“This is not a memoir. Rather, this is a fraternal meditation on the question: ‘Are we friends, my brother?’ The story is uncertain, the characters are in flux, the voices are plural, the photographs are as troubled as the prose. This is not a memoir.”
Thus Scott Abbott introduces the reader to his exploration of the life of his brother John, a man who died of AIDS in 1991 at the age of forty. Writing about his brother, he finds he is writing about himself and about the warm-hearted, educated, and homophobic LDS family that forged the core of his identity.
Images and quotations are interwoven with the reflections, as is a critical female voice that questions his assertions and ridicules his rhetoric. The book moves from the starkness of a morgue’s autopsy through familial disintegration and adult defiance to a culminating fraternal conversation. This exquisitely written work will challenge notions of resolution and wholeness.
Winner of the book manuscript prize in creative nonfiction in the Utah Arts Council’s Original Writing Competition.
Winner of the 15 Bytes Book Award for Creative Nonfiction.
Archaeologists refer to stone artifacts that are altered by or used to alter other items through abrasion, pecking, or polishing as "ground stone." This includes mortars, and pestles used to process vegetal materials, pigments, clays, and tempers; abraders, polishing stones, and hammerstones for manufacturing other artifacts; and artifacts shaped by abrasion or pecking, such as axes, pipes, figurines, ornaments, and architectural pieces. Because there is a fuzzy line between flaked and ground stone artifacts, some analysts state that ground stone includes any stone item not considered flaked.
This manual presents a flexible yet structured method for analyzing stone artifacts and classifying them in meaningful categories. The analysis techniques record important attributes based on design, manufacture, and use.
Part I contains discussions on determining function, classification, attributes of grinding technology, use-wear analysis, modeling tool use, utilization of ethnographic and experimental resources, and research suggestions. Part II contains definitions and descriptions of artifact types. Here the author also seeks to unravel the knot that has developed around conflicting application of terms.
A significant reference for any archaeological fieldworker or student who encounters such artifacts.
Law and the Living Colorado River asserts that the so-called Law of the River—the vast assemblage of interstate compacts, international treaties, federal and state statutes, regulations, contracts, and other legal documents governing use and management of the Colorado River—ignores the needs of the river as a nested system of aquatic and aquatic-dependent ecosystems. Although society now recognizes and appreciates the natural values of the Colorado River, the Law of the River remains fixed in service of human economies like irrigation and hydropower. Robert W. Adler contends that the law must respond to changing values that prioritize natural systems alongside human ones. He proposes acknowledging the legal rights of the river itself, following the recent movement to recognize rights of nature in other ecosystems around the world. Recognizing that U.S. law has significant barriers to that proposal, however, Adler borrows from aspects of international water law to propose as a shorter-term strategy amendments to the Colorado River Compact that would enhance protection of the river’s environmental needs and values.
Adler delivered this lecture on March 17, 2022, at the 27th annual symposium of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment, jointly sponsored by the Wallace Stegner Center and the Water & Tribes Initiative | Colorado River Basin.
Utah Series in Middle East Studies
In this notable work, Souad T. Ali examines the seminal writings of Egyptian reformist scholar Ali'Abd al-Raziq, often regarded as the intellectual father of Islamic secularism, and his controversial argument that the caliphate should be considered a human innovation, rather than a religious imperative. 'Abd al Raziq contended that Islam is "a religion, not a state; a message, not a government," a major departure from the traditional view that religious and political spheres are intertwined and inseparable in Islam.
Opponents denounced 'Abd al-Raziq's ideas as a foreign corruption imported from the West. Ali's careful, objective, and scholarly examination of 'Abd al-Raziq's work, however, reveals that his arguments are not based in Western thought. Rather, they sit firmly within the dictates of Islam's sacred texts, particularly the Quran and Hadith, and also enjoy considerable support from the historical record.
This analysis critically challenges prevalent misinterpretations of Islam that have endured for centuries. Ali recognizes the varied models and discourses that have arisen throughout different epochs, especially so the role that Western intervention has played in placing the question of Islam's modernity at the forefront of intellectual debate. Throughout, the study emphasizes the atmosphere of openness and tolerance that is a requisite for free, intelligent debate.
The Danish-Mormon migration to Utah in the nineteenth century was, relative to population size, one of the largest European religious out-migrations in history. Hundreds of thousands of Americans can trace their ancestry to Danish Mormons, but few know about the social and cultural ramifications of their ancestors’ conversion to Mormonism. This book tells that exciting and complex story for the first time.
In 1849, after nearly a thousand years of state- controlled religion, Denmark’s first democratic constitution granted religious freedom. One year later, the arrival of three Mormon missionaries in Denmark and their rapid success at winning converts to their faith caused a crisis in Danish society over the existential question: "How could someone be Danish but not Lutheran?" Over the next half-century nearly thirty thousand Danes joined the LDS Church, more than eighteen thousand of whom emigrated to join their fellow Mormons in Utah. This volume explores the range of Danish public reactions to Mormonism over a seventy-year period—from theological concerns articulated by Søren and Peter Christian Kierkegaard in the 1850s to fear-mongering about polygamy and white slavery in silent films of the 1910s and 1920s—and looks at the personal histories of converts.
Honorable Mention for Best International Book from the Mormon History Association.
Canyoneering 2: Technical Loop Hikes is a guide to seven, week-long backpack trips into some for the most unspoiled and least-visited areas in the Utah section of the Colorado Plateau. Every hike contains the four essentials of a great canyoneering route: spectacular canyons, intimate narrows, big views, and physical challenge. Although the routes are difficult, newcomers to the canyons will also find detailed information here that can be used to plan less demanding excursions. Hikes include Muddy Creek in the San Rafael Swell, Dirty Devil North, Dirty Devil South, Dark Canyon, White Canyon, Escalante East, and Escalante South. For experienced canyoneers.
Debitage, the by-product flakes and chips from stone tool production, is the most abundant artifact type in prehistoric archaeological sites. For much of the period in which archaeology has employed scientific methodology, debitage has been discarded or ignored as debris. Now archaeologists have begun to recognize its potential to provide information about the kinds of tools produced and the characteristics of the technology being employed. Debitage can even provide clues regarding human organizational systems such as settlement mobility and site functions.
This volume brings together some of the most recent research on debitage analysis and interpretation. It presents stone tool production experiments and offers detailed archaeological investigations for interpreting variability at the individual and collective levels. Although there are a number of volumes that focus on general analysis of lithic artifacts, this is the first volume to address debitage and should be of use to a wide range of archaeological researchers.
When Europeans first visited California, they encountered one of the most culturally diverse regions of the New World. The coasts and ecologically richest areas were dotted with small polities which were supported not by horticulture but exclusively by hunting, fishing, and gathering, placing them among the more complex hunter-gatherer groups in the world.
The Origins of a Pacific Coast Chiefdom considers the Chumash, perhaps the most hierarchically organized of the California groups. It explores the final thousand years of coastal Chumash culture, which culminated in the complex society witnessed by the earliest Spanish explorers.
Chumash life was characterized by settled villages, massive production of prestige goods, sophisticated plank canoes, and extensive maritime exchange systems—features more characteristic of agricultural societies. Archaeological sites in the island Chumash area are exceptionally well preserved, permitting precise interpretations of both subtle and major changes in technologies, subsistence, prestige goods, and specialized shell and lithic industries. The data and interpretations presented here are the result of fifteen years of intensive investigation on the Channel Islands.
Winner of the 2019 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry
Zachary Asher’s second collection, gone bird in the glass hours, is a play in verse, featuring seven voices. It begins with a rabbi, bewildered and bent by personal grief, guided and beguiled by elusive Blue Postman into the world of “the glass hours” and its inhabitants.
Rooted in magical realism, gone bird in the glass hours experiments with multiple forms from epistles to centos, from fractals to prayers. These poems are brave in their excavations of grief and solace, wonder and rage, collective trauma and, ultimately, transcendence.
“John Wesley Powell: explorer, writer, geologist, anthropologist, land planner, bureaucrat. Which one do we focus on?” This is the question author James M. Aton poses at the beginning of his biography of Powell, though he soon decides that it is impossible to ignore any facet of Powell’s life. Powell was a polymath, one whose “divergent interests resemble one of those braided streambeds in his beloved canyon country, branching out in many directions, but ultimately beginning and ending in the same stream."
Aton beautifully tells the multidimensional stories of Powell’s childhood, his military and teaching careers, his famous and exciting explorations of the Colorado River, and the battles he waged from his influential positions within the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology and the United States Geological Survey. This new edition of John Wesley Powell: His Life and Legacy, first printed as an issue of the Boise State University Western Writers Series, includes the original biography, but also features Aton’s new interpretations of Powell’s writings on exploration, land-planning, anthropology, and irrigation, and incorporates the author’s distinguished faculty lecture on Powell and cash-register dams in the Colorado River Basin.
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