Synopses & Reviews
This colorful, richly textured account of spiritual training and practice within an American Indian social network emphasizes narrative over analysis. Thomas Buckley's foregrounding of Yurok narratives creates one major level of dialogue in an innovative ethnography that features dialogue as its central theoretical trope. Buckley places himself in conversation with contemporary Yurok friends and elders, with written texts, and with twentieth-century anthropology as well. He describes Yurok Indian spirituality as "a significant field in which individual and society meet in dialoguecooperating, resisting, negotiating, changing each other in manifold ways. 'Culture,' here, is not a thing but a process, an emergence through time."
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. 295-312) and index.
Synopsis
"The most in-depth, complex, and analytically sophisticated portrayal of Yurok spirituality ever written by an anthropologist [and] the most important ethnographic work about the Yurok in general since Kroeber's work in the early twentieth century."Les W. Field, author of
The Grimace of Macho Ratón"Its description of Yurok religious practice in recent times is both sympathetic and insightful, providing an interweaving series of narratives and interpretations. The author makes an eloquent case for cultural continuity."Michael Harkin, author of The Heiltsuks
About the Author
Thomas Buckley is an independent scholar and writer living in Maine. He previously taught anthropology and American Indian studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and coedited Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation (California, 1988).
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE: CONTEXTS
1. The Yurok Reservation
2. Double Helix
3. Native Authors
PART TWO: TESTIMONY
4. Seeing with Their Own Eyes
5. Doctors
6. The GO-Road
PART THREE: UNDERSTANDINGS
7. The One Who Flies All around the World
8. The World
9. Melancholy
10. The Shaker Church
11. Jump Dance
Notes
References
Acknowledgments of Permissions
Index