NC State textbook adoption 2006-07.

Many anthropological accounts of warfare in indigenous societies have described the taking of heads or other body parts as trophies. But almost nothing is known of the prevalence of trophy-taking of this sort in the armed forces of contemporary nation-states. This book is a history of this type of misconduct among military personnel over the past two centuries, exploring its close connections with colonialism, scientific collecting and concepts of race, and how it is a model for violent power relationships between groups.

The British Missionary movement, which began in earnest in the early 19th century, was one of the most extraordinary movements of the last two centuries, radically transforming the lives of people in large parts of the globe, including in Europe itself. By exploring a range of artifacts, photographs and archival documents that have survived, or emerged from, these transformations, this volume sheds an oblique light on the histories of British Missionaries in Africa and the Pacific, and the ways in which their work is remembered in different parts of the world today. Short contributions describing the histories of particular items, accompanied by rich visual imagery, showcase the extraordinary l items that were caught up in histories of conversion, and are still controversial for many today. By focusing on the varied forms of missionary heritage, this volume aims to question the often used categories of trophies, relics or curios, and highlight the complexity involved in the missionary encounter. This volume is the result of a research networking project bringing together specialists of missionary collections, i.e. artifacts, photographs or archival documents. These specialists are academics of various disciplines, museum curators and indigenous stakeholders who aim to show to a wide audience what missionary heritage constitutes and how varied it is. The heritage in focus is based in museums, archives, churches and archaeological sites in Britain, the Pacific and Africa. With contributions by Ben Burt of the British Museum, Sagale Buadromo of the Fiji Museum, Ghanaian artist, art historian and curator Atta Kwami, Jack Thompson of the University of Edinburgh, Steven Hooper of the Sainsbury Research Unit, Joshua Bell of the Smithsonian Institute, Samoan artist Greg Semu and many more.

Vada Prickett is a 29-year-old Hose Associate at a car wash in South Carolina, and Darla, the woman he loves, is about to marry his friend, rival, and life-long neighbor, Wyatt Yancey. Vada has “spent his life waiting for the thing to get a proper start.” But it will never get that start, for Vada, as this wildly original novel opens, is being crushed to death by Wyatt’s latest animal trophy, a stuffed grizzly bear Vada has been helping him to smuggle—against Darla’s wishes—into Wyatt’s house. It turns out that the cliché is true—at the moment of death, your life does flash before your eyes. Trophy, the account of a man’s final, fleeting instant on earth, joins Vada as he attempts to make that flash last as long as possible. As he lies dying, too soon and too absurdly, Vada tries to unravel the mysteries of his life. He first bargains with God, then rages against the dying of the light. Exhausted, Vada proceeds to prolong, in every way available to a man in his dire circumstances, the time he has remaining. Just beneath Griffith’s dark humor and witty take on our present-day culture lies a meditation on memory and identity and the power of language over both.

When a former sixties radical is murdered during a string of random sniper attacks, the All Souls Legal Cooperative must settle his surprisingly large estate. Then private investigator Sharon McCone comes across a new will, made just days before he died, that disinherits his two children in favor of four unknown and unconnected parties. McCone sifts through Perry Hilderly's belongings but finds little to explain this puzzling change. That is, until she uncovers a .357 with the serial number burned off. As McCone tracks down the new beneficiaries she discovers that the shootings aren't so random after all and that the dead man isn't the only one with a lurid past. To link the heirs to the killings, she must follow a treacherous trail of evidence that travels from the Vietnam years to the present. But along the way the elusive sniper waits in a homicidal rage and takes aim-this time at All Souls and Sharon McCone.

This edited volume mainly focuses on the practice of taking and displaying various body parts as trophies in both North and South America. The editors and contributors (which include Native Peoples from both continents) examine the evidence and causes of Amerindian trophy taking. Additionally, they present objectively and discuss dispassionately the topic of human proclivity toward ritual violence. This book fills the gap in literature on this subject.