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Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day! Berghahn recognizes the significance of indigenous cultures and in the spirit of this day, we have collected some of our relevant titles below.
Performing Knowledge in an Australian Indigenous Community
Franca Tamisari
“This is an excellent exploration and exegesis of Yolngu performance in all its varied forms from ceremonial to popular song and dance … This book is a highly satisfying and compelling read as its penetrating argument utilizes a sophisticated interweaving of theory and ethnography to demonstrate how learning ‘The Law’ is a foundational sense of being in and part of the boneland, (ngaraka), knowing the stories, being able to relate appropriately to kin and country and having the skills, knowledge, rights and ability to perform the songs and dances.” • Fiona Magowan, Queen’s University Belfast.
Volume 15, ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology
Read freely available introduction.
Creation and Creativity in Indigenous Lowland South America
Anthropological Perspectives
Edited by Ernst Halbmayer and Anne Goletz
“This volume is an outstanding piece of scholarship, which, from the standpoint of the processes of creation and creativity, accomplishes, in a good measure, a critique and reassessment of current styles on analyzing Amazonian sociality.” • Juan Alvaro Echeverri, Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Read freely available introduction.
Open Access
Decolonialization and Movements for Environmental Justice
Edited by Jaskiran Dhillon
“Although the essays were already published a while ago, they have not lost any of their relevance, and one can only wish that thanks to the volume being available through Open Access many people will discover this topical publication.” • Amerindian Research
Read freely available introduction, and more with Open Access.
Kaniuekutat: The Life of an Innu Hunter
Georg Henriksen
“Through his own life story, Kaniuekutat speaks to many issues of importance facing the Innu in contemporary times, with an eye on tradition and the lessons of the past…A valuable text for students of anthropology, Native studies, and history.” · Choice
Read freely available introduction.
Perspectives on the Home, Hearth and Household in the Circumpolar North
Edited by David G. Anderson, Robert P. Wishart, and Virginie Vaté
“Each chapter offers something interesting for the reader…One can list bright and sometimes provocative ideas put forth by each contributor…The main advantage of this book is the ability to spark interest among the most diverse groups of specialists in the field of indigenous cultures.” · Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
Edited by Jóhann Páll Árnason and Björn Wittrock
“…the articles, taken together, provide an exciting picture of the diversity that is unified in the Nordic region… [and] a significant contribution to the discussion of multiple modernities.” · Scandinavian-Canadian Studies/Études scandinaves au Canada
Read freely available introduction.
Animism in Rainforest and Tundra
Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia
Edited by Marc Brightman, Vanessa Elisa Grotti, and Olga Ulturgasheva
“This thoughtful volume is extraordinarily rich and will prompt all of us interested in these questions to think about them from fresh perspectives.” • Anthropological Forum
Read freely available introduction.
The 1926/27 Soviet Polar Census Expeditions
Edited by David G. Anderson
“The contributors have made excellent use of recently opened archives and interviews with descendants of the people surveyed to provide a uniquely human portrait of this seminal project. While the chapters focus most thoroughly on the Nenets, Khanty, and Yakut, the analysis is of broader relevance to an understanding of Siberian peoples during the first stages of the sovietization of the Far North. This book will prove of unique value to historians of the Soviet period as well as to cultural anthropologists specializing in polar peoples. Highly recommended.” • Choice
Indigenous Peoples and Demography
The Complex Relation between Identity and Statistics
Edited by Per Axelsson and Peter Sköld
“This interesting collection looks at changes in population studies and examines indigeneity in contexts as different as Australia and Norway. It is particularly valuable with respect to two broad geographic categories: countries originally settled by British colonists, and states in northern Europe… the study of categorization and enumeration offers valuable insights on how ethnic boundaries are established, and how–inevitably–they are challenged and contested.” · Choice
Read freely available introduction.
Narrating the Future in Siberia
Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny
Olga Ulturgasheva
“This thought-provoking and highly original work, relevant especially for students of the anthropology of childhood, supplies an important new chapter to native Siberian ethnography. Highly recommended for anyone seriously interested in today’s Siberia, all levels.” · Choice
Indigenous Peoples and Global Communication
Valerie Alia
“In sum, New Media Nationoffers scholars of minorities, of digital media and of globalizing indigeneities the opportunity to understand how the practices of producing meanings through discourses of resistance contribute over time to the development and re-invigoration of alternative discourses often thought to have been dissolved by the spread of ‘mass media’. By engaging in micro-analyses of specific cultural discourses and their elaboration in specific emergent media situations, Alia alerts her readers to the importance of the complexity of the local.” • Discourse & Communication
Volume 2, Anthropology of Media
Read freely available introduction.
The Naskapi on the Edge of the White Man’s World
Georg Henriksen
“Valuable as an example of the anthropology of development and modernization prevalent in northern Canada at the time, the book transcends this genre in the acuity of its ethnographic analysis and beautifully captures a moment – Henriksen began fieldwork in 1966 – when Mushuau Innu were making the transition to permanent communities… This book is important for Algonquian and circumpolar specialists, as well as for students wishing to understand dynamics of hunting societies in modernity. It has also become significant as a historical record both of the Innu people and of anthropology in northern Canada.” · Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Read freely available introduction.
Culture and Identity in the Inuit Homeland
Valerie Alia
“…a thought-provoking book. Alia lays out the intricacies of Inuit naming so clearly, describes the Arctic environment so vividly, and conveys such a rich sense of Inuit values, concerns, and humour that readers are likely to hunger for more information and to pose ethnographic and on mastic questions that press forward the horizons of Inuit ethnography. Names and Nunavut is a welcome addition to Arctic ethnography and should be of interest not only to linguists and anthropologists working in the Arctic but to anyone interested in the relationship between onomasty, personhood, and cosmology and to anyone looking for fresh insights to the micropractices of linguistic and onomastic colonialism” · NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics
Read freely available introduction.
Knowing and Managing Animals in the Circumpolar North
Edited by David G. Anderson and Mark Nuttall
“The edited work contains one of the most interesting sets of northern papers to appear in a very long time…each paper is excellent…this book will hopefully provoke considerable thought…This is a work that should be discussed in terms of the particulars of the various papers, but also for the overview it provides.” – Polar Record
Volume 104 Forthcoming in November 2014!