String Figures and how to Make Them

String Figures and how to Make Them

Author: Caroline F. Jayne

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 1962-01-01

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 9780486201528

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Diagrams and text illustrate the steps involved in creating over one hundred string figures while providing information on their origin and cultural background


String Figures as Mathematics?

String Figures as Mathematics?

Author: Eric Vandendriessche

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-01-02

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 331911994X

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This book addresses the mathematical rationality contained in the making of string figures. It does so by using interdisciplinary methods borrowed from anthropology, mathematics, history and philosophy of mathematics. The practice of string figure-making has long been carried out in many societies, and particularly in those of oral tradition. It consists in applying a succession of operations to a string (knotted into a loop), mostly using the fingers and sometimes the feet, the wrists or the mouth. This succession of operations is intended to generate a final figure. The book explores different modes of conceptualization of the practice of string figure-making and analyses various source material through these conceptual tools: it looks at research by mathematicians, as well as ethnographical publications, and personal fieldwork findings in the Chaco, Paraguay, and in the Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, which all give evidence of the rationality that underlies this activity. It concludes that the creation of string figures may be seen as the result of intellectual processes, involving the elaboration of algorithms, and concepts such as operation, sub-procedure, iteration, and transformation.


Fascinating String Figures

Fascinating String Figures

Author: International String Figure Association

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 1999-01-01

Total Pages: 84

ISBN-13: 9780486404004

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Collects instructions drawn from the pages of String Figure Magazine explaining how to create such string "sculptures" as "Twinkling star," "Polar Bear," "Erupting volcano," and "Andromeda galaxy"


Social Life in Northwest Alaska

Social Life in Northwest Alaska

Author: Ernest S. Burch

Publisher: University of Alaska Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 1889963925

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This landmark volume will stand for decades as one of the most comprehensive studies of a hunter-gatherer population ever written. In this third and final volume in a series on the early contact period Iñupiaq Eskimos of northwestern Alaska, Burch examines every topic of significance to hunter-gatherer research, ranging from discussions of social relationships and settlement structure to nineteenth-century material culture.