As companies increasingly look to the global market for capital, cheaper commodities and labor, and lower production costs, the impact on Mexican and American workers and labor unions is significant. National boundaries and the laws of governments that regulate social relations between laborers and management are less relevant in the era of globalization, rendering ineffective the traditional union strategies of pressuring the state for reform.
Focusing especially on the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (the first international labor agreement linked to an international trade agreement), Norman Caulfield notes the waning political influence of trade unions and their disunity and divergence on crucial issues such as labor migration and workers' rights. Comparing the labor movement's fortunes in the 1970s with its current weakened condition, Caulfield notes the parallel decline in the United States' hegemonic influence in an increasingly globalized economy. As a result, organized labor has been transformed from organizations that once pressured management and the state for worker concessions to organizations that now request that workers concede wages, pensions, and health benefits to remain competitive in the global marketplace.
Though study of American Indian cultures had been fostered for several centuries by missionaries and explorers, it was not until he nineteenth century that a disciplined and systematic approach to the study of New World cultures began to emerge. With Schoolcraft, Powell, Boas, and others, an adventurers’ avocation first became a profession, and it is to these early scholars that we owe the major theoretical perspectives and insights which provided a grounding for American anthropology and folklore studies.
In these twenty-one essays, many of which originally appeared in such now obscure periodicals as Southern Literary Messenger, American Whig Review, and DeLestry’s Western Magazine, Clements presents representative works by most of the major early figures in the field. The collection includes early statements and applications of most of the theoretical approaches to folklore employed in the nineteenth century, and it encompasses each of the major folklore genres studied by nineteenth-century researchers.
Extensive headnotes to each essay provide information about the author, discussion of the theoretical context of each essay, and direction to more contemporary treatments of the theories and materials involved, and the problems addressed. These together with a brief introduction tracing the genesis of American folklore studies, and chronological arrangement of the articles themselves, make Native American Folklore a convenient introduction to and survey of the major ideas and figures of American folklore studies in its formative period.
This collection provides a benchmark that helps secure the position of collaboration between Native American and non-Native American scholars in the forefront of study of Native oral traditions. Seven sets of intercultural authors present Native American oral texts with commentary, exploring dimensions of perspective, discovery, and meaning that emerge through collaborative translation and interpretation. The texts studied all come from the American West but include a rich variety of material, since their tribal sources range from the Yupik in the Arctic to the Yaqui in the Sonoran Desert.
This presentation of jointly authored work is timely: it addresses increasing interest in, calls for, and movement toward reflexivity in the relationships between scholars and the Native communities they study, and it responds to the renewed commitment in those communities to asserting more control over representations of their traditions. Although Native and academic communities have long tried to work together in the study of culture and literature, the relationship has been awkward and imbalanced toward the academics. In many cases, the contributions of Native assistants, informants, translators, and field workers to the work of professional ethnographers has been inadequately credited, ignored, or only recently uncovered. Native Americans usually have not participated in planning and writing such projects. Native American Oral Traditions provides models for overcoming such obstacles to interpreting and understanding Native oral literature in relation to the communities and cultures from which it comes.
Though scholarship on intoxicants in regions like Asia, Africa, Mesoamerica, and South America is plentiful, Native Intoxicants of North America represents the first foray into a study of prehistoric intoxicants throughout North America specifically. In this study, Sean Rafferty fills significant gaps in existing research with a focus on native cultures of North America and holistic coverage of intoxicants by type. Importantly, Rafferty anchors his investigation in an easily overlooked question: why did early humans use intoxicants in the first place?
Rafferty begins by discussing the origins of intoxicants and their role in rituals, medicine, and recreation. Subsequent chapters turn to specific intoxicants—hallucinogens, stimulants, alcohol, and tobacco—making ample use of illustrations across disciplines, weaving a tapestry of culture, ritual, medicine, botany, artifact, and history. All the while, Rafferty explores the societal significance of narcotics, stimulants, and hallucinogens on prehistoric North American cultures.
While Native Intoxicants of North America focuses specifically on Native cultures, the author’s analysis provides the foundation for a valuable broader discussion: that in a world where few human behaviors are universal, experiencing altered states of consciousness is one that transcends culture and time.
From the Chickasaw fighting the Choctaw in the Southeast to the Sioux battling the Cheyenne on the Great Plains, warfare was endemic among the North American Indians when Europeans first arrived on this continent. An impressive array of offensive weaponry and battle tactics gave rise to an equally impressive range of defensive technology. Native Americans constructed very effective armor and shields using wood, bone, and leather. Their fortifications ranged from simple refuges to walled and moated stockades to multiple stockades linked in strategic defensive networks.
In this book, David E. Jones offers the first systematic comparative study of the defensive armor and fortifications of aboriginal Native Americans. Drawing data from ethnohistorical accounts and archaeological evidence, he surveys the use of armor, shields, and fortifications both before European contact and during the historic period by American Indians from the Southeast to the Northwest Coast, from the Northeast Woodlands to the desert Southwest, and from the Sub-Arctic to the Great Plains. Jones also demonstrates the sociocultural factors that affected warfare and shaped the development of different types of armor and fortifications. Extensive eyewitness descriptions of warfare, armor, and fortifications, as well as photos and sketches of Indian armor from museum collections, add a visual dimension to the text.
From the earliest traces of first arrivals to the present, Native Americans represent a diverse and colorful array of cultures. Ranging North America and topics as diverse as archaeological discoveries from thousands of years ago and accounts of reservation life today, this study draws on traditional records as well as oral histories and biographical sketches to bring the history of these varied peoples to life.
Johansen’s account, now available for the first time in one comprehensive volume, tackles the various theories that date Native Americans’ first probable appearance perhaps 30,000 years before Columbus’s arrival. Chapters trace the explosion of westward expansion and include personal sketches of some of those famous for native resistance such as Tecumseh’s six-nation alliance, among many others. The book also explores the new wave of Native American activism that began in the 1960s, reservation life today, the repatriation of artifacts, and the current and widespread revival of native language studies.
Written in a compelling and accessible style, this book not only provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of North American Indians, but also offers an uncommonly rich description of the material and intellectual ways that Native American cultures have influenced the life and institutions of people across the globe.
Sean Harvey explores the morally entangled territory of language and race in this intellectual history of encounters between whites and Native Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Misunderstandings about the differences between European and indigenous American languages strongly influenced whites’ beliefs about the descent and capabilities of Native Americans, he shows. These beliefs would play an important role in the subjugation of Native peoples as the United States pursued its “manifest destiny” of westward expansion.
Over time, the attempts of whites to communicate with Indians gave rise to theories linking language and race. Scholars maintained that language was a key marker of racial ancestry, inspiring conjectures about the structure of Native American vocal organs and the grammatical organization and inheritability of their languages. A racially inflected discourse of “savage languages” entered the American mainstream and shaped attitudes toward Native Americans, fatefully so when it came to questions of Indian sovereignty and justifications of their forcible removal and confinement to reservations.
By the mid-nineteenth century, scientific efforts were under way to record the sounds and translate the concepts of Native American languages and to classify them into families. New discoveries by ethnologists and philologists revealed a degree of cultural divergence among speakers of related languages that was incompatible with prevailing notions of race. It became clear that language and race were not essentially connected. Yet theories of a linguistically shaped “Indian mind” continued to inform the U.S. government’s efforts to extinguish Native languages for years to come.
Johnson argues that nineteenth-century rhetoric was primarily synthetic, derived from the combination of classical elements and eighteenth-century belletristic and epistemological approaches to theory and practice. She reveals that nineteenth-century rhetoric supported several rhetorical arts, each conceived systematically from a similar theoretical foundation.
Daniel Otte offers a comprehensive taxonomic treatise on all known species of grasshoppers from the Gulf of Panama to Alaska. Grasshoppers are a dominant form of life in most terrestrial habitats. The abundance of grasshoppers and the ease of obtaining them have brought about their extensive use in a wide variety of biological studies. It is probably fair to say that grasshoppers are biologically better understood than any equivalent group of insects. They were used in pioneering studies in genetics and are increasingly being used to test evolutionary, ecological, and physiological theories. Unfortunately, much of this work is still based on a poor classification, and many studies are hindered by difficulties which arise in identifying the species.
Now for the first time scientists are provided with:
– Illustrated keys and lists for distinguishing genera and species;
– Information on distributional limits, habitat preference, ecology, behavior, and life cycle;
– A list of pertinent references;
– Point distribution maps;
– A taxonomic index as well as a history of name changes.
But the book’s most spectacular feature is the author’s detailed drawings of all species in full color. The North American Grasshoppers will be especially useful to scientists in agriculture, environmental assessment, biogeography, grassland ecology, and insect taxonomy, and will also appeal to amateur naturalists. Undoubtedly, it will long stand as a definitive reference in its field.
Walter E. Klippel came to the University of Tennessee in 1977 as an assistant professor of anthropology. In the forty years that followed, he supervised and mentored countless students in archaeology and biological anthropology, published more than fifty journal articles and book chapters, and assembled a zooarchaeological comparative collection of national significance. During his tenure, Klippel’s important contributions to the field of zooarchaeology would impact not only his students and colleagues but the development of zooarchaeological research as a whole. Even after his retirement in 2017, Klippel’s influence is readily apparent in the studies of his contemporaries. North American Zooarchaeology: Reflections on History and Continuity is their tribute to his work.
Developed by friends, students, and colleagues of Walter Klippel, North American Zooarchaeology presents a wide-ranging collection of essays through the lens of his remarkable career. Each chapter of the volume represents a prevailing theme notable in Klippel’s research, including geological and landscape contexts, taphonomy, and the incorporation of actualistic methodologies and new technologies into zooarchaeological analyses. The diversity of topics represented across the ten chapters showcase just how extensive Klippel’s research interests are and suggest how much contemporary zooarchaeology owes to his vision. The authors take up this broad palette to explore the various ways in which the framework of zooarchaeology can be used and applied in nontraditional settings.
With a foreword by Bonnie Styles and Bruce McMillan, longtime friends and colleagues of Walter Klippel, this volume reflects on the history and continuity of zooarchaeology in North America and honors one of its most notable contemporary contributors. With its multifaceted approach, this volume is sure to appeal to a broad array of practitioners in the field of zooarchaeology.
Adoption of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 ended a long and sometimes acrimonious debate over the question of how to organize and govern the western territories of the United States. Many eastern leaders viewed the Northwest Territory as a colonial possession, while freedom-loving settlers demanded local self- government. These essays address the ambiguities of the Ordinance, balance of power politics in North America, missionary activity in the territory, slavery, and higher education in the Old Northwest.
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