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Celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day

 

Monday, October 8th is Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the United States. As a counter-celebration to Columbus Day, Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a holiday that celebrates Indigenous peoples across various localities in the United States.

 

With the hopes of promoting understanding of Indigenous communities around the world, we present a selection of titles below which highlight many different aspects of Indigenous peoples and cultures.

 


Berghahn Journals is delighted to offer full access to Girlhood Studies until the end of the year using the code GIRL2018Follow these steps to redeem.

 

 


Non-Humans in Amerindian South America: Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals and SongsNON-HUMANS IN AMERINDIAN SOUTH AMERICA
Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals and Songs
Edited by Juan Javier Rivera Andía

Volume 37, EASA Series

 

Drawing on fieldwork from diverse Amerindian societies, and presenting ethnographies of non-human entities emerging in ritual, oral tradition, cosmology, shamanism and music, this book offers new insights into the indigenous constitutions of humanity, personhood, and environment characteristic of the South American highlands and lowlands.

 

INDIGENEITY AND THE SACRED
Indigenous Revival and the Conservation of Sacred Natural Sites in the Americas
Edited by Fausto Sarmiento and Sarah Hitchner

Volume 22, Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology

 

This book presents current research in the political ecology of indigenous revival and its role in nature conservation in critical areas in the Americas. An important contribution to evolving studies on conservation of sacred natural sites (SNS), the book elucidates the complexity of development scenarios within cultural landscapes related to the appropriation of religion, environmental change in indigenous territories, and new conservation management approaches. Indigeneity and the Sacred explores how these struggles for land, rights, and political power are embedded within physical landscapes, and how indigenous identity is reconstituted as globalizing forces simultaneously threaten and promote the notion of indigeneity.

Read Introduction

Edges, Fringes, Frontiers: Integral Ecology, Indigenous Knowledge and Sustainability in GuyanaEDGES, FRINGES, FRONTIERS
Integral Ecology, Indigenous Knowledge and Sustainability in Guyana
Thomas B. Henfrey

Volume 23, Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology

 

Based on an ethnographic account of subsistence use of Amazonian forests by Wapishana people in Guyana, Edges, Frontiers, Fringes examines the social, cultural and behavioral bases for sustainability and resilience in indigenous resource use.

Read Chapter 1. Edges, Fringes, Frontiers

 

An Australian Indigenous Diaspora: Warlpiri Matriarchs and the Refashioning of TraditionAN AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS DIASPORA
Warlpiri Matriarchs and the Refashioning of Tradition
Paul Burke

 

This book is a multi-sited ethnography of the migration of a minority of the aboriginal Warlpiri away from their traditional homeland to distant towns and cities. It follows a number of Warlpiri matriarchs into their new locations, exploring how they sustain their independent lives and examining their changing relationship with the traditional culture they represent.

Read Introduction

 

Animism beyond the Soul: Ontology, Reflexivity, and the Making of Anthropological KnowledgeANIMISM BEYOND THE SOUL
Ontology, Reflexivity, and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge
Edited by Katherine Swancutt and Mireille Mazard

Volume 6, Studies in Social Analysis

 

The contributors to this volume offer compelling case studies that demonstrate how indigenous animistic practices, concepts, traditions, and ontologies are co-authored in highly reflexive ways by anthropologists and their interlocutors.

Read Introduction: Anthropological Knowledge Making, the Reflexive Feedback Loop, and Conceptualizations of the Soul

 

TREES, KNOTS, AND OUTRIGGERS
Environmental Knowledge in the Northeast Kula Ring
Frederick H. Damon

Volume 21, Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology

 

Trees, Knots and Outriggers (Kaynen Muyuw) is the culmination of twenty-five years of work by Frederick H. Damon and his attention to cultural adaptations to the environment in Melanesia. Damon details the intricacies of indigenous knowledge and practice in his sweeping synthesis of symbolic and structuralist anthropology with recent developments in historical ecology. This book is a long conversation between the author’s many Papua New Guinea informants, teachers and friends, and scientists in Australia, Europe and the United States, in which a spirit of adventure and discovery is palpable.

Read Introduction

Related Link: This book is accompanied by a large online repository of images: https://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/Trees_Knots__Outriggers/

 

THE IMBALANCE OF POWER
Leadership, Masculinity and Wealth in the Amazon
Marc Brightman

 

Amerindian societies have an iconic status in classical political thought. For Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Rousseau, the native American ‘state of nature’ operates as a foil for the European polity. Challenging this tradition, The Imbalance of Power demonstrates ethnographically that the Carib speaking indigenous societies of the Guiana region of Amazonia do not fit conventional characterizations of ‘simple’ political units with ‘egalitarian’ political ideologies and ‘harmonious’ relationships with nature.

Read Introduction

 

INDIGENIST MOBILIZATION
Confronting Electoral Communism and Precarious Livelihoods in Post-Reform Kerala
Luisa Steur

Volume 20, Dislocations

 

Indigenist Mobilization explores the history of the dynamics between the Communist party in Kerala and indigenist activists, and the subtle ways in which global capitalist restructuring leads to a resonance of indigenist visions in the changed the everyday working lives and future aspirations of subaltern groups in Kerala.

Read Introduction: Research and Activism in, on, and Beyond a Capitalist World System

 

BEING AND BECOMING
Embodiment and Experience among the Orang Rimba of Sumatra
Ramsey Elkholy
Foreword by Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen

 

In a unique methodological contribution, Ramsey Elkholy adopts a set of body-centered approaches that reflect and capture the day-to-day, moment-to-moment ways in which the hunters and gatherers of Orang Rimba, Sumatra, engage with the world.

Read Introduction

 

THE FOREST PEOPLE WITHOUT A FOREST
Development Paradoxes, Belonging and Participation of the Baka in East Cameroon
Glory M. Lueong

 

This book examines how the Baka, who live in Eastern Cameroon, assert forms of belonging in order to participate in development interventions, and how community life is shaped and reshaped through these interventions. Often referred to as ‘forest people’, the Baka have witnessed many recent development interventions that include competing and contradictory policies such as ‘civilize’, assimilate and integrate the Baka into ‘full citizenship’, conserve the forest and wildlife resources, and preserve indigenous cultures at the verge of extinction.

Read Introduction

 

BIOMEDICAL ENTANGLEMENTS
Conceptions of Personhood in a Papua New Guinea Society
Franziska A. Herbst

Volume 5, Person, Space and Memory in the Contemporary Pacific

 

Biomedical Entanglements is an ethnographic study of the Giri people of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the indigenous population’s interaction with modern medicine. In her fieldwork, Franziska A. Herbst follows the Giri people as they circulate within and around ethnographic sites that include a rural health center and an urban hospital. The study bridges medical anthropology and global health, exploring how the ‘biomedical’ is imbued with social meaning and how biomedicine affects Giri ways of life.

Read Introduction

 

LEAVING FOOTPRINTS IN THE TAIGA
Luck, Spirits and Ambivalence among the Siberian Orochen Reindeer Herders and Hunters
Donatas Brandišauskas

NEW SERIES: Volume 1, Studies in the Circumpolar North

 

Nowhere have recent environmental and social changes been more pronounced than in post-Soviet Siberia. Donatas Brandišauskas probes the strategies that Orochen reindeer herders of southeastern Siberia have developed to navigate these changes. “Catching luck” is one such strategy that plays a central role in Orochen cosmology — luck implies a vernacular theory of causality based on active interactions of humans, non-humans, material objects, and places. Brandišauskas describes in rich details the skills, knowledge, ritual practices, storytelling, and movements that enable the Orochen to “catch luck” (or not, sometimes), to navigate times of change and upheaval.

Read Introduction: Luck, Spirits and Places

 

LIVING ON THIN ICE
The Gwich’in Natives of Alaska
Steven C. Dinero

 

“The book is an excellent presentation of multidisciplinary methods focused steadily on the people and on their perceptions of what is going on. Most interesting for the future is that the internet may be the way to keep members of the Gwich’in diaspora connected to the village and their ‘Gwich’inness’…Highly Recommended. .All academic levels/libraries.” · Choice

Read Introduction

 

OWNERSHIP AND NURTURE
Studies in Native Amazonian Property Relations
Edited by Marc Brightman, Carlos Fausto, and Vanessa Grotti
Foreword by James Leach

 

The first book to address the classic anthropological theme of property through the ethnography of Amazonia, Ownership and Nurture sets new and challenging terms for anthropological debates about the region and about property in general.

Read Introduction: Altering Ownership in Amazonia

 

New in Paperback

MASKS AND STAFFS
Identity Politics in the Cameroon Grassfields
Michaela Pelican

Volume 11, Integration and Conflict Studies

 

The Cameroon Grassfields, home to three ethnic groups – Grassfields societies, Mbororo, and Hausa – provide a valuable case study for the anthropological examination of identity politics and interethnic relations. In the midst of the political liberalization of Cameroon in the late 1990s and 2000s, local responses to political and legal changes took the form of a series of performative and discursive expressions of ethnicity. Confrontational encounters stimulated by economic and political rivalry, as well as socially integrative processes, transformed collective self-understanding in Cameroon in conjunction with recent global discourses on human, minority, and indigenous rights. The book provides a vital contribution to the study of ethnicity, conflict, and social change in the anthropology of Africa.

Read Introduction

 

LIFE AS A HUNT
Thresholds of Identities and Illusions on an African Landscape
Stuart A. Marks

 

“Few academic books display such depth as does this one, but then few anthropologists devote over five decades to the same communities and issues. Anthropologist Marks first worked among Zambia’s Valley Bisa people in 1966, returning frequently for further research. The result is a masterwork of description, interpretation, and self-reflection.” · Choice

Read Introduction: On Poaching an Elephant: Calling the Shots and Following the Ricochets

 


Berghahn Journals:

 

Girlhood Studies

Editor-in-Chief: Claudia Mitchell, McGill University

ISSN: 1938-8209 (Print)
ISSN: 1938-8322 (Online)

Volume 10/2017, 3 issues p.a. (spring, summer, winter)

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Editor: John P. Ziker, Boise State University

ISSN: 1361-7362 (Print)
ISSN: 1476-6787 (Online)

Volume 16/2017, 3 issues p.a. (spring, summer, winter)

 


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