'We Are Still Didene'
'We Are Still Didene'

Author: Thomas McIlwraith

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2012-10-15

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 1442695714

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Detailing the history of the aboriginal village of Iskut, British Columbia over the past 100 years, ‘We Are Still Didene’ examines the community's transition from subsistence hunting to wage work in trapping, guiding, construction, and service jobs. Using naturally occurring, extended transcripts of stories told by the group's hunters, Thomas McIlwraith explores how Iskut hunting culture and the memories that the Iskut share have been maintained orally. McIlwraith demonstrates the ways in which these stories challenge the idealized images of Aboriginals that underlie state-sponsored traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) studies. McIlwraith instead illuminates how these narratives are connected to the Iskut Village's complex relationships with resource extraction companies and the province of British Columbia, as well as their interactions with animals and the environment.

Truly Human
Truly Human

Author: Scott E. Simon

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2023-04-28

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 1487546017

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The Sediq and Truku Indigenous peoples on the mountainous island of Formosa – today called Taiwan – say that their ancestors emerged in the beginning of time from Pusu Qhuni, a tree-covered boulder in the highlands. Living in the mountain forests, they observed the sacred law of Gaya, seeking equilibrium with other humans, the spirits, animals, and plants. They developed a politics in which each community preserved its autonomy and sharing was valued more highly than personal accumulation of goods or power. These lifeworlds were shattered by colonialism, capitalist development, and cultural imperialism in the twentieth century. Based on two decades of ethnographic field research, Truly Human portrays these peoples’ lifeworlds, teachings, political struggles for recognition, and relations with non-human animals. Taking seriously their ontological claims that Gaya offers moral guidance to all humans, Scott E. Simon reflects on what this particular form of Indigenous resurgence reveals about human rights, sovereignty, and the good of all kind. Truly Human contributes to a decolonizing anthropology at a time when all humans need Indigenous land-based teachings more than ever.

People of the Saltwater
People of the Saltwater

Author: Charles R. Menzies

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2022-11

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1496232623

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People of the Saltwater is an exploration of an ancient community of the Gitxaala Nation and how its members relate socially, politically, and economically to the rest of the world.

The First Nations of British Columbia, Third Edition
The First Nations of British Columbia, Third Edition

Author: Robert J. Muckle

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2014-10-15

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 0774828757

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Since it was first published in 1998, The First Nations of British Columbia has been an essential introduction to the province’s first peoples. Written within an anthropological framework, it familiarizes readers with the history and cultures of First Nations in the province and provides a fundamental understanding of current affairs and concerns. This fully revised third edition includes: an all new introduction and conclusion updated information and references sidebars on topics of interest such as totem poles, sasquatch, and Chinook jargon discussions of enduring stereotypes and misperceptions of First Nations excerpts from important historical documents, including the Canadian government’s Apology for Residential Schools Concise and accessibly written, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to deepen their understanding of First Nations in what is now British Columbia.

Shadow Play
Shadow Play

Author: Sheri Lynn Gibbings

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1487525729

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Shadow Play examines how members of the urban underclass in Indonesia seek to negotiate their rights to urban space in a country undergoing significant social, political, and economic change.

Suspect Others
Suspect Others

Author: Stuart Earle Strange

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2021-07-30

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1487509723

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Suspect Others explores how ideas of self-knowledge and identity arise from a unique set of rituals in Suriname, a postcolonial Caribbean nation rife with racial and religious suspicion. Amid competition for belonging, political power, and control over natural resources, Surinamese Ndyuka Maroons and Hindus look to spirit mediums to understand the causes of their successes and sufferings and to know the hidden minds of relatives and rivals alike. But although mediumship promises knowledge of others, interactions between mediums and their devotees also fundamentally challenge what devotees know about themselves, thereby turning interpersonal suspicion into doubts about the self. Through a rich ethnographic comparison of the different ways in which Ndyuka and Hindu spirit mediums and their devotees navigate suspicion, Suspect Others shows how present-day Caribbean peoples come to experience selves that defy concepts of personhood inflicted by the colonial past. Stuart Earle Strange investigates key questions about the nature of self-knowledge, religious revelation, and racial discourse in a hyper-diverse society. At a moment when exclusionary suspicions dominate global politics, Suspect Others elucidates self-identity as a social process that emerges from the paradoxical ways in which people must look to others to know themselves.

Indigenous Peoples of North America
Indigenous Peoples of North America

Author: Robert J. Muckle

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2012-02-16

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1442604166

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Most books dealing with North American Indigenous peoples are exhaustive in coverage. They provide in-depth discussion of various culture areas which, while valuable, sometimes means that the big picture context is lost. This book offers a corrective to that trend by providing a concise, thematic overview of the key issues facing Indigenous peoples in North America, from prehistory to the present. It integrates a culture area analysis within a thematic approach, covering archaeology, traditional lifeways, the colonial era, and contemporary Indigenous culture. Muckle also explores the history of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and anthropologists with rigor and honesty. The result is a remarkably comprehensive book that provides a strong grounding for understanding Indigenous cultures in North America.

Legacies of Violence
Legacies of Violence

Author: Antonio Sorge

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2015-07-06

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1442621745

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The inhabitants of highland Sardinia proudly declare a long history of resistance to outside authority. Many even celebrate the belief that “not even the Roman Empire reached this far.” Yet, since the late nineteenth century, the Italian government has pacified and integrated the mountain districts of the island into the state, often through the use of force. In Legacies of Violence, Antonio Sorge examines local understandings of this past and the effects that a history of violence exercises on collective representations. This is particularly the case among the shepherds of the island, who claim to embody an ancient code of honour known as balentia that they allege to be uncorrupted by the values of mainstream Italian society. A perceptive ethnography of the mobilization of history in support of a way of life that is disappearing as the region’s inhabitants adopt a more mobile, cosmopolitan, and urbane lifestyle, Sorge’s work demonstrates how social memory continues to shape the present in the Sardinian highlands.

Island in the Stream
Island in the Stream

Author: Michael Lambek

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2018-11-05

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 1487519052

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Island in the Stream introduces an original genre of ethnographic history as it follows a community on Mayotte, an East African island in the Mozambique Channel, through eleven periods of fieldwork between 1975 and 2015. Over this 40-year span Mayotte shifted from a declining and neglected colonial backwater to a full département of the French state. In a highly unusual postcolonial trajectory, citizens of Mayotte demanded this incorporation within France rather than joining the independent republic of the Comoros. The Malagasy-speaking Muslim villagers Michael Lambek encountered in 1975 practiced subsistence cultivation and lived without roads, schools, electricity, or running water; today they are educated citizens of the EU who travel regularly to metropolitan France and beyond. Offering a series of ethnographic slices of life across time, Island in the Stream highlights community members' ethical engagement in their own history as they looked to the future, acknowledged the past, and engaged and transformed local forms of sociality, exchange, and ritual performance. This is a unique account of the changing horizons and historical consciousness of an African community and an intimate portrait of the inhabitants and their concerns, as well as a glimpse into the changing perspective of the ethnographer.

Milanese Encounters
Milanese Encounters

Author: Cristina Moretti

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2015-03-27

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 1442620730

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In a city driven by fashion and design, visibility and invisibility are powerful forces. Milanese Encounters examines how the acts of looking, recognizing, and being seen reflect social relations and power structures in contemporary Milan. Cristina Moretti’s ethnographic study reveals how the meanings of Milan’s public spaces shift as the city’s various inhabitants use, appropriate, and travel through them. Moretti’s extensive fieldwork covers international migrants, social justice organizations, and middle-class citizens groups in locations such as community centers, abandoned industrial areas, and central plazas and streets. Situated at the intersection of urban and visual anthropology, her work will challenge and inspire scholars in anthropology, urban studies, and other fields. Contributing to studies of urban Italy, neoliberalism, and immigration, Milanese Encounters is a welcome demonstration of ethnography’s potential to analyse the connections and divisions created by complex modern cities.