives. Yet he does not stray far, and his depiction of the squeezing of the citizens of Rome for more and more taxes by successive emperors (plus their dilution of the currency) that led to the destruction of the free small-holding and business-owning classes, and with them the Empire, is chilling and instructive. The barbarians were kinder: they didn't use money.

The inventions of banking and of merchants' instruments (such as bills of exchange) are discussed, as well as the first national banks, in explaining the advent of paper money, the next great innovation. The pax Britannica is discussed, too, in a way: the British empire was not really as important, probably, as the British pound, backed by gold, and serving as a fixed monetary point, for a long period of world prosperity. For whatever logic inheres, or does not, to the "backing" of a currency by a precious metal, it did have the faith of many for a long time, and held currencies in rock-solid interrelationships for years.

Are things better now that all our currencies are floating, changing values relatively and absolutely every moment? Gold is a superstition, after all, so away with it! This book is at its best discussing the national hyperinflations that followed the Great War, the falling away from the gold standard, and the advent of the newer types of money and near-money. Electronic cash of various sorts, currency markets, and credit-card purchases that create private money are playing havoc with the traditional calculations of national money supply, and undermining the ability of governments to control their currency.

Where will it end? We'll have to surf this tidal wave of new money creation as long as we can without getting swamped: "The current electronic revolution in money promises to increase even more the role of money in our public and private lives, surpassing kinship, religion, occupation, and citizenship as the defining element of social life. We stand now at the dawn of the Age of Money." (p268) ... Read more

Book Description

This is a lively discussion of Japanese popular culture from an anthropological perpective. An international team of authors considers a broad range of topics, including sumo, karaoke, manga, women's magazines, soccer and morning television. Through these topics--many of which have never previously been addressed by scholars--the contributors also explore several deeper themes: the construction of gender in Japan; the impact of globalization and modern consumerism; and the rapidly shifting boundaries of Japanese culture and identity. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

For pleasure and easy reference
This is an exellent book for the beginner in studies of japanese culture. It deals with different matters such as: sumo, manga/anime, karaoke, horse-racing and womens magazines - all in a scientific but relaxed tone. Maybe you want what bosozoku-driving is??? In short - comprehensive and informative. A must for your bookshelf!! ... Read more

Book Description

This essay on humanity's experience of history and its interpretation begins with a study of the traditional or mythological view and concludes with a comparative estimate of modern historiological approaches. ... Read more

Reviews (12)

In the Light of Mythology
Mircea Eliade, in his internationally aclimed authority, does not need to be praised by a non specialist such as myself, but I still feel compelled to express my infinte debt to his work, of which "The Myth of the Eternal Return" was the introductory book. I am a college student of History, Philosophy, and Religion/Mythology. The area is not so promising as computers or medicine, but when one is in love, as I am with my area of interests, the desert becomes atractive, for one believes the Promised Land is on the other side. Eliade's work is so enlightening, accesible, and rich in information and poetry that my fear of entering in such a discredited area is erased as I read it. I hope the Myth of the Eternal Return will bring as much satisfaction to all who read it as it did to me, and that the Myth will also bring back, as its title promises, the old human interest in the ultimate problems of History, Philosophy, and Mythology. Read it and embrace the magic of our culture!

an interesting and thought-provoking piece of scholarship
I was inspired by the icredible insight and interesting acedemic thought in this book -- it's hard to beleive that it was written over fourty years ago. The struggle with "the terror of history" and the horror of linear time is something that many of us still struggle with today.

As a student of literature, I found this book particularly helpful in studying the moderns, such as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, who, as Eliade mentions, both express a longing to return to the cyclical. As a mythology-lover I found that this book gave me a new perspective on the study of myth -- which I feel is still important if we are to understand the primitive depths of our own minds.

Ability to Recreate verses Historical Existentialism
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I'm in awe over this book! It's a larger lens, a higher mountain to see religious and historical thought. Really, I am amazed at this book. 50 years after it is written and I've read hundreds of books and here I am dumb founded. Read some of the other amazon.com reviews here (some are excellent) and now I am adding to them.

Eliade relates two main types of persons. The archaic man and the modern. The archaic models his life on archetypes, similiar to Plato's "world of ideas," forsaking history in favor of such. He repeatedly and continually destroys all history and recreates himself in a new beginning. He does this by entering a timeless realm Eliade calls the illo tempore, a timeless and numinous death and rebirth, which he bases on cyclic events of some type.

The modern man negates all of this in favor of historicity. He measures all history and time, or the profane time, and bases his entire life on the meaning of such in present existence and all future decision making. However, without the archaic man's non-historical regenerative abilities to recreate himself in such timelessness, or in the sacred, in imitation of archetypes, the modern historical man faces extreme existential despair. But what saves the modern man from suicide and utter meaninglessness in relativism and nihilism; he joins to his historical self, either religious faith, cyclic theories, mysticism, science and philosophy.

Hegel suggests history (and all the evil in history) is never repeated and necessary for the evolution to higher ends. Only persons like Belinsky or Dostoeyski have resisted but weakly in that. Marx had made a science of history as the results of the class struggle, which ultimately fails and leaves us in our existential relativity.

So remedies are created to coincide with historical measurement, as in Nietzsche's Eternal Return,although cyclic in nature is not the Eternal Return of the Archaic man who regenerations a new beginning, but rather that of the Greek Heraclitus and Pythagorean thoughts, are the cyclic meanings needed to live a life of measured time and history apart from the archaic regenerative man of archetype models and rebirth into new beginnings. The same holds true for Oswald Spenglers biological conception of history and Heidegger's idea of historicity transcending all are what modern man must attach to his linear historical measurement.

While monotheism, the first to measure history and time encounters the timelessness of the illo tempore in the beginning of creation and in the "end" of the world or in Christianity in the second coming of the messiah. Unlike the archaic man who enters the new creation each and every time he recreates both himself and his world.

Eliade suggests that perhaps mankind will one day return to the archaic man of regeneration in repetition of rituals and meaning to cease measuring this time and enter in the timelessness, letting go of history and entering in the illo tempore.

(Archetype Non-Historical Regeneration Man)
The wind blows - but - gets continually reborn; or,
(Historical Man with Religious Faith)
Cling to your dusty mirror and hold God's hand.
(Historical Man without Religious Faith)
Or the mirror without dust would destroy the world.

And to sum it up, Archaic man had no history, repeated archetype models, destroying his past (all history) and recreating the beginning of time each year in a mystical, timeless moment in the illo tempore, all history erased. While modern man relies on history and profane time and gains either science, philosophy or religious faith to prevent him from dying in existential despair.

Now I'm reading this great book entitled, When Science Meets Religion, by Ian G. Barbour and reading of those with religious faith who conform the uncertainties of quantum physics with a God who controls such acausual events. Seeing this through Eliade's lens, I see this as an historical man's attempt to join religious faith to his history and science in order to prevent him from existential despair in the terror of history. For the archaic man none of this is needed, as he will erase all history, re-creating the beginning of time reborn in the timeless moment of illo tempore, not of some future time but of the present.

And while the modern man has history and faith, he also forms minority governments to control, organized and maintains his linear history. The majority are followers, freedom is seriously limited. The archaic man has complete freedom as each time cycle or year, to erase all history, to enter in the timeless moment of the archetype of illo tempore and re-create himself and his world.

I can't say enough for this book, this only a summary of a higher mountain to see humanity.

post-modern archetypes
Reading this book, I came to acknowledge in no modern scholar's analysis is there a possibility of divergence from "politically accepted" thought. To say a primitive (someone illiterate, living bounded into archetypes) has a theory of being is highly ridiculous, especially as the author himself acknowledges primitive man's disconfort in living outside the world of archetypes. To link an archetype (which is a form of instinct, with equivalents among other higher mammals) with philosophy, and even with the highest stance of the latter (ontology) is "mentally incorrect".

These pitiful relativistic stances should be immediately ignored by a serious person. Otherwise, the influences of Jung's theories are always apparent. As always, ideas aren't bad in themselves, but their interpretation makes them a vehicle of relativism.

According to Eliade, the archaic man lives in a world of archetypes and cyclical past, while for the "fallen" man of modern civilizations archetypes no longer exist and time is linear. This is obviously incorrect. His very idea that "we should respect other peoples cultures and not judge others as primitive" is an ALWAYS recurrent mindless ARCHETYPE of Post-Modern ages.

This book has changed my life! (really)
When I first became aquainted with the thought of Mircea Eliade it was through this book. It really changed the way I looked at the world.

The basic Eliade's idea that majority of basic beliefs of human beings about the world do not correspond to the reality but are merely inherited from the religious tradition of our ethnical group is the greatest insight that revolutionized my personal philosophy. After all, how many of our believes are unconsciously shaped by Judeo-Christian dogma? - not only the idea of history as having the beginning and the end which is analyzed in this book, but other ideas as well, such as the idea of death. We think it is bad to die. Why we think so? Because of our belief in soul and its death or possibility of suffering in hell. Tribals share with us the survival instinct which is basic for all mammals but aside from that they are not distressed by the idea of death because they believe that they return back to Mother Earth. Prove them wrong! After all we all come from the matter of this planet in material sense and return to it again, having lived our lives. To believe in the eternal return is more logical than to believe in some entity called "soul" which is separated from the body "once and for all" after death.

This is just a single thought on my part.
After reading this book, those of you who are ready to accept its ideas will undoubtly have more thoughts about the validity of our common-sense beliefs about reality.

Even if scientific materialism is true this is no great reason for pessimism - we are who we think we are! ... Read more

Book Description

This Sourcebook helps the students to develop the international perspective that is requisite in business today.This book is a collection of original case studies and exercises that teaches how to work effectively and comfortably with individuals who may not share the same belief systems, values, or communication styles.The material in this book covers many of the potential problem areas that confront international managers and domestic managers working with different ethnic groups. These include human resource issues, financial and economic situations that cause stress, and consumer behavior in new and unfamiliar environments. "Sourcebook" emphasizes some of the issues and concerns students need to be aware of when dealing with other cultures, and the importance of studying in-depth the culture, history, politics, and geography of an area. ... Read more

Book Description

Based on extensive research in West Africa, Christopher Steiner's book presents a richly detailed description of the economic networks that transfer art objects from their site of use and production in Africa to their point of consumption in art galleries and shops throughout Europe and America. In the course of this fascinating transcultural journey, African art acquires different meanings. It means one thing to the rural villagers who create and still use it in ritual and performance, another to the Muslim traders who barter and resell it, and something else to the buyers and collectors in the West who purchase it for investment and display it in their homes. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Excellent introduction to African art and global art trade
This is a wonderful book which introduces the reader to African art in the context of the international market and art trade. As an African art collector, I learned a great deal about the "tricks" of the trade and the techniques of faking and market pricing. It is also fascinating to read about the lives of those who deal in African art, and how the trade impacts their religious convictions, as well as their personal and economic aspirations. ... Read more

Book Description

An eclectic and highly original examination of one of the most dynamic concepts-and constructs-in the world.

With more than one billion overweight adults in the world today, obesity has become an epidemic. But fat is not as straightforward-or even as uni-versally damned-as one might think. Enlisting thirteen anthropologists and a fat activist, editors and anthropologists Don Kulick and Anne Meneley have produced an unconventional-and unprecedented-examination of fat in various cultural and social contexts. In this anthology, these writers argue that fat is neither a mere physical state nor an inert concept. Instead, it is a construct built by culture and judged in courts of public opinion, courts whose laws vary from society to society.

From the anthropology of "fat-talk" among teenage girls in Sweden to the veneration of Spam in Hawaii; from fear of the fat-sucking pishtaco vampire in the Andes to the underground allure of fat porn stars like Supersize Betsy-this anthology provides fresh perspectives on a subject more complex than love handles, and less easily understood than a number on a scale. Fat proves that fat can be beautiful, evil, pornographic, delicious, shameful, ugly, or magical. It all depends on who-and where-you are. ... Read more

Book Description

In this closely integrated collection of essays on colonialism in world history, Frederick Cooper raises crucial questions about concepts relevant to a wide range of issues in the social sciences and humanities, including identity, globalization, and modernity. Rather than portray the past two centuries as the inevitable movement from empire to nation-state, Cooper places nationalism within a much wider range of imperial and diasporic imaginations, of rulers and ruled alike, well into the twentieth century. He addresses both the insights and the blind spots of colonial studies in an effort to get beyond the tendency in the field to focus on a generic colonialism located sometime between 1492 and the 1960s and somewhere in the "West." Broad-ranging, cogently argued, and with a historical focus that moves from Africa to South Asia to Europe, these essays, most published here for the first time, propose a fuller engagement in the give-and-take of history, not least in the ways in which concepts usually attributed to Western universalism--including citizenship and equality--were defined and reconfigured by political mobilizations in colonial contexts. ... Read more

Book Description

Exactly what is religious about religious healing? Thomas Csordas explores the relationships between religion, healing, and embodiment through a variety of ethnographic examples. Based on over 20 years of field research and drawing examples and cases from a wide variety of cultural groups, including Navajo, Afro-Brazilians, Japanese, and American Catholic Charismatics, Csordas examines the details of the therapeutic process in practice. The book brings together cultural phenomenology with an emphasis upon embodiment and performativity to explore ritual healing in the worlds of the body, the spirit, and culture. ... Read more

Book Description

By emphasizing human osteology, forensic anthropology, anthropometry, primates, human evolution, and genetics, this lab manual, written by Diane France, provides students with hands-on lab assignments to help make the concepts of physical and anthropology more clear. It contains short-answer questions, identification problems, and observation exercises. The Lab Manual provides a wealth of solid information that is invaluable in supporting the labs that accompany physical anthropology courses. ... Read more

Reviews (4)

An anthropology student's nightmare
My professor has chosen to use this lab book for her "Introductory Biological Anthropology" course. On average, my classmates and I spend around four or five hours hunting for answers hidden within. The common theory we have is that somewhere there is a textbook that might accompany it. The diagrams are not very helpful - tiny black and white pictures that we are supposed to compare in size, shape, etc. The questions are very vague - before I started to type this review, I was using google to try to find some sort of answers for my lab before meeting with almost half of my class to go over what we've each individually found. At the end of term, I am definately having a book burning party for this manual!

ONLY GAME IN TOWN
I've used this manual for my physical anthropology classes since the 3rd edition, and there has been some improvement. It's the only game in town as far as lab manuals go, although the students also like Kappelman's VIRTUAL LABORATORIES cd-rom.

There's an instructor's manual available for printout from the publisher, but the key has some WRONG answers, which is annoying when one is swamped or has a student assistant grading who may not realize that the key is wrong. For example, the solution to the ABO blood group frequencies in exercise 1.6.3b is wrong and there are some weird stats in exercise 11.2's key, but that might be my mistake.

Some of the info is arcane, and refers to information that is not available in the prefatory chapter in the manual or in most phys anth texts. Specifically, why is it important to know about cingula?

The exercises are a bit redundant and over-long, but that's what the students have told me -- I actually like the way that France has the students build the answers to the problems in stages, going from simple to complex.The pictures in the 5th edition ARE better, but the mechanics of doing the exercises w/pictures can get crazy sometimes, what with flipping back to see this figure or that. Some exercises refer to figures several chapters back, and are a little hard to find.

I know that I will keep using this manual. It's good for undergraduate through graduate students, it represents a huge amount of work on France's part (which I appreciate!) and it's the only game in town.

*** this review refers to the latest, 5th edition.

Caution!
The review quoted here refers to a VERY old edition.The new 5th edition is out now, so please review THAT edition for possible use.Constructive criticism is always welcome.

A serviceable manual sorely in need of a major update
I use this manual to teach an introductory lab in physical anthropology.The third edition is a small improvement over the second.For beginning students, the photographs and diagrams are not clear enough to teach fromand must be supplemented from other sources.Most of the practice problemsare fairly good but the book lacks an appendix of answers or anaccompanying instructor's manual leaving the instructor to guess at theintent of the authors for some of the more obscure examples.However,considering the dearth of good lab manuals for physical anthropology thisis not the worst. ... Read more

Book Description

Artfully interweaving theatrical, musical, and ritual performance from the eighteenth century to the present in London and New Orleans, Roach explores Atlantic rim performance cultures in a rich continuum of intercultural exchange that reinvents, recreates, and restores history. Complemented with fifty-five illustrations, including spectacular photos of the famed Mardi Gras Indians, this fascinating work employs an entirely unique approach to the study of culture. Rather than focusing on one region,Cities of the Dead explores broad cultural connections over place and time, showing through myriad examples how performance can revise the unwritten past.

Reviews (1)

Social memory
Roach's use of Paul Connerton's "incorporating practice of memory" (from "How Societies Remember": buy this!) allows him to develop a theory of the genealogy of performance-which seems to me to be a sort of re-construction or re-tracing of origins.This approach allows him to do some extremely interesting analysis of legal ramifications of race, racial categories (the octaroon, for example), public performance of capitalism in the form of the slave markets, and "body ownership."It also reifies race and racial designations and works in many ways against his arguments.For instance, the multiple ethnicities of Native Americans merge together into one self-contained "Other" within the imagination of both African and Anglo Americans.How Africans appropriated these images in their performances of race seem more complex in reality than Roach makes them out to be-related to the idea of "first," land distribution, and the fact that the issue of legal ownership and status was ambivalent at best ("The slave-holding propensities of the Five Civilized Tribes (so-called by