| Accessories By Manufacturer | |
|
|
Email Newsletter
Get info on Sales, Events, New Products, and More!
|
|
|
|
|
| OLD MAN FOG (Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry) | 
 enlarge | Author: Haviland John B
Publisher: Smithsonian
Category: Book
List Price: $32.95
Buy New: $4.99
You Save: $27.96 (85%)
New (10) Used (13) from $4.20
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 2076756
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 226
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 1560989130
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.899150943
EAN: 9781560989134
ASIN: 1560989130
Publication Date: January 17, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Same day shipping. Free Upgrade to 1st class mail for all CDs. Professional packaging material. Friendly customer service.
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Barrow Point, on the far northern coast of Queensland, Australia, was once the home of numerous Aboriginal groups. For countless centuries these indigenous people worked the sea, the rivers, and the forests, memorializing the landscape and its animals in a rich body of songs and folktales. With the arrival of Europeans during a succession of gold rushes in Queensland, however, they were driven away from their homeland. John Haviland, an American anthropologist, and Roger Hart, an elderly Barrow Point Aborigine, reconstruct some of that body of oral literature here. Hart narrates a series of stories about "Old Man Fog," who moves about the countryside talking with curlews, lizards, dingoes, foxes, and snakes, learning their ways and occasionally suffering their tricks. Many of these stories point to lessons on how the Aboriginal peoples learned how to live in this difficult country, where sources of fresh water are few and dangers many. They address ritually powerful "story places," points on the land that possess special significance. While noting the irony of the folkloric enterprise ("what were once moral tales for initiated adults have become 'fairy tales' for children's books"), Haviland provides useful commentary on Hart's stories, which shed light on the ethnography and natural history of Australia. --Gregory McNamee
|
| Customer Reviews:
Interesting example of new ethnography December 16, 2005
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Haviland's book is an interesting if not entirely successful experiment in ethnographic literature. Or perhaps we should say, Haviland's and Roger Hart's, since he goes further than most anthropologists in crediting the person who provided him with the information. It is well to remember that we anthropologists do not so much write books as craft accounts of the experiences that people allow us to have into books.
Haviland weaves together three strands in his work: Hart's life story as an elder from the Barrow Point region, the myths of the Barrow Point people (as reconstructed by Hart), and documentary data from the modern history of northern Queensland. He finally accompanies Hart on a journey back to his homeland. Haviland is more aware and more clear than most that an ethnography of a contemporary Aboriginal or any other native group cannot be straightforward reportage but must always been pieced back together from the fractured memories of the survivors of the modernization process. The resultant book, he warns, will always seem more integrated and unified than the experiences that went into it. His book cannot help but suffer from the same defect. He presents a refraction of his disjointed experience of Hart's disjointed memories, but a book that really presented the experience as it felt in the first place would be impossible to read. The whole project is worthwhile not only for what we learn about Aboriginal culture but about anthropological knowledge and the construction of one kind of account and literature out of another.
|
|
|
Site by: Troy Peterson | |
