Results by title

2 books match the query 'Krech, Shepard'

cover of Expanding American Anthropology, 1945-1980: A Generation Reflects

Expanding American Anthropology, 1945-1980

A Generation Reflects

Edited by Alice Beck Kehoe and Paul L. Doughty

University of Alabama Press, 2012

Expanding American Anthropology, 1945–1980: A Generation Reflects takes an inside look at American anthropology’s participation in the enormous expansion of the social sciences after World War II. During this time the discipline of anthropology itself came of age, expanding into diverse subfields, frequently on the initiative of individual practitioners. The Association of Senior Anthropologists of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) called upon a number of its leaders to give accounts of their particular innovations in the discipline. This volume is the result of the AAA venture—a set of primary documents on the history of American anthropology at a critical juncture.

In preparing the volume, the editors endeavored to maintain the feeling of “oral history” within the chapters and to preserve the individual voices of the contributors. There are many books on the history of anthropology, but few that include personal essays from such a broad swath of different perspectives. The passing of time will make this volume increasingly valuable in understanding the development of American anthropology from a small discipline to the profession of over ten thousand practitioners.
[more]
cover of Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

David M. Gordon

Ohio University Press, 2012

Indigenous knowledge has become a catchphrase in global struggles for environmental justice. Yet indigenous knowledges are often viewed, incorrectly, as pure and primordial cultural artifacts. This collection draws from African and North American cases to argue that the forms of knowledge identified as “indigenous” resulted from strategies to control environmental resources during and after colonial encounters.

At times indigenous knowledges represented a “middle ground” of intellectual exchanges between colonizers and colonized; elsewhere, indigenous knowledges were defined through conflict and struggle. The authors demonstrate how people claimed that their hybrid forms of knowledge were communal, religious, and traditional, as opposed to individualist, secular, and scientific, which they associated with European colonialism.

Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment offers comparative and transnational insights that disturb romantic views of unchanging indigenous knowledges in harmony with the environment. The result is a book that informs and complicates how indigenous knowledges can and should relate to environmental policy-making.

Contributors: David Bernstein, Derick Fay, Andrew H. Fisher, Karen Flint, David M. Gordon, Paul Kelton, Shepard Krech III, Joshua Reid, Parker Shipton, Lance van Sittert, Jacob Tropp, James L. A. Webb, Jr., Marsha Weisiger

[more]