"In the 1930s anthropologist Sister M. Inez Hilger traveled to nine reservations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan to record traditional Chippewa (Ojibway) methods of raising children. Her intriguing study captures the essential details of Chippewa child life-and provides a comprehensive overview of a fascinating culture. A new introduction by Jean M. O'Brien, assistant professor of history and American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota, assesses Hilger's contributions in this book, which was first published in 1951."-- Back cover.
In An Introduction to Childhood, Heather Montgomery examines the role children have played within anthropology, how they have been studied by anthropologists and how they have been portrayed and analyzed in ethnographic monographs over the last one hundred and fifty years. Offers a comprehensive overview of childhood from an anthropological perspective Draws upon a wide range of examples and evidence from different geographical areas and belief systems Synthesizes existing literature on the anthropology of childhood, while providing a fresh perspective Engages students with illustrative ethnographies to illuminate key topics and themes
Enriched with anecdotes from ethnography and the daily media, this revised edition examines family structure, reproduction, profiles of children's caretakers, their treatment at different ages, their play, work, schooling, and transition to adulthood. The result is a nuanced and credible picture of childhood in different cultures, past and present.
This book is an intellectual tour de force: a comprehensive Darwinian interpretation of human development. Looking at the entire range of human evolutionary history, Melvin Konner tells the compelling and complex story of how cross-cultural and universal characteristics of our growth from infancy to adolescence became rooted in genetically inherited characteristics of the human brain. All study of our evolution starts with one simple truth: human beings take an extraordinarily long time to grow up. What does this extended period of dependency have to do with human brain growth and social interactions? And why is play a sign of cognitive complexity, and a spur for cultural evolution? As Konner explores these questions, and topics ranging from bipedal walking to incest taboos, he firmly lays the foundations of psychology in biology. As his book eloquently explains, human learning and the greatest human intellectual accomplishments are rooted in our inherited capacity for attachments to each other. In our love of those we learn from, we find our way as individuals and as a species. Never before has this intersection of the biology and psychology of childhood been so brilliantly described. "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," wrote Dobzhansky. In this remarkable book, Melvin Konner shows that nothing in childhood makes sense except in the light of evolution.
A highly influential scholar urges that linguistics be studied as part of the entire communicative conduct of social groups and demonstrates the mutual relation between linguistics and other disciplines, such as sociology, social anthropology, and education.
General material, non Aboriginal; includes A basic list of books and periodicals for college libraries, compiled by R.S. Beckham with the assistance of M.P. Beckham.
