Author: Howard Morphy Publisher: ISBN: Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 188
Book Description
Interpretive account of childs funeral at Gurkawuy outstation, Trial Bay; Yolngu social organisation (particularly clan formation and marriage); contact history; outline of religious beliefs including relationship to ancestors, land, law role of songs, dances and painting; attitudes to death and mourning; concept of souls; mortuary practices (including change); names of participants; detailed account of the ceremony; meaning of ritual episodes; sociological analysis of relationships between participants; choice and decision in ceremony construction; Afterword by Ian Dunlop separately annotated.
Author: Benedict Allen Publisher: ISBN: 9780571206223 Category : Ethnology Languages : en Pages : 223
Book Description
Benedict Allen travelled through Papua New Guinea in search of a tribe that would let him participate in an initiation ceremony into manhood. He was finally admitted to the ceremonies of the Sepik tribe, whose totemic god is the crocodile. With fifteen other young males, Allen was secluded from the village in a large nest-like enclosure. Crocodile marks were carved onto their bodies with sharpened bamboo. Grey mud was applied to stop the blood-flow from their wounds, and they were beaten every day for six weeks. This book is the story of Allen's initiation experiences - a tale of love, community through shared pain and of sudden death.
Author: Bruno Schulz Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 9780140186253 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 164
Book Description
The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable - and most chilling - is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one. Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew killed by the Nazis in 1942, is considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between the two world wars.
Author: Tony Robinson-Smith Publisher: University of Alberta ISBN: 1772127515 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
Of Canoes and Crocodiles is a story of adventure in the remote and threatened landscapes of Papua New Guinea. In 2018, Tony Robinson-Smith and his wife Nadya Ladouceur bought dugout canoes and paddled down the Sepik, the country’s longest river. Traveling with local guides and staying in their villages, Tony and Nadya ate smoked piranha and sago pancakes, heard tales of river gods and sorcerers, marvelled at rainbow bee-eaters and cat-size flying foxes, sank in a tropical storm, got lost in mosquito-infested swamplands, and hid from pirates in mangroves near the sea. As the narrative follows the bends of the river, Robinson-Smith incorporates into its flow descriptions of crocodile initiation rites, village “big men,” the barter system, raskolism, and sing-sings. He reflects on clan loyalty, colonization, Christian missionaries, bride price, the environmental impacts of foreign logging and mining, and the joys and fears of following the current down a long, snaky waterway in a volatile Australasian country.
Author: William Bartram Publisher: Good Press ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 405
Book Description
Presenting the exciting accounts of American botanist, ornithologist, and explorer William Bartram's pioneering survey of the American south. Around the time the American colonies were forcibly dismissing the political bands that connected them to England, Bartram was exploring the wilds of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida searching for undiscovered plants and birds. As a result, he combined scientific discoveries with incredibly vivid descriptions of nature and delivered a work that would delight both scientists and poets. These chronicles of his four-year journey to the southern British colonies in America are influential as a scientific work, a historical reference regarding American Indians and the American South, and a contribution to American literature.
Author: Kathryn Coe Publisher: Rutgers University Press ISBN: 9780813531328 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 236
Book Description
In our society it has long been believed that art serves very little social purpose. Evolutionary anthropologists, however, are examining a potential role for art in human evolution. Kathryn Coe looks to the visual arts of traditional societies for clues. Because they are passed down from previous generations, traditional art forms such as body decoration, funeral ornaments, and ancestral paintings offer ways to promote social relationships among kin and codescendants of a common ancestor. Mothers used art forms to anchor themselves and their kin to the father and his kin, and to promote the survival and reproductive success of kin and descendants. Individuals who abided by this strategy, accompanied by its strict codes of cooperation, left more distant descendants than did individuals who did not. Over time, given this reproductive success, large numbers of individuals would be identified as codescendants of a common ancestor and would cooperate as if they were close kin. These cooperative codescendants were more likely to survive and leave descendants. With each new generation these clans propagated not only their genes but also their behavioral strategy, the replication or presence of "art." The book concludes by examining the changing characteristics of visual art -- including a higher value on creativity, competition, and cost -- when traditional constraints on social behavior disappear. Book jacket.
Author: Ted Levin Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 9780820326726 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 316
Book Description
In "Liquid Land," Levin guides readers past the dire headlines about the Everglades' demise and into the magnificent swamp itself, where they come face-to-face with the remaining plants, animals, and landscapes that will survive only if the public protects them.
Author: Howard Morphy
Author: Benedict Allen
Author: Bruno Schulz
Author: Tony Robinson-Smith
Author: Benedict Allen
Author: 
Author: William Bartram
Author: Kathryn Coe
Author: William Bartram
Author: Ted Levin