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Pass down the powerful teachings of African and African American oral traditions with these 50 beautifully illustrated cultural folktales. In this captivating collection of folklore from the African diaspora, discover the stories that have been passed down through generations and continue to teach valuable lessons today through their vibrant, illustrative language. Through its 50 folktales, Roots & Legends celebrates the richness of the African and African American cultures and champions the importance of oral tradition, a practice that rose up through the dark times of slavery and oppression. Thoughtfully curated and richly illustrated, Roots & Legends features the wonder and educational lessons of cultural stories and figures such as: The Flying Africans Sukey and the Mermaid The Legend of Big Momma How the Leopard Got Its Spots Coyote Steals the Sun The Haunting of Sweet Hollow Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock And more! Divided into seven sections covering the spiritual nature of animals, people, the land and its sometimes spooky inhabitants, and more, each page is filled with timeless tales of heroes, tricksters, and everyday wisdom, and invites you to immerse yourself in the depth and beauty of African and African American folklore. A perfect choice for families interested in passing down African and African American heritage through storytelling traditions, Roots & Legends will enchant readers of all ages through its beautifully illustrated and accessible collection of folklore.
Examining how memory, intergenerational transmission, and kinship work together, Relative Strangers sheds light on Romani life in Palestine. Arpan Roy presents an ethnographic portrait of Dom Romani communities living between Palestine and Jordan, zooming in on everyday life in working-class neighborhoods, and under conditions of perpetual war and instability. The book focuses on how Doms are able to sustain ethnic difference through kinship, even when public performances of difference are no longer emphasized - a kind of alterity that is neither visible by obvious markers like race or religious difference, nor detected by the antennas of the state. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Amman, Roy makes a case for such alterity for Romani people and other groups in the region. Analysing intimate ethnographic scenes through anthropological theories of kinship, psychoanalysis, social theory from the Global South, and more, the book reveals how alterity in the Middle East does not adhere to rigid identitarian categories. Ultimately, Relative Strangersdemonstrates the inadequacy of transposing models of pluralism centred on European and American experiences of minoritization onto other contexts.
In the 1970s, in his capacity as government representative from the Afghan Institute of Archaeology, Ghulam Rahman Amiri accompanied a joint Afghan-US archaeological mission to the Sistan region of southwest Afghanistan. The results of his work were published in Farsi as a descriptive ethnographic monograph. The Helmand Baluch is the first English translation of Amiri's extraordinary encounters. This rich ethnography describes the cultural, political, and economic systems of the Baluch people living in the lower Helmand River Valley of Afghanistan. It is an area that has received little study since the early 20th Century, yet is a region with a remarkable history in one of the most volatile territories in the world.
When the Smithsonian's Hall of Physical Anthropology opened in 1965 it featured 160 Andean skulls affixed to a wall to visualize how the world's human population had exploded since the birth of Christ. Through a history of Inca mummies, a pre-Hispanic surgery called trepanation, and Andean crania like these, Empires of the Dead explains how "ancient Peruvians" became the single largest population in the Smithsonian and many other museums in Peru, the Americas, and beyond. In 1532, when Spain invaded the Inca empire, Europeans learned that Inca and Andean peoples made their ancestors sacred by preserving them with the world's oldest practices of artificial mummification. To extinguish their power, the Spaniards collected these ancestors as specimens of conquest, science, nature, and race. Yet colonial Andean communities also found ways to keep the dead alive, making "Inca mummies" a symbol of resistance that Spanish American patriots used to introduce Peruvian Independence and science to the world. Inspired, nineteenth-century US anthropologists disinterred and collected Andean mummies and skulls to question the antiquity and civilization of the American "race" in publications, world's fairs, and US museums. Peruvian scholars then used those mummies and skulls to transform anthropology itself, curating these "scientific ancestors" as evidence of pre-Hispanic superiority in healing. Bringing together the history of science, race, and museums' possession of Indigenous remains, from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, Empires of the Dead illuminates how South American ancestors became coveted mummies, skulls, and specimens of knowledge and nationhood. In doing so it reveals how Peruvian and Andean peoples have learned from their dead, seeking the recovery of looted heritage in the centuries before North American museums began their own work of decolonization.
We now live in the Anthropocene, the first epoch of our own making. We have altered the Earth's atmosphere, landscapes, and bodies of water. The burning of fossil fuels has warmed the planet enough to change weather patterns, melt glaciers, and raise sea levels, a situation made worse by rampant deforestation and resource depletion. Many look to governments to confront these existential challenges. In Maya Wisdom and the Survival of Our Planet, Lisa Lucero looks to the Maya, past and present. Through the lens of the traditional Maya inclusive worldview--one in which humans are part of the world, not separate from it, and where everything is connected--Lucero provides a practical roadmap on how to sustainably address climate change and environmental degradation. She shows how the Maya collaborate with rather than try to subjugate forests, animals, soils, water, and other nonhuman entities. The Maya sustainably farmed for millennia and provided goods, labor, and services to their kings in cities. In return, kings performed vital ceremonies to the Rain God Chahk, other gods, and ancestors to replenish urban reservoirs that lasted throughout the long dry season--a balancing act that worked for over 1,000 years. Lucero shows how approaches to tackle climate change from the bottom-up, beginning with the family or household, are just as important as top-down governmental mitigation, and how learning from traditional knowledge is vital for the survival of us all. She brings to life the tropical jungles of Central America and reveals the valuable solutions its ancient and contemporary inhabitants offer us to save our planet.
From the legendary producer of Nick Drake, R.E.M., Toots and the Maytals, and Pink Floyd and author of White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s comes a riveting, world-spanning tour de force illuminating the artists, histories, controversies, and collaborations that shaped global music. Paul Simon told Joe Boyd that when he first heard the accordion flourish that would open his multi-platinum album Graceland, it seemed to proclaim, "You haven't heard this before!" Yet the 1980s "world music" boom that Simon's album helped usher in had roots that extended back through the decades and across continents: tango on the eve of World War I, Latin dance across the '30s, '40s and '50s, reggae in the '70s, pre-War samba and pre-Beatles bossa nova, Eastern European ensembles filling capitalist concert halls during the Cold War, Indian ragas changing rock and roll in the 1960s, the folk music-inspired classical composers of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this sweeping history compiled from more than a decade of travel, research, interviews, and deep listening, Boyd sets out to explore centuries of fascinating backstories to these sounds. He shows how personalities, events, and politics in places such as Havana, Lagos, Budapest, Kingston, and Rio are as colorful and momentous as anything that took place in New Orleans, Harlem, Laurel Canyon, or Liverpool. And, moreover, how jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock 'n' roll would never have happened if it weren't for the notes and rhythms emanating from over the horizon. The one-of-a-kind result is And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: a glorious, symphonic celebration of the music that shapes our world.
Ancient South America, 2nd edition features the full panorama of the South American past from the first inhabitants to the European invasions Isolated for all of prehistory and much of history, the continent witnessed the rise of cultures and advanced civilizations rivalling those of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Independently of developments elsewhere, South American peoples invented agriculture, domesticated animals, and created pottery, elaborate architecture, and the arts of working metals. Tribes, chiefdoms, and immense conquest states rose, flourished, and disappeared, leaving only their ruined monuments and broken artifacts as testimonials to past greatness. This new edition is completely revised and updated to reflect archaeological discoveries and insights made in the past three decades. Incorporating new findings on northern and eastern lowlands, and discussions of the first civilizations, it also examines the first inhabitants of Brazil and Patagonia as well as the Andes. Accessibly written and abundantly illustration, the volume also includes chronological charts and new examples.
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.
The "gripping and astonishing story" (Douglas Preston) of the Cinta Larga, a tribe that had no contact with the West until the 1960s and came to run an illegal diamond mine in the Amazon. Growing up in a remote corner of the world's largest rainforest, Pio, Maria, and Oita learned to hunt wild pigs and tapirs, and gathered Brazil nuts and açaí berries from centuries-old trees. The first highway pierced through in 1960. Ranchers, loggers, and prospectors invaded, and the kids lost their families to terrible new weapons and diseases. Pushed by the government to assimilate, they struggled to figure out their new, capitalist reality, discovering its wonders--cars, refrigerators, TV sets, phones--as well as a way to acquire them: by selling the natural riches of their own forest home. They had to partner with the white men who'd hunted them, but their wealth grew legendary, the envy of the nation--until decades of suppressed trauma erupted into a massacre, bloody retribution that made headlines across the globe. Based on six years of immersive reporting and research, When We Sold God's Eye tells a unique kind of adventure story, one that begins with a river journey by Theodore Roosevelt and ends with smugglers from New York City's Diamond District. It's a story of survival against all odds; of the temptations of wealth and the dream of prosperity; of an ecosystem threatened by our hunger for resources; of genocide and revenge. It's a tragedy as old as the first European encounters with Indigenous people, playing out in the present day. But most of all, it's the moving saga of a few audacious individuals--Pio, Maria, Oita, and their friends--and their attempts to adapt and even thrive in the most unlikely circumstances.
Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labour all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year. Yet the real lives and work of smugglers - or coyotes, or guides, as they are often known by the migrants who hire their services - are only ever reported on from a distance, using tired tropes and stereotypes, often depicted as boogie men and violent warlords. In an effort to better understand this essential yet extralegal billion dollar global industry, internationally recognised anthropologist and expert Jason De Leon embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years. The result of this unique and extraordinary access is SOLDIERS AND KINGS: the first ever in-depth, character-driven look at human smuggling. It is a heart-wrenching and intimate narrative that revolves around the life and death of one coyote who falls in love and tries to leave smuggling behind. In a powerful, original voice, De Leon expertly chronicles the lives of low-level foot soldiers breaking into the smuggling game, and morally conflicted gang leaders who oversee rag-tag crews of guides and informants along the migrant trail. SOLDIERS AND KINGS is not only a ground-breaking up-close glimpse of a difficult-to-access world, it is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.
A stunning bilingual, illustrated, and photographic account of a celebrated Mexican tradition The lively Mexican holiday of Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) brings together sorrow and laughter, drawing from indigenous traditions of celebrating one's ancestors and loved ones who have been lost. It's a day of serenity, family, and exuberant creativity, where sugar and skulls can exist side by side. In this bilingual book, beloved Mexican art and culture magazine Artes de México creates a stunning written, illustrated, and photographic account that takes readers through the tradition's origins, its history and evolution, and the many ways it is celebrated today. Alongside the visually stunning displays of altars, cemeteries, costumes, and festivities, a group of renowned Mexican writers has contributed essays that cover topics including the holiday's rural and urban distinctions, occult ancestry, and indigenous rituals. Their words are imbued with spectacular personal significance--and impressive academic rigor--as they recount local legends, family traditions, and tales of life, death, and wandering souls.
A panoramic history of Puerto Rico from pre-Columbian times to today Puerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking territory of the United States with a history shaped by conquest and resistance. For centuries, Puerto Ricans have crafted and negotiated complex ideas about nationhood. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo provides a new history of Puerto Rico that gives voice to the archipelago's people while offering a lens through which to understand the political, economic, and social challenges confronting them today. In this masterful work of scholarship, Meléndez-Badillo sheds light on the vibrant cultures of the archipelago in the centuries before the arrival of Columbus and captures the full sweep of Puerto Rico's turbulent history in the centuries that followed, from the first indigenous insurrection against colonial rule in 1511--led by the powerful chieftain Agüeybaná II--to the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1952. He deftly portrays the contemporary period and the intertwined though unequal histories of the archipelago and the continental United States. Puerto Rico is an engaging, sometimes personal, and consistently surprising history of colonialism, revolt, and the creation of a national identity, offering new perspectives not only on Puerto Rico and the Caribbean but on the United States and the Atlantic world more broadly. Available in Spanish from our partners at Grupo Planeta
The philosophy of Mesoamerica - the indigenous groups of precolonial North-Central America - is rich and varied but relatively little-known. In this ground-breaking book, Alexus McLeod introduces the philosophical traditions of the Maya, Nahua (Aztecs), Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and others, focussing in particular on their treatment of language, truth, time, creation, personhood, knowledge, and morality. His wide-ranging discussion includes important texts of world literature such as the K'iche Maya Popol Vuh and the Aztec Florentine Codex, as well as precolonial glyphic texts and imagery. This comprehensive and accessible book will give students, specialists and other interested readers an understanding of Mesoamerican philosophy and a sense of the current scholarship in the field.
A journey to the coast of North Sentinel Island, home to a tribe believed to be the most isolated human community on earth. The Sentinelese people want to be left alone and will shoot deadly arrows at anyone who tries to come ashore. As the web of modernity draws ever closer, the island represents the last chapter in the Age of Discovery--the final holdout in a completely connected world. In November 2018, a zealous American missionary was killed while attempting to visit an island he called "Satan's last stronghold," a small patch of land known as North Sentinel in the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean. News of the tragedy fascinated people around the world. Most were unaware such a place still existed in our time: an island unmolested by the advances of modern technology. Twenty years before the American missionary's ill-fated visit, a young American historian and journalist named Adam Goodheart also traveled to the waters off North Sentinel. During his time in the Andaman Islands he witnessed another isolated tribe emerge into modernity for the first time. Now, Goodheart--a bestselling historian--has returned to the Andamans. The Last Island is a work of history as well as travel, a journey in time as well as place. It tells the stories of others drawn to North Sentinel's mystery through the centuries, from imperial adventurers to an eccentric Victorian photographer to modern-day anthropologists. It narrates the tragic stories of other Andaman tribes' encounters with the outside world. And it shows how the web of modernity is drawing ever closer to the island's shores. The Last Island is a beautifully written meditation on the end of the Age of Discovery at the start of a new millennium. It is a book that will fascinate any reader interested in the limits--and dangers--of our modern, global society and its emphasis on ceaseless, unbroken connection.
Contents: The Bajju -- Baranzan, the Bajju Founding Father -- The Men's Secret Ancestral Organization and Small-Scale Warfare -- Bajju Legal System -- Hunting and Horns -- Witchcraft-Nkut -- Illness and Medicine -- God and the Spirit World -- The Life Cycle: Birth, Marriage, and Death -- Taboos -- Values -- Indirect Rule in the Precolonial and Colonial Contexts -- The Christian Era -- Bajju Cultural Change
Unveil the dynamic world of Sami education across Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Russia in this book. This vital volume presents cutting-edge research from top scholars, enriching teacher education with innovative, interdisciplinary insights. Discover unique contributions through a blend of Sami and Māori perspectives, and navigate the profound impacts of history on modern educational challenges and Indigenous self-determination. Contributors are: Rauni Äärelä-Vihriälä, Kristina Belancic, Karianne Berg, Anna-Lill Drugge, Heidi Harju-Luukkainen, Máret J. Heatta, Hanna Helander, Huia Tomlins Jahnke, Ylva Jannok Nutti, Pigga Keskitalo, Asbj rn Kolberg, David Kroik, Marikaisa Laiti, Inker-Anni Linkola-Aikio, Torjer Olsen, Hanna Outakoski, Annika Pasanen, Rauna Rahko-Ravantti, Hilde Sollid, Tuija Turunen and Ekaterina Zmyvalova.
Today, the majority of the world's Christian population lives in the Global South. This textbook offers in one volume a compact and vivid overview of the history of Christianity in Asia, Africa and Latin America since 1450, focussing on diversity and interdependence, local actors and global entanglements.
Savings and insurance associations are widespread not only in Ethiopia but also in its diaspora, even in countries with diversified and comprehensive formal financial institutions. The contributors to this volume give an extensive overview of these associations in Ethiopia and its diaspora and, at the same time, ask what the activities within these associations tell us about their members' future aspirations and ideas of a »good life«.
The Sahara is Libya's outstanding landscape feature and is the source of most of its significant natural resources. This desert region is also extraordinarily rich in historical and cultural heritage that is in itself another valuable resource, through exploitation by Libya's tourism industry. This volume draws attention to the link between the benefits that Libya draws from its Saharan resources (oil, gas, water, minerals and tourism) and the need to safeguard and record aspects of its cultural heritage. The book also provides a summary of important developments in Saharan studies and shows how these can contribute to modern planning and development of the desert regions.
Ethnography destabilizes the notion of the frontier as merely a geographic space and conveys its limitations--that lead researchers to reflect on their methodological approaches. Frontier Ethnographies explores the ethnographic edges of contemporary anthropological inquiry in Afghanistan and Pakistan by assembling voices of emerging scholars who have conducted field research within the region in the past two decades. Through examining moments of insecurity, vulnerability, doubt, fear, failure, and daydreaming, researchers reflect on their own experiences of field research and how--faced with frontiers--they have been forced to reimagine or reconstruct their understanding of the social world.