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THE POETICS OF POLITICS: “THEIRS” AND “OURS”
Michael Silverstein Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, 1126 East 59th St., Chicago, IL 60637-1580
Events of political communication define issues and create spaces of action that position people with respect to them. How? Political talk is not effective in these ways just because it describes the world—as it is or as it might be. In various ways, effective talk in political events forms a diagrammatic microcosm of its targeted field of action, linking events of political process in which it thrives with varying degrees of compelling effectiveness. Political talk of the “factional” politics of Indo-Fijians draws on principles we can see—and discerning participants can hear!—as well in our own agonistic electoral politics of recognition.
HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY AND THE PREHISTORIC FOUNDATIONS OF MOIETY ORGANIZATION AMONG THE EASTERN PUEBLOS Severin M. Fowles 8 Walters Crescent, The Mumbles, Swansea, Wales, UK SA3 4BB
Past discussions of Eastern Pueblo moiety organization in the American Southwest have been dominated by structural-functionalist positions and have proposed that moieties emerged in this area in order to facilitate the social integration of large, aggregated villages. This paper revisits the question of moiety origins from an archaeological perspective, presenting new data from the ancestral Northern Tiwa region that document the presence of a dual division as early as the late thirteenth century at the large village of T’aitöna (Pot Creek Pueblo). Consideration of the village’s position within the local historical trajectory suggests that moieties were initially established there as a means of formalizing the social relationships between a local population and a recently arrived group of immigrants. The paper ends by arguing that these sorts of specific historical phenomena must be granted greater causal significance in the explanation of Eastern Pueblo moiety origins.
A CROSS CULTURAL TEST OF THE HYPOTHESIS THAT INFRASTRUCTURE PREDICTS INDIVIDUAL ESCHATOLOGY
D. Bruce Dickson Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843
Jeffrey Olsen William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI 96822
P. Fred Dahm Department of Statistics, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843
Mitchell S. Wachtel Department of Pathology, Texas Tech University Medical Center, Lubbock,TX 79430
Cultural materialism gives priority to infrastructure, that is, to productive and reproductive processes, in explaining sociocultural systems. It predicts that social structures and symbolic-ideational beliefs will be favored or eliminated depending on whether they enhance or impede these processes. The symbolic-ideational sphere of virtually every human sociocultural system contains an “individual eschatology” or theory of the fate of the human personality at death. Eschatologies are either “judgmental,” in which the deceased is judged for acts in life, or “nonjudgmental,” in which no such claim is made. Presumably, each is compatible with different infrastructures and structures. We hypothesized that societies with low infrastructural productivity lack judgmental eschatologies, whereas those with high productivity have them. The null hypothesis was tested using a study population of 271 sociocultural systems drawn from the Human Relations Area Files and rejected at the 0.0001 level. However, while strong, the relationship between eschatology and infrastructure is not deterministic. We used a logistic regression model for this non-deterministic relationship. This analysis revealed statistically significant effects on the probability a sociocultural system has a judgmental eschatology depending on geographic area (Africa, Circum- Mediterranean, Insular Pacific, East-Eurasian, and America), general evolutionary level (Pastoral, Plow Agriculture, or other), intensity of agriculture (None, Intensive/Irrigation, or other), and percentage of total subsistence activity accounted for by agriculture. We tentatively conclude that infrastructure predicts the nature of belief regarding the fate of the personality at death, a result consistent with the theory of cultural materialism.
WHO IS THIS REALLY ABOUT ANYWAY? ISHI, KROEBER, AND THE INTERTWINING OF CALIFORNIA INDIAN AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL HISTORIES
Les W. Field Department of Anthropology, MSC 01-1040, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131
Ishi in Three Centuries. Karl Kroeber and Clifton Kroeber, eds. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. 416 pp. $49. 95 cloth. Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last “Wild” Indian. Orin Starn. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2004. 320 pp. $25. 95 cloth.
Leslie A. White, Evolution and Revolution in Anthropology. William J. Peace Reviewed by Aram A. Yengoyan.
Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists. David H. Price. Reviewed by Susan R. Trencher.
Blood and Voice: Navajo Women Ceremonial Practitioners. Maureen Trudelle Schwarz. Reviewed by Louise Lamphere.
Rabinal Achi: A Mayan Drama of War and Sacrifice. Dennis Tedlock. Reviewed by Michael D. Coe.
Mayo Ethnobotany: Land, History, and Traditional Knowledge in Northwest Mexico. David Yetman and Thomas R. Van Devender. Reviewed by Lisa W. Huckell.
Forgotten Tribes: Unrecognized Indians and the Federal Acknowledgment Process. Mark Edwin Miller. Reviewed by Kirk Dombrowski.
Law & Empire in the Pacific: Fiji and Hawai’i. Sally Engle Merry and Donald Brenneis, eds. Reviewed by Richard Scaglion.
Islam in Urban America: Sunni Muslims in Chicago. Garbi Schmidt. Reviewed by Jonathan Benthall.
Mesoamerican Lithic Technology: Experimentation and Interpretation. Kenneth G. Hirth, ed. Reviewed by Robert S. Santley.
Wretched Kush: Ethnic Identities and Boundaries in Egypt’s Nubian Empire. Stuart Tyson Smith. Reviewed by Lana Troy.
Mediterranean Archaeological Landscapes: Current Issues. Effie Athanassopoulos and LuAnn Wandsnider, eds. Reviewed by Donald O. Henry.
Journey to the Ice Age: Discovering an Ancient World. Peter L. Storck. Reviewed by Bruce B. Huckell.
The Settlement of the American Continents: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Human Biogeography. C. Michael Barton, Geoffrey A. Clark, David R. Yesner, and Georges R. Pearson. Reviewed by Brian Fagan.
Archaeology beyond Dialogue. Ian Hodder. Reviewed by Trevor Watkins.
Our Collective Responsibility: The Ethics and Practice of Archaeological Collections Stewardship. S. Terry Childs, ed. Reviewed by Joe Watkins.
Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century. Peter E. Pope. Reviewed by Brad Loewen.
The Juvenile Skeleton. Louise Scheuer, Sue Black, Helen Liversidge, and Angela Christie. Reviewed by Heather J. H. Edgar.
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