anthropology

Hardcover. London, Oxford University Press, reprint, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. Reprint of the 1928 edition. Concerning the indigenous peoples of Papua it covers the Taro primitive religious cult and the "garden culture" and magic of the Orokaiva. Dark-blue cloth boards with gilt lettering to spine. 231 pages includes index, glossary & fwd., + frontis. and 6 b&w illus, a diagram and a fold-out map at back. Francis Edgar Williams (9 February 1893 - 12 May 1943) was an Australian anthropologist who worked for the government of the Territory of Papua from 1922 to 1942. One of the few anthropologists of his time able to spend two continuous decades in the same location without having to regularly return to a metropolitan university or institution, he performed during those twenty years heavy field work, and published many books and articles. Several pages with light pencil marks in margins. Otherwise a clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Oxford UK, The Clarendon Press, reprint, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 355 pages, 38 plates with titles (including frontispiece, mostly phtographic, folding map). Contents: Introduction; The Orokaiva People; Daily Life; Personal Enhancement; The Food Quest; Arts of Life; Individual, Family, and Clan; The Plant Emblem; Marriage; The Tribes; Warfare; Initiation Ceremonies; Ceremonies of Mourning; Dance and Drama; The Spiritual Substitute; Survival After Death; Medicine and Magic; Morality; Note on Orthography; Glossary; Index. Reprint of a book first published in 1930.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly edgeworn dust jacket. In 1968, a conference was held to explore the ultimate question- Are the problems created by man's pursuit of his conscious purposes- problems that now threaten to destroy both the web of meaning in human life and the ecological web of this planet- actually within the competence of man to solve? 324 pages plus index. No markings, covers lightly splayed.

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 410 pages, b&w, color illustrations. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the half-title page. Painting Culture tells the complex story of how, over the past three decades, the acrylic "dot" paintings of central Australia were transformed into objects of international high art, eagerly sought by upscale galleries and collectors. Since the early 1970s, Fred R. Myers has studied--often as a participant-observer--the Pintupi, one of several Aboriginal groups who paint the famous acrylic works. Describing their paintings and the complicated cultural issues they raise, Myers looks at how the paintings represent Aboriginal people and their culture and how their heritage is translated into exchangeable values. He tracks the way these paintings become high art as they move outward from indigenous communities through and among other social institutions--the world of dealers, museums, and critics.

Softcover. Chicago, HAU Books, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. 303 pages, b&w illustrations. In his 1978 Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, unpublished until now, Gilbert Lewis takes on essential problems for medical anthropology. Has there been progress in medicine? Consider what it was like to be ill in a Gnau village in the West Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea in 1968 and compare it with the experience of illness fifteen years later, after they gained independence. The changes involved some loss of self-reliance. Or consider Bregbo, a community in the Ivory Coast whose prophet offers healing through confession and, in some cases, long-term care in a therapeutic setting. What does this offer that psychiatric approaches to healing do not? Drawing on these and other cases, Lewis conveys the importance of the ethnographic comparison of medical beliefs in dynamic spaces of knowledge to do with illness, health, and healing, especially as these change over time and intersect with others.

Hardcover. NY, Crown Publishers, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 324 pages. This is a rivetting chronicle by two visitors to a complex world rarely seen by outsiders: the vibrant daily lives of West African villagers, and the parellel, invisible realm of spirits that surround them. This beautifully written memoir recounts the deepening knowledge slowly acquired by Alma Gottlieb, a cultural anthropologist, and Philip Graham, a fiction writer, as they lived among the Beng, a previously unstudied people of Cote d'Ivoire. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Orlando FL, Academic Press, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with some discoloration along edges. 299 pages, b&w illustrations. This book contains a selection of papers from the Third International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies held in Bad Homburg, Germany, in 1983; these papers combine archaeology, history, and ethnography to explore the relationship between prehistoric and living hunter gatherer societies; they look for both continuity in these societies through time and for the effects of changing degrees of contact with surrounding farmers, herders, traders, and settlers. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Melbourne AU, F. W. Cheshire, reprint, 1967, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover in a poor, chipped and worn dust jacket, 252 pages, illustrated with b/w photos, drawings, and two maps in the text. End-papers feature double-page maps of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, index. The author was a Patrol Officer in New Guinea and later became a member of the Papua-New Guinea Legislative Council. The book covers three periods: 1927-1937; 1938-1942; and 1942-1962. There is pencil underlining to many pages. Still an attractive copy of a fairly scarce book.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth covers with paper label on spine, lettering faded. Introduction by Franz Boas. 291 pages including index. No date on title page, only date is 1934 on copyright page. Previous owner's inscription on front fly leaf dated 1935. A bright, tight copy.

Softcover. Cambridge University Press, reprint, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 314 pages. Essays on language, action and interpretation. This is a collection in translation of essays by Paul Ricoeur which presents a comprehensive view of his philosophical hermeneutics, its relation to the views of his predecessors in the tradition and its consequences for the social sciences. The major theme that unites his writings is that of a philosophical anthropology. This anthropology, which Ricoeur came to call an anthropology of the "capable human being," aims to give an account of the fundamental capabilities and vulnerabilities that human beings display in the activities that make up their lives.

Hardcover. Washington DC/Canberra, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with light edgewear, fading to spine. 334 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY MYERS on the front fly leaf. The Pintupi are a hunting-gathering people of Australia's Western Desert. They were among the last Aborigines to come into contact with white society. This book presents a comprehensive ethnographic interpretation of the ways in which Pintupi politics, cosmology, kinship systems, nomadic patterns and social values reinforce and sometimes contradict each other.

Softcover. London, Cambridge University Press , 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 500 pages, maps and charts. The papers collected in this volume present important information on the history and culture of contemporary gathering and hunting peoples from Canada, India, Africa, Australia and the Philippines. The volume focuses on two themes: first, on the techniques which band-living foraging peoples employ to organise their social and economic lives; and second, on their fight for the right to their own lands and for a measure of cultural and political autonomy. The contributors maintain that gatherer-hunters are not examples of a disappearing way of life, but peoples who have maintained their social and economic practices through long periods of contact with stratified societies. The aim of this volume it to make known to as wide an audience as possible the daily lives, the patterns of relations between the sexes and the political orientations of the world's contemporary foragers. Clean copy.

Softcover. Beijing, China Tibetology Publishing House, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 224 pages. "The publication of Dr. Ben Jiao's dissertation in China is a welcome addition to the growing literature in China about Tibetan culture and society as well as an excellent example of how anthropological approaches and frameworks can bring penetrating analyses to our understanding of complex social institutions. And, of course, it is especially fitting that the first Tibetan to receive a PhD in the West has conducted the first study of Tibetan fraternal polyandry in Tibet-and that his study is a major contribution to the field of anthroplogy and Tibetan studies."

Hardcover. NY, University Books, 1sr, 1966, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, orange cloth stamped in black, 400 pages. Discusses The Nature and State of Possession, Exorcism, and Shamanism. Looks at the history of possession, and its importance to religious psychology. With an appendix on Parapsychology. Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich [1880-1949] was a German psychologist and philosopher at the University Tubingen. He published numerous works on parapsychology and the occult. This is an ex-lib copy with stamping, residue to endpapers. No dust jacket, small sticker on spine, clean interior.

Hardcover. New York, Academic Press, 1st USA, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 313 pages. Hardcover. B/w illustrations throughout. Dust jacket unclipped. Gilt title on spine and front cover. Dust jacket has agewear with light foxing and soil. Some foxing to edges. Clean inside, binding tight.

Hardcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 299 pages, b&w illustrations. How, asks John Terrell in this richly illustrated and original book, can we best account for the remarkable diversity of the Pacific Islanders in biology, language, and custom? Traditionally scholars have recognized a simple racial division between Polynesians, Micronesians, Melanesians, Australians, and South-east Asians: peoples allegedly differing in physical appearance, temperament, achievements, and perhaps even intelligence. Terrell shows that such simple divisions do not fit the known facts and provide little more than a crude, static picture of human diversity. A few pages with light pencil marking, otherwise clean.

Softcover. Sydney AU, University of Sydney, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, blue wrappers, 164 pages. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Macmillan, 1st US, 1928, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover in a worn, tattered dust jacket with a yellow sticker on front cover. 328 pages. The Austrian-born sociologist's reflections on race, physical differences, race mingling and decay of nations, race and psychology, backward races, etc. Spine cloth torn at top with a 1/2" square gone. Names on front endpapers. Otherwise a tight, clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press], 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, maroon cloth covers with gilt stamping. This is the original edition, later revised. Small nick to cloth on rear cover. Clean copy, no dust jacket.

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, reprint, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 170 pages. Having previously published a more standard ethnographic study about Morocco, here Rabinow describes in straight-forward language a series of encounters with his informants, from a French innkeeper holding on to the vestiges of a colonial past to the rural descendants of a seventeenth-century saint. The unfolding of these encounters over the length of the author's stay in Morocco develops the book's main theme, that the collection of cultural data shapes and informs that material and its participant observer as well.

Hardcover. London, Macmillan, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth stamped in gilt, 407 pages. Chapters include: Myth and Ritual, Religion and Healing, Witchcraft and Sorcery, 20th Century Theories of Religion, The Science of Religion and others. Owner's small sticker inside front cover otherwise clean.

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2nd pr., 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 488 pages, b&w illustrations. Addressing problems of objectivity and authenticity, Sabine MacCormack reconstructs how Andean religion was understood by the Spanish in light of seventeenth-century European theological and philosophical movements, and by Andean writers trying to find in it antecedents to their new Christian faith. Some fading to spine, otherwise a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the title page. What motivates us to reread literary works? How is our pleasure, interpretation, involvement, and evaluation different when we read a literary work and when we reread it? This fascinating book by Matei Calinescu is the first to focus on the implications of rereading for critical understanding. Drawing on literary theory, cultural anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and previous theories of reading, Calinescu describes the dynamics of rereading and explores the sometimes complementary, sometimes sharply conflicting relationships between reading and rereading. Calinescu analyzes fictional works by Borges, Nabokov, Proust, Robbe-Grillet, and Henry James, among others, explaining how reading texts is related both to symbolic play or make-believe and to games with rules. He reviews the history of reading in modern times, discussing, for example, how the Reformation led to rereadings of Scripture and how the proliferation of books during the Enlightenment led to a shift from "intensive reading" to "extensive reading." Calinescu looks at the distinctions between reading and rereading from the perspectives of the age, situation, and gender of the individual reader. He discusses the problems raised by secret or oblique languages and codes - devised to evade censors, communicate with a select audience of "secret sharers," or play games of hide-and-seek with the reader - and shows that they naturally lead to rereading a text. Calinescu argues persuasively that an understanding of rereading is useful in formulating both analytic strategies of practical criticism and a poetics of reading. Clean, bright copy.