Mother Jones is an award-winning national magazine widely respected for its groundbreaking investigative reporting and coverage of sustainability and environmental issues.

Mother Jones is an award-winning national magazine widely respected for its groundbreaking investigative reporting and coverage of sustainability and environmental issues.

At a juncture in history when much interest and attention is focused on Central and South American political, ecological, social, and environmental concerns, this dictionary fills a major gap in reference materials relating to Amerindian tribes. This one-volume reference collects important information about the current status of the indigenous peoples of Central and South America and offers a chronology of the conquest of the Amerindian tribes; a list of tribes by country; and an extensive bibliography of surviving American Indian groups. Historical as well as contemporary descriptions of approximately 500 existing tribes or groups of people are provided along with several bibliographic citations at the conclusion of each entry. The focus of the volume is on those Indian groups that still maintain a sense of tribal identity. For the vast majority of his entries, James S. Olson draws material from the Smithsonian Institution's seven-volume Handbook of South American Indians as well as other classic resources of a broad, general nature. Much attention is also focused on the complicated question of South American languages and on the definition of what constitutes an Indian. Olson's introduction cites dozens of valuable reference works relating to these topics. Following the introduction, this survey of surviving Amerindians is divided into sections that contain entries for each existing tribe or group; an appendix listing tribes by country; the Amerindian conquest chronology; and a bibliographical essay. This unique reference work should be an important item for most public, college, and university libraries. It will be welcomed by reference librarians, historians, anthropologists, and their students.

Cross-Cultural Dimensions in Conscious Thought represents a major contribution, describing an empirically-validated method for analyzing the thematic content of narratives as a tool for comparative research in Anthropology, Cultural Psychology and Ethnopsychiatry. This second volume in the two volume series presents research conducted in Ireland, Kenya, Japan, the Philippines, Canada, the United States, India, Brazil and Venezuela. This research illustrates, for the cross-cultural researcher, the usefulness of projective techniques as a means for eliciting culturally relevant information from informants. It also exemplifies how the analysis of narrative themes, when it is related to other material obtained in field settings, can reveal meaningful within-group and between-group differences in human experience, and can help us make sense of conscious human experience across a wide range of sociocultural contexts.

Max Weber viewed modern life as disenchanted, an arena from which scientific inquiry had banished magic. In contrast, Mark Schneider argues intriguingly that enchantment—the sense that we are confronted by inexplicable phenomena—persists in the world today, although it has shifted from the natural to the cultural arena. Culture and Enchantment shows that students of culture today operate in social and intellectual circumstances similar to those of seventeenth-century natural philosophers. Just as Newton was drawn to alchemy, scholars today are fascinated by ghostly and mercurial agents thought to account for the meanings of cultural entities. For interpretive disciplines, Schneider suggests, meaning often behaves behaves as mysteriously as the apparitions pursued by centuries ago by natural philosophers. He demonstrates this using two case studies from anthropology: Clifford Geertz's description of Balinese cockfights and Yoruba statuary, and Claude Levi-Strauss's analyses of myths. These provide a basis for actively engaging disputes over the meaning and interpretation of culture. Culture and Enchantment will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience in anthropology, sociology, history, history and sociology of science, culture studies, and literary theory. Schneider's provocative arguments will make this book a fulcrum in the continuing debate over the nature and prospects of cultural inquiry.

As Lévi-Strauss freely explores the mythologies of the Americas, with occasional incursions into European and Japanese folklore, tales of sloths and squirrels interweave with discussions of Freud, Saussure, "signification," and plays by Sophocles and Labiche. Lévi-Strauss critiques psychoanalytic interpretation and defends the interpretive powers of structuralism. "Electrifying. . . . A brilliant demonstration of structural analysis in action. . . . Can be read with pleasure and profit by anyone interested in that aspect of self-discovery that comes through knowledge of the universal and timeless myths that live on in all of us."—Jonathan Sharp, San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle "A characteristic tour de force. . . . One remains awed by him."—Colin Thubron, Sunday Times "With all its epistemological depth, the book reads at times like a Simenon or a Lewis Carroll, fusing concise methodology with mastery of style."—Bernadette Bucher, American Ethnologist "[An] engagingly provocative exploration of mythology in the Americas. . . . Always a good read."—Choice "A playful, highly entertaining book, fluently and elegantly translated by Bénédicte Chorier."—Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, New York Times Book Review