Ethnology comprises the seventh and eighth volumes in the Handbook of Middle American Indians, published in cooperation with the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University under the general editorship of Robert Wauchope (1909–1979). The editor of the Ethnology volumes is Evon Z. Vogt (1918–2004), Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social Relations, Harvard University.

These two books contain forty-three articles, all written by authorities in their field, on the ethnology of the Maya region, the southern Mexican highlands and adjacent regions, the central Mexican highlands, western Mexico, and northwest Mexico. Among the topics described for each group of Indians are the history of ethnological investigations, cultural and linguistic distributions, major postcontact events, population, subsistence systems and food patterns, settlement patterns, technology, economy, social organization, religion and world view, aesthetic and recreational patterns, life cycle and personality development, and annual cycle of life.

The volumes are illustrated with photographs and drawings of contemporary and early historical scenes of native Indian life in Mexico and Central America.

The Handbook of Middle American Indians was assembled and edited at the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University with the assistance of grants from the National Science Foundation and under the sponsorship of the National Research Council Committee on Latin American Anthropology.

Paradoxically, at a time when hunting and gathering societies are almost a thing of the past, a subsistence system based on gathering is not only persisting but actually gaining ground in southeastern Indonesia. The economy of the small islands of Roti and Savu is centered on the intensive use of the lontar palm tree, whose juice is the staple of the people's diet and whose leaves, leafstalks, and trunks provide the wherewithal for their housing and most of their needs.

This economy, marvelously stable and adaptive, is described in detail by James Fox, and is contrasted with that of the large neighboring islands, Timor and Sumba; there slash-and-burn agriculture has led to steady ecological deterioration, in the wake of which the lontar economy of the smaller islands has gained a foothold and is gradually expanding. How these developments came about is revealed by an examination of the history of the islands over several hundred years and the effects of the policies of successive colonial governments. The historical perspective adds depth to the ethnographic presentation and is vital to the anthropological analysis of social change.

In preparation for the writing of this book the author spent three years in the Timor area, especially on Roti; learned Dutch, Indonesian, and several local island dialects; and had done intensive historical research in Indonesia and in archives in the Netherlands.

A distinguished anthropologist and a creative force behind postmodern writing in his field, Vincent Crapanzano here focuses his considerable critical powers upon his own culture. In essays that question how the human sciences, particularly anthropology and psychoanalysis, articulate their fields of study, Crapanzano addresses nothing less than the enormous problem of defining the self in both its individual and collective projections.

Treating subjects as diverse as Roman carnivals and Balinese cockfights, circumcision, dreaming, and spirit possession in Morocco, transference in psychoanalysis, self-characterization in teenage girls’ gossip, Alice in Wonderland, and Jane Austen’s Emma, dialogue models in hermeneutics, and semantic vertigo in Hamlet’s Elsinore, these essays look critically at the inner workings of interpretation in human sciences and literary study. In modern Western culture’s attempts to interpret and communicate the nature of other cultures, Crapanzano finds a crippling crisis in representation. He shows how the quest for knowledge of “exotic” and “primitive” people is often confused with an unexamined need for self-definition, and he sets forth the resulting interpretive paradoxes, particularly the suppression of any awareness of the play of power and desire in such an approach. What is missing from contemporary theories of interpretation is, in Crapanzano’s account, a crucial understanding of the role context plays in any act of communication or its representation—in interpretation itself.