Association of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence Best Research in the General History of Recorded Sound (2000) The invention of the cylinder phonograph at the end of the nineteenth century opened up a new world for cultural research. Indeed, Edison's talking machine became one of the basic tools of anthropology. It not only equipped researchers with the means of preserving folk songs but it also enabled them to investigate a wide spectrum of distinct vocal expressions in the emerging fields of anthropology and folklore. Ethnographers grasped its huge potential and fanned out through regional America to record rituals, stories, word lists, and songs in isolated cultures. From the outset the federal government helped fuel the momentum to record cultures that were at risk of being lost. Through the Bureau of American Ethnology, the Smithsonian Institution took an active role in preserving native heritage. It supported projects to make phonographic documentation of American Indian language, music, and rituals before developing technologies and national expansion might futher undermine them. This study of the early phonograph's impact shows traditional ethnography being transformed, for attitudes of both ethnographers and performers were reshaped by this exciting technology. In the presence of the phonograph both fieldwork and the materials collected were revolutionized. By radically altering the old research modes, the phonograph brought the disciplines of anthropology and folklore into the modern era. At first the instrument was as strange and new to the fieldworkers as it was to their subjects. To some the first encounter with the phonograph was a deeply unsettling experience. When it was demonstrated in 1878 before members of the National Academy of Sciences, several members of the audience fainted. Even its inventor was astonished. Of his first successful test of his tinfoil phonograph, Thomas A. Edison said, "I was never taken so aback in my life." The cylinders that have survived from these times offer an unrivaled resource not only for contemporary scholarship but also for a grassroots renaissance of cultural and religious values. In tracing the historical interplay of the talking machine with field research, A Spiral Way underscores the natural adaptablity of cultural study to this new technology.

Detailed account of a 50-year-old woman's Jungian analysis, during which she recovers her energy and sense of self-worth. The emphasis here is on the importance of dreams, which point the way at times of transition.

Evelyn Underhill was a prolific writer, with dozens of books and hundreds of articles to her credit. Underhill wrote about mysticism in the beginning of her career, but later focused more on the spiritual life as lived by ordinary people. Written by Underhill under the pseudonym John Cordelier, ?The Spiral Way? is a Christian look at the journey of the spirit. With chapters structured to parallel the Roman Catholic tradition of the Mysteries of the Rosary, Underhill relates the spiritual journey to the life of Jesus Christ. This book, subtitled ?Mediations Upon the Fifteen Mysteries of the Soul's Ascent, ? examines those mysteries in three phases. The Joyful Mysteries (the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Presentation in the Temple, and the Child amongst the Doctors) examines the ascent of the soul. The Sorrowful Mysteries (the Agony in the Garden, the Scourging, the Crown of Thorns, the Bearing of the Cross, and the Crucifixion) expands upon the trials and the agony experiencedalong an often difficult path. The third phase, the Triumphant Mysteries (the Resurrection, the Ascension, the Coming of the Holy Spirit, the Assumption, and the Coronation) fulfills the promise of the soul's glorious ascension of ultimate redemption.

All communities are teeming with energy, spirit, and knowledge, and Spiral to the Stars taps into and activates this dynamism to discuss Indigenous community planning from a Mvskoke perspective. This book poses questions about what community is, how to reclaim community, and how to embark on the process of envisioning what and where the community can be. Geographer Laura Harjo demonstrates that Mvskoke communities have what they need to dream, imagine, speculate, and activate the wishes of ancestors, contemporary kin, and future relatives—all in a present temporality—which is Indigenous futurity. Organized around four methodologies—radical sovereignty, community knowledge, collective power, and emergence geographies—Spiral to the Stars provides a path that departs from traditional community-making strategies, which are often extensions of the settler state. Readers are provided a set of methodologies to build genuine community relationships, knowledge, power, and spaces for themselves. Communities don’t have to wait on experts because this book helps them activate their own possibilities and expertise. A detailed final chapter provides participatory tools that can be used in workshop settings or one on one. This book offers a critical and concrete map for community making that leverages Indigenous way-finding tools. Mvskoke narratives thread throughout the text, vividly demonstrating that theories come from lived and felt experiences. This is a must-have book for community organizers, radical pedagogists, and anyone wishing to empower and advocate for their community.

This treasure of diverse and visionary writings explores the sacredness of women's everyday lives. Twenty-two contemporary spiritual teachers'including Irina Tweedie, Brooke Medicine Eagle, Swami Radha, Bernadette Roberts, and Mary Giles'probe aspects of their lives from sexuality, work, and cooking, to relationships, prayer, and mysticism. A vision then emerges of women as extraordinary sacred beings, their lives sources of personal and community transformation. This book is a guide for those seeking a practical, workable spiritual life.

"How lovely to discover a book on the craft of writing that is also fun to read . . . Alison asserts that the best stories follow patterns in nature, and by defining these new styles she offers writers the freedom to explore but with enough guidance to thrive." ―Maris Kreizman, Vulture A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019 | A Poets & Writers Best Books for Writers As Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: “For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel― one we’re actually told to follow―and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides . . . But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculosexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?" W. G. Sebald’s Emigrants was the first novel to show Alison how forward momentum can be created by way of pattern, rather than the traditional arc--or, in nature, wave. Other writers of nonlinear prose considered in her “museum of specimens” include Nicholson Baker, Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Gabriel García Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Susan Minot, David Mitchell, Caryl Phillips, and Mary Robison. Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let’s leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike.