The King of the World in the Land of the Pygmies

The King of the World in the Land of the Pygmies PDF Author: Joan Mark
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803282506
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Joan Mark offers an interpretive biography of Patrick Tracy Lowell Putnam (1904–53), who spent twenty-five years living among the Bambuti pygmies of the Ituri Forest in what is now Zaire. On the Epulu River he constructed Camp Putnam as a harmonious multiracial community. He modeled his camp on the “dude ranches” of the American West, taking in paying guests while running a medical clinic and occasionally offering legal aid to the local people, and assumed the role of intermediary between locals and visitors, including Colin M. Turnbull, author of the classic Forest People. Mark describes Putnam’s mercurial relations with family and with his African and American wives—and follows him to his sad and violent end. She places Patrick Putnam within the context of three different anthropological traditions and examines his contribution as an expert on pygmies.

The King of the World in the Land of the Pygmies

The King of the World in the Land of the Pygmies PDF Author: Joan Mark
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803282506
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book

Book Description
Joan Mark offers an interpretive biography of Patrick Tracy Lowell Putnam (1904–53), who spent twenty-five years living among the Bambuti pygmies of the Ituri Forest in what is now Zaire. On the Epulu River he constructed Camp Putnam as a harmonious multiracial community. He modeled his camp on the “dude ranches” of the American West, taking in paying guests while running a medical clinic and occasionally offering legal aid to the local people, and assumed the role of intermediary between locals and visitors, including Colin M. Turnbull, author of the classic Forest People. Mark describes Putnam’s mercurial relations with family and with his African and American wives—and follows him to his sad and violent end. She places Patrick Putnam within the context of three different anthropological traditions and examines his contribution as an expert on pygmies.

Big and Small

Big and Small PDF Author: Lynne Vallone
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300231717
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
A groundbreaking work that explores human size as a distinctive cultural marker in Western thought Author, scholar, and editor Lynne Vallone has an international reputation in the field of child studies. In this analytical tour-de-force, she explores bodily size difference—particularly unusual bodies, big and small—as an overlooked yet crucial marker that informs human identity and culture. Exploring miniaturism, giganticism, obesity, and the lived experiences of actual big and small people, Vallone boldly addresses the uncomfortable implications of using physical measures to judge normalcy, goodness, gender identity, and beauty. This wide-ranging work surveys the lives and contexts of both real and imagined persons with extraordinary bodies from the seventeenth century to the present day through close examinations of art, literature, folklore, and cultural practices, as well as scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses. Generously illustrated and written in a lively and accessible style, Vallone’s provocative study encourages readers to look with care at extraordinary bodies and the cultures that created, depicted, loved, and dominated them.

Worldly Provincialism

Worldly Provincialism PDF Author: H. Glenn Penny
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472089260
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Worldly Provincialism introduces readers to German anthropology during the age of empire and illustrates how the initial motives and interests that gave birth to German anthropology were channeled and shaped by contexts as various as romantic voyages in the South Pacific, the Herero wars in Southwest Africa, open-air presentations of exotic peoples in Berlin, and prison camps during World War I. It also shows that Germans' unique intellectual traditions, their emphasis on concepts of culture, and the late arrival of both the German nation-state and the German colonial empire affected their interest in and relationships with non-Europeans. Worldly Provincialism confirms that there is no justification for presupposing that Europeans shared a common cultural code while abroad or for assuming that they would have behaved similarly during their interactions with non-Europeans. Thus, we must rethink the relationships among anthropology, colonialism, and race. It also forces a rethinking of our understanding of race in the nineteenth century, when race science emerged and eclipsed many alternative racial theories. H. Glenn Penny is Assistant Professor of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Matti Bunzl is Aaron and Robin Fischer Assistant Professor of Jewish Culture and Society, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Photography and American Coloniality

Photography and American Coloniality PDF Author: Raoul J. Granqvist
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628952881
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This book is the first to question both why and how the colonialist mythologies represented by the work of photographer Eliot Elisofon persist. It documents and discusses a heterogeneous practice of American coloniality of power as it explores Elisofon’s career as war photographer-correspondent and staff photographer for LIFE, filmmaker, author, artist, and collector of “primitive art” and sculpture. It focuses on three areas: Elisofon’s narcissism, voyeurism, and sexism; his involvement in the homogenizing of Western social orders and colonial legacies; and his enthused mission of “sending home” a mass of still-life photographs, annexed African artifacts, and assumed vintage knowledge. The book does not challenge his artistic merit or his fascinating personality; what it does question is his production and imagining of “difference.” As the text travels from World War II to colonialism, postcolonialism, and the Cold War, from Casablanca to Leopoldville (Kinshasa), it proves to be a necessarily strenuous and provocative trip.

Congo Solo

Congo Solo PDF Author: Emily Hahn
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773539042
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Emily Hahn was one of the most prolific and enduring writers atThe New Yorker– her first by-line appeared there in 1926, her last in 1996. She was also the author of fifty-three books, and, had her 1933 travel memoir,Congo Solo, not been published in a censored version during the darkest days of the Great Depression, it might well have been hailed as a classic of the genre, alongside Dinesen'sOut of Africa. In many ways Hahn's vivid account of her eight-month sojourn in a remote medical clinic was years ahead of its time. A woman who lived life on her own terms, Hahn was an unknown and struggling writer whenCongo Solowas published. Here – restored to the form she had intended – is Hahn's unforgettable narrative, a vivid, provocative, and at times disturbing firsthand account of the racism, brutality, sexism, and exploitation that were everyday life realities under Belgium's iron-fisted colonial rule. Until now, the few copies ofCongo Soloin circulation were the adulterated version, which the author altered after pressure from her publisher and threats of litigation from the main character's family. This edition makes available a lost treasure of women's travel writing that shocks and impresses, while shedding valuable light on the gender and race politics of the period.

Conversations In The Rainforest

Conversations In The Rainforest PDF Author: Richard Peterson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429721528
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A rich, interdisciplinary study of Central African land ethics incorporating conversations with local rainforest inhabitants that yield vibrant new insights into the dilemmas of sustaining Africa's rainforests and its people. In Conversations in the Rainforest, Richard B. Peterson combines interdisciplinary research and intimate, first-hand convers

Western Music and Its Others

Western Music and Its Others PDF Author: Georgina Born
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520220846
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
"[Western Music and Its Others] will be taken as an important book signalling a new turn within the field. It takes the best features of traditional, rigorous scholarship and brings these to bear upon contemporary, more speculative questions. The level of theoretical sophistication is high. The studies within it are polemical and timely and of lasting scholarly value."—Will Straw, co-editor of Theory Rules: Art as Theory/ Theory and Art "The great value of this collection lies in the wealth of questions that it raises--questions that together crystallize the recent concerns of musicology with force and clarity. But it also lies in the authors' resistance to the easy 'postmodernist' answers that threaten to turn new musicology prematurely grey. The editors' comprehensive, intellectually adventurous introduction exemplifies the sort of eager yet properly skeptical receptivity to scholarly innovation that fosters lasting disciplinary reform. It alone is worth the price of the book." —Richard Taruskin, author of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through " Mavra" "When cultural-studies methods first appeared in musicology 15 years ago, they triggered a storm of polemics that sometimes overshadowed the important issues being raised. As the canon wars recede, however, scholars are finding it possible to focus on the concerns that led them to cultural criticism in the first place: the study of music and its political meanings. Western Music and Its Others brings together leading musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and specialists in film and popular music to explore the ways European and North American musicians have drawn on or identified themselves in tension with the musical practices of Others. In a series of essays ranging from examination of the Orientalist tropes of early 20th-century Modernists to the tangled claims for ownership in today's World Music, the authors in this collection greatly advance both our knowledge of specific case studies and our intellectual awareness of the complexity and urgency of these problems. A timely intervention that should help push music studies to the next level." —Susan McClary, author of Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (2000) "This collection provides a sophisticated model for using theory to interrogate music and music to interrogate theory. The essays both take up and challenge the dominance of notions of representation in cultural theory as they explore the relevance of the concepts of hybridity and otherness for contemporary art music. Sophisticated theory, erudite scholarship and a very real appreciation for the specificities of music make this a powerful and important addition to our understanding of both culture and music." —Lawrence Grossberg, author of Dancing in Spite of Myself

The Land of the New Guinea Pygmies

The Land of the New Guinea Pygmies PDF Author: Cecil Godfrey Rawling
Publisher: London : Seeley, Service
ISBN:
Category : British Ornithologists' Union Expedition
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description


New York Times Saturday Book Review Supplement

New York Times Saturday Book Review Supplement PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Books
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description


Still a Pygmy

Still a Pygmy PDF Author: Isaac Bacirongo
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781925048421
Category : Pygmies
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Still a Pygmy is a story of love, pride and prejudice that traces the journey of BaTembo Pygmy Isaac Bacirongo from the forests of Central Africa, through the brutality of dictatorship and war, to arrival and settlement in Australia's melting pot. Isaac's inimitable style and voice draw readers into the heart of this memoir, his relationship with his wife, who survived his mother's attempts to kill her and who helped Isaac through experiences of appalling violence. It is full of warmth, wit and wise insights about life -especially family life and child-rearing. Isaac Bacirongo grew up as a Pygmy hunter-gatherer in the Congo. However, when his Papa left the forest to find work, Isaac went to missionary school, where he fell in love with scientific reason and rejected his mission teachings. He courted and wed Josephine, a 'town girl', whom his mother hated. Complaining that her new daughter-in-law would not be able to catch crabs or collect firewood, she engaged a witchdoctor in an attempt to kill her. Isaac and Josephine moved to the city, and he became a prosperous businessman. Isaac become a community leader involved in the fight for Pygmy rights, but he was imprisoned for his activism by the brutal regime that controls Eastern Congo. He bribed his way out of jail and fled to Kenya with his wife and 10 children in 2000. there he becomes an interpreter on a corruption investigation into the UNHCR. Granted a humanitarian visa, the family resettled as refugees in Sydney, but life started to unravel under the pressure of domestic violence, his children's assimilation and an Australian workplace that tested Isaac's African values. Although this memoir is Isaac's personal story, unique in its perspective on life as a Pygmy, it is also a universal story about the tragedies and challenges faced by many refugees and migrants, and their indomitable spirit they display in rising above challenges and confronting change to touch and transform the new communities they join.