This work documents the ethical dilemmas faced by anthropologists and researchers in general when investigating Amerindian communities.

Consecutive waves of paleolithic migrants crossing the Bering land bridge from Siberia to North America between 80,000 and 7,000 b.c. brought with them the shamanic way of harnessing supernatural powers. This way prevailed until the White intrusion 400 years ago, into the living space of the aboriginal peoples of North America. Wherever European political, religious, and economic dominance was established, shamanic institutions became the focus of negative attention. The shamanic practitioner was variously depicted by governmental and ecclesiastic authorities (...) as a charlatan and imposter or a purveyor of evil influence. Some well-known ethnological and medico-psychological experts have until very recently portrayed the shaman as a mentally deranged person whose “primitive” culture permits the acting-out of psychopathology in a prestigious role, a eurocentric and positivistic fallacy rooted in Western misinterpretations of learned behavior manifested during shamanic rituals involving altered states of consciousness. Legal measures to suppress shamanic ceremonials were taken in the United States, especially in the aftermath of the Ghost Dance. This shaman-inspired movement, originating in the Prophet Dance of the Pacific Northwest (Spier 1935), sent waves of hectic sacro-nativistic ceremonial activity through many Amerindian tribes, and finally culminated in the Sioux uprising of 1890 which ended in the tragedy of Wounded Knee (cf. Mooney 1896). (shrink)

In his edicts, the emperor Aśoka Maurya extols brāhmaṇas, usually alongside ascetics (śramaṇas), as deserving honor and generosity, though he never alludes to their connection with ritual, the central theme of early Brahmanical literature. On the other hand, in Rock Edicts I and IX, he disparages sacrifices, and ceremonies performed by women, advocating instead the practice of ethical virtues. Close attention to the wording of Rock Edict IX shows that Aśoka and the Brahmanical Gṛhyasūtras talk about domestic (...) class='Hi'>rites in very similar terms, even describing them with the same adjective (uccāvaca). Both of them note the special role of women as a source of knowledge of such ceremonies, and differ only in how they evalute the value of such ceremonial: Aśoka disparages women’s rites, while some Gṛhyasūtras explicitly validate women as authorities in such matters. A comparison of these sources highlights the distinctive role of the term dhamma in Aśoka’s usage (in contrast to maṅgala (auspicious folk rites), and may provide some guidance for dating the Gṛhyasūtras. The fact that Aśoka does not explicitly connect such rites with the brāhmaṇas suggests that in his experience at least (i.e., in Magadha) Brahmins’ religious authority had nothing to do with domestic ritual. We may conclude that the Vedic canonization of Gṛhya ritual norms was not yet recognized outside of priestly circles, if it had developed yet at all. (shrink)

Ayudha Puja, a South Indian festival translated as “worship of the machines,” is a dramatic example of how religion and science intertwine in political life. Across South India, but especially in the state of Karnataka, scientists and engineers celebrate the festival in offices, laboratories, and workshops by attending a puja led by a priest. Although the festival is noteworthy in many ways, one of its most immediate valences is political. In this article, we argue that Ayudha Puja normalizes Brahminical Hinduism (...) within scientific culture through the inclusion of non-Hindus and through scientists' description of the festival as “cultural” rather than “religious.”. (shrink)

One of the finest private collections of Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian art in America is owned by James and Marilynn Alsdorf. This catalogue provides an opportunity for individuals other than scholars and specialists to view the works of art.

Early to mid-nineteenth-century America experienced a cultural fascination with oneness or monism--the notion that individuals are not separate from divinity but, rather, that the individual soul is an incarnation of the universal soul. Everything is one. This buzz of monism was traceable in part to translations of the Vedas by Indian philosopher Rammohun Roy and found some of its fullest expression in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. This oneness tradition is what animates Jeremy David Engels--not (...) only because we can't understand Emerson, Whitman, and other American philosophers without it, but because Engels thinks this tradition offers a way of thinking and acting that can meet the ethical challenges of everyday democracy in the present. The Ethics of Oneness is not only a brilliant study of the centrality of the Bhagavad Gita in the philosophy of Emerson and Whitman and a compelling reception history of the Gita in America, it is also a constructive project of moral and political philosophy intended to open possibilities for the present. If the lessons of oneness are taken to heart, Engels thinks, it ispossible to counter the pervasive, problematic American ideals of separation, competition, hierarchy, exclusion, and domination. For both Emerson and Whitman, American democracy requires a firm ontological foundation of oneness that is beyond question if it is to survive and thrive. (shrink)

The centrality of death rituals has in anthropologically informed studies of Buddhism been little documented. The current volume brings together a range of perspectives on Buddhist death rituals including ethnographic, textual, historical and theoretically informed accounts, and presents the diversity of the Buddhist funeral cultures of mainland Southeast Asia and China. It arises out of the University of Bristol's Centre for Buddhist Studies research project Buddhist Death Rituals in Southeast Asia and China, funded by the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities (...) Research Council. This project involved extensive new research in Thailand, Laos and China. Other items from that project included several public exhibitions, extensive stills photographs, and several video films. The project-team produced two 30 minutes films on the ghost festival in Laos and China, one on urban funerals in Chiang Mai (Thailand) and several shorter clips dealing with funeral cultures in Laos, Thailand and China. Most of this material (and an extensive bibliography on the topic) is available free of charge from the project website located at the webpage of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies (Centre for Buddhist Studies) at the University of Bristol. (shrink)

Andean philosophy of nature or pachasophy results from topography and mode of production that, merged together, have produced an integrated and interacting worldview that blurs the line between culture and nature. Respecting Pacha, or the interconnectedness of life and geography, maintaining complementarity and equilibrium through symbolic interactions, and caring for Pachamama, the feminine presence of Pacha manifested mainly as cultivable soil are the basis of Andean environmental and social ethics. Reciprocity or ayni is the glue that holds everything together. This (...) weaving of traditional beliefs, customs, and ecologi­cal knowledge is rooted in the landscape and has sustained Quechua and Aymara societies during many millennia of knowing, using, and transforming the varied environments of the central Andes of South America. Any environmental ethics that influences people’s lives and promotes respectful and sustainable relationships with nature will be framed by already held worldviews. In Bolivia indigenous intellectuals are drawing on the ancient tradition of Pacha to trace an environmental ethics of pacha qamaña or the harmonious and integral well-being of life, the Earth, and the cosmos, and the ethics of suma qamaña as an all em­bracing ethical framework for the “good life” or “living well.” Although pacha qamaña and suma qamaña are rooted in the Andean mythological worldview, they will interest Western philosophers because the values they promote can be correctives for Western cultural traits that see little more than instrumental value in nature. In this sense, pacha qamaña and suma qamaña contribute to the broader discussion of environmental ethics. (shrink)

The Northern Triangle of Central America is one of the most violent regions in the world. Although the violence has a long history, the countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are currently experiencing a critical situation with a new threat: criminal gangs. This article explores regional violence and elaborates a peacebuilding proposal based on a reading of the concept of jubilee. Jubilee is explained via the categories of inclusion, reconciliation and rest. The article concludes that for the (...) countries of the northern Central American triangle, the application of jubilee principles represents true peace in times of peace. (shrink)

El artículo a partir de fuentes iconográficas, estudia la sustitución de los símbolos imperiales españoles por nuevos símbolos republicanos a principios del siglo XIX, destacando obras como las alegorías de la libertad y la patria para el caso colombiano. Estos emblemas tuvieron su origen en las representaciones de América del siglo XVI, pero con las autonomías y las posteriores independencias se convierten en los primeros símbolos de identidad de las nacientes repúblicas. The article, based on iconographic sources, studies the substitution (...) of imperial Spanish symbols by new republican symbols at the beginning of the 19th century, emphasizing some works as the allegories of Freedom and the Mother land in the case of Colombia. These emblems had their origin in the representations of America of the 16th century, however, initially, with their autonomies and later independences they turn into the first symbols of identity of the blossoming republics. (shrink)

Two excerpts from Xenophon, in which he states that Socrates avidly practised religious ceremonies promoted by Athens, are subject to two different interpretations by modern historians. For some, they are the proof that the Athenian city was only concerned with the rituals of its fellow citizens, and in no way with their beliefs. In contrast with this view, Hendrick Versnel feels that, by writing that Socrates performed ceremonies, Xenophon thinks that he proves that his master really did believe (...) in the gods. Both of these interpretations are incorrect, as a careful new consideration of these passages can demonstrate. (shrink)

For many tribes of Plains Indians whose bison-hunting culture flourished during the 18th and 19th centuries, the sun dance was the major communal religious ceremony. Generally held in late spring or early summer, the rite celebrates renewal-the spiritual rebirth of participants and their relatives as well as the regeneration of the living earth with all its components. The sun dance reflects relationships with nature that are characteristic of the Plains ethos, and includes symbolic representations of various animal species, particularly (...) the eagle and the buffalo, that once played vital roles in the lives of the people and are still endowed with sacredness and special powers. The ritual, involving sacrifice and supplication to insure harmony between all living beings, continues to be practiced by many contemporary native Americans. (shrink)

Archaeological facts have a perplexing character; they are often seen as less likely to “lie,” capable of bearing tangible, material witness to actual conditions of life, actions and events, but at the same time they are notoriously fragmentary and enigmatic, and disturbingly vulnerable to dispersal and attrition. As Trouillot (1995) argues for historical inquiry, the identification, selection, interpretation and narration of archaeological facts is a radically constructive process. Rather than conclude on this basis that archaeological facts and fictions are indistinguishable, (...) I identify a number of strategies that archaeologists rely on to make discerning use of “legacy” data – archaeological data recovered and curated over for decades, even centuries, often for very different purposes than those that animate contemporary archaeological inquiry. These include source criticism, secondary retrieval, repositioning and recontextualizing these data in ways that can, sometimes radically shift the “facts” associated with them. The construction of critical genealogies of these facts – the travels and transformations of the material, interpretive and narrative facts of archaeology – is a crucial condition for the successful exploitation of these epistemic possibilities. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay performs an anticolonial and poetic methodology of combining Black and Native feminists' deconstruction of metaphor and metaphysics in order to argue for the centrality of colonial metaphor to colonial metaphysics. I combine their analyses of the separate gendered metaphors of Blackness and Indianness and the centrality of these metaphors to the development of a global metaphysics as well as the transference of the terms of metaphysics to whiteness. I then apply this method of combined terms and readings to (...) white colonial writing that compares Black and Native America, which transforms both communities not only into individually potent, gendered metaphors but into an essential poetic pairing, a poetic couplet. Drawing on the work of Black and Native feminists, I further argue that when we take this paired model to evaluate the political concerns of Black and Native America, we come to a more complete and global understanding and refutation of whiteness. The creation, connection, and comparison of the gendered metaphors and archetypical figures of the "African Slave" and "Indian Savage" are important to each other and to the creation of a Western conception of the globe. Colonialism uses gender to compound metaphor's ability to create, by combining metaphors of gender with metaphors of race and colonialism to develop new symbolic amalgamations. This gestalt of metaphors comes together in order to create a fictive European metaphysics used to ameliorate white fears of the diversity of life on planet Earth and to satisfy white desires to control it. In this coupled metaphoric form, Blackness and Indianness are not connected by analogy but by the open-ended cut, the caesura, of poetry and the violence of slavery and conquest. I offer this anticolonial and poetic pairing as a model for political imagining between Black and Native theory. (shrink)

In this analysis I use the first regional Central America ethics code to discuss the wider problems of corruption and media complicity with central governments in the region. Luis Moreno Ocampo of Transparency International has noted that to understand corruption factors one must first study formalized rules for the system. Following Moreno's suggestion, in this article I focus on the code and the actions it inspired to highlight the widespread corrupt media practices of the region. Although the (...) code had an immediate effect, that effect has waned and in some cases has been forgotten. (shrink)

v. 1. The philosophy of the Kabbalah.--v. 2. The philosophy of Spinoza.

Edification 教化 is one of the central concepts of Confucianism. The metaphysical basis of the Confucian edification is the “philosophical theory” in the sense of rational humanism rather than the “religious doctrine” in the sense of pure faith. Confucianism did not create a system of ceremony and propriety owned by Confucians only. The system of ceremony and propriety on which Confucians depend to carry out their social edification is that of “rites and music,” the common life style of (...) ancient China. After continual metaphysical explanation and elevation, the system of ceremony and propriety and that of rites and music have undergone a sort of ever-evolving historical fluctuation, and evinced a sort of openness and forgiveness comparable to that of any other religious form. Compared with typical religious practices, whose ceremonies and rituals that have their own special fixity and exclusivity, Confucian ceremonies and rituals are fundamentally different. The edification of Confucianism can be labeled as “edification in the sense of philosophy.” As a “philosophy”, Confucianism’s vision did not focus on cognition but on completion and realization. (shrink)

The soul, which dominated many intellectual debates at the beginning of the twentieth century, has virtually disappeared from the sciences and the humanities. Yet it is everywhere in popular culture-from holistic therapies and new spiritual practices to literature and film to ecological and political ideologies. Ignored by scholars, it is hiding in plain sight in a plethora of religious, psychological, environmental, and scientific movements. This book uncovers the history of the concept of the soul in twentieth-century Europe and North (...) class='Hi'>America. Beginning in fin de siècle Germany, Kocku von Stuckrad examines a fascination spanning philosophy, the sciences, the arts, and the study of religion, as well as occultism and spiritualism, against the backdrop of the emergence of experimental psychology. He then explores how and why the United States witnessed a flowering of ideas about the soul in popular culture and spirituality in the latter half of the century. Von Stuckrad examines an astonishingly wide range of figures and movements-ranging from Ernest Renan, Martin Buber, and Carl Gustav Jung to the Esalen Institute, deep ecology, and revivals of shamanism, animism, and paganism to Rachel Carson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and the Harry Potter franchise. Revealing how the soul remains central to a culture that is only seemingly secular, this book casts new light on the place of spirituality, religion, and metaphysics in Europe and North America today. (shrink)

Just last month, for example, John Negroponte went to Baghdad as US ambassador to Iraq, heading the world's largest diplomatic mission, with the task of handing over sovereignty to Iraqis to fulfil Bush's 'messianic mission' to graft democracy to the Middle East and the world, or so we are solemnly informed.

Indigenous cultures of North America confronted a problem of knowledge different from that of canonical European philosophy. The European problem is to identify and overcome obstacles to the perfection of knowledge as science, while the Indigenous problem is to conserve a legacy of practice fused with a territory. Complicating the difference is that one of these traditions violently colonized the other, and with colonization the Indigenous problem changes. The old problem of inter-generational stability cannot be separated from the post-colonial (...) problem of sovereignty in the land where the knowledge makes sense. I differentiate the question of the value of knowledge (Part 1), and its content (Part 2). The qualities these epistemologies favor define what I callceremonial knowledge, that is, knowledge that sustains a ceremonial community. The question of content considers the interdisciplinary research of Indigenous and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, as well as the issue of epistemic decolonization. (shrink)

This paper tries to trace the roots of the Śaiva Mantramārga concept of innate impurity. Since innate impurity is regarded as one of the three bonds fettering bound individual souls, this paper begins with the Pāśupata and early Śaiva views on these bonds. It examines the Buddhist logician Dharmakīrti’s criticism of the Śaiva idea that initiation removes sin, and discusses the Pāśupata concept of sin-cleansing and two different concepts of innate impurity found in two early Śaiva scriptures: the Sarvajñānottaratantra and (...) Svāyambhuvasūtrasaṃgraha. In search of the roots of these Śaiva conceptions of innate impurity, this paper then goes over some Vedic passages which speak of the removal of sin during the initiatory rite and identify it as the internal impurity. Putting all these points together, this paper concludes arguing that the Śaivas initially saw sin or the unseen force of merits and demerits as innate impurity, but later, under the pressure of criticism, they introduced the idea of innate impurity as a separate abstract substance affecting all souls with its multiple powers. (shrink)

Like philosophy itself, Dune explores everything from politics to art to life to reality, but above all, the novels ponder the mysteries of mind. Voyaging through psychic expanses, Frank Herbert hits upon some of the same insights discovered by indigenous people from the Americas. Many of these ideas are repeated in mainstream American and European philosophical traditions like pragmatism and existential phenomenology. These outlooks share a regard for mind as ecological, which is more or less to say that minds extend (...) beyond the brain into the rest of the body and the surrounding environment. -/- The cross-cultural strands in Dune tie closely to Herbert’s life and interests. An outdoorsman born in the Pacific West, he had an abiding bond with a friend from the Quileute tribe, Howie Hansen. Herbert advocated for aboriginal rights and crafted well-intentioned if slightly stereotypical tales about indigenous characters, partly based on his visits with Northwest tribes. Carl Jung (1875-1961), whose idea of collective consciousness echoes aboriginal views, was among Herbert’s European influences. So was existential phenomenology, especially as developed by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). The names of characters in one of Herbert’s novels—The Santaroga Barrier—in fact coincide with terms that Heidegger used to articulate how emotionally colored coping with our environment defines our existence. Many indigenous philosophers have treated phenomenology and its American cousin pragmatism in approving ways. Indeed, the ideas of North America’s first inhabitants seem to have been absorbed by pragmatists and even earlier by transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). -/- These different philosophies all advance a place-based psychology. Anne Waters, herself of mixed tribal heritage, generalizes the mindset of her people this way: “American Indian consciousness, and hence American Indian identity is … interdependent with our land base.” Lee Hester, a Choctaw thinker, adds that practices—not mere beliefs—are most important for native thought. American transcendentalists and pragmatists, as well as European phenomenologists, similarly see hands-on practices and environmental interactions as the core of experience. Extending this a little, they sometimes suggest experience isn’t individual but instead cultural. “Culture” is here understood as interactions within communities that define our worlds and experiences, as when we talk about the “French experience,” “culture” or “world,” or the “experience of parenthood.” This theme also shows up in indigenous thought. -/- Exploring the Dune universe, we find everything from land-based concepts of personal identity, to the idea of sharpening the mind through hands-on training, to collective notions of experience in cooperative tribes or through the genetic memory of central characters. The stories explore fate versus free will in cosmic contexts, introducing views from indigenous thought and the pragmatic philosophy of William James (1842-1910). Different forms of spiritualism mingle to shape minds and cultural mixtures around the globe, and the same occurs in the Dune series. The customs and personalities of characters fuse elements from Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Taoism, and especially Islam. The series not only highlights that religion shapes psychology, but also that faith connects to place, especially paralleling Judeo-Christian-Islamic desert faiths. In capturing these points, the Dune novels show that “our values, our lifestyles and even the ways we think and feel have been strongly influenced by our locations in history and geography. The study of the human mind is fundamentally the study of place.”. (shrink)

This book analyses the use of the crucial concept of 'taste' in the works of five major seventeenth-century French authors, Méré, Saint Evremond, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Boileau. It combines close readings of important texts with a thoroughgoing political analysis of seventeenth-century French society in terms of class and gender. Dr Moriarty shows that far from being timeless and universal, the term 'taste' is culture-specific, shifting according to the needs of a writer and his social group. The notion of (...) 'taste' not only helped to shape a new dominant culture, but also registered the conflicts within that culture between a view of taste that presupposted the values of 'polite society' as an exclusive (though not necessarily aristocratic) group, and a view that stressed the value of the classical-humanist tradition as a source of standards ratified by a broader public. this study sheds light not only on the central concept, but also on the individual authors discussed and on the norms of French classical literature in general. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay reviews the 2013 Human Life International (HLI) propaganda video, Central America and Mexico: Fighting for Life, Faith, and Family, which, we argue, illustrates the well-orchestrated counteroffensive against reproductive and sexual rights movements occurring in the region. First we summarize the film's key themes, including the assertion that Catholicism is fundamental to Mexican and Central American identities and that the international “pro-abortion movement” is waging war against Catholics. Second, we note the development of a new strategic (...) alliance between Catholics and evangelicals that relies on lay religious activists working in the fields of medicine, bioethics, law, and government. Third, we show how the video appeals to HLI donors by asking them to support crisis pregnancy centres, homes for unwed mothers, adoption programs, and “natural” fertility assistance. We argue that the film conspicuously ignores the consequences of abortion bans already in place in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, and does not consider that what it terms “international pressures” also includes treaty obligations with the United Nations and Organization of American States. This essay offers insights into the strategies used by opponents of reproductive and sexual rights movements in Mexico and Central America. (shrink)

Indigenous cultures of North America confronted a problem of knowledge different from that of canonical European philosophy. The European problem is to identify and overcome obstacles to the perfection of knowledge as science, while the Indigenous problem is to conserve a legacy of practice fused with a territory. Complicating the difference is that one of these traditions violently colonized the other, and with colonization the Indigenous problem changes. The old problem of inter-generational stability cannot be separated from the post-colonial (...) problem of sovereignty in the land where the knowledge makes sense. I differentiate the question of the value of knowledge (Part One), and its content (Part Two). The qualities these epistemologies favor define what I call ceremonial knowledge, that is, knowledge that sustains a ceremonial community. The question of content considers the interdisciplinary research of Indigenous and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, as well as the issue of epistemic decolonization. (shrink)

Published to coincide with the quincentennial celebrations of Columbus's ‘discovery’ of the New World, the Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko's apocalyptic 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead, is a harsh indictment of five hundred years of colonialism, racism and genocide in the New World. Silko clearly links this inhuman(e) history to the contemporary social policies of a range of nation states within the Americas, to present a variety of political issues that are of crucial significance to contemporary tribal communities (...) and other multi-national disenfranchised groups. Among others, this includes the significance of gender to constructions of American settlement and Federal-Indian relations, and to Silko's own status, and choice of literary topics, as a female (and Native) writer. This essay analyses Silko's disruption of authorized and sanitized state narratives, and of accepted (and acceptable) narratives of settlement; and considers Silko's use of the almanac form – the codex – of the pre-contact Aztec and Mayan libraries as a means to assert indigenous literacy, and to challenge the Euro-American claims to ‘civilization’ that are the basis for New World settlement. Most significantly, as its title suggests, Almanac of the Dead emphasizes the presence of the dead, both indigenous peoples and African slaves, to expose the real costs of settlement, and to actively un-settle the Euro- American reader. Consequently, Almanac of the Dead presents the powerful alternative histories of a range of dispossessed social and ethnic groups throughout the Americas, while relocating and reconsidering the US within the context of the Americas as a continental and historical whole, and emphasizing the positive potential of political activism. (shrink)

Edification 教化 is one of the central concepts of Confucianism. The metaphysical basis of the Confucian edification is the “philosophical theory” in the sense of rational humanism rather than the “religious doctrine” in the sense of pure faith. Confucianism did not create a system of ceremony and propriety owned by Confucians only. The system of ceremony and propriety on which Confucians depend to carry out their social edification is that of “rites and music,” the common life style of (...) ancient China. After continual metaphysical explanation and elevation, the system of ceremony and propriety and that of rites and music have undergone a sort of ever-evolving historical fluctuation, and evinced a sort of openness and forgiveness comparable to that of any other religious form. Compared with typical religious practices, whose ceremonies and rituals that have their own special fixity and exclusivity, Confucian ceremonies and rituals are fundamentally different. The edification of Confucianism can be labeled as “edification in the sense of philosophy.” As a “philosophy”, Confucianism’s vision did not focus on cognition but on completion and realization. (shrink)

For more than fifteen years, Melissa Ann Pinney has been making photographs of girls and women, from infancy to old age, to portray how feminine identity is constructed, taught, and communicated. Her work depicts not only the rites of American womanhood—a prom, a wedding, a baby shower, a tea party—but the informal passages of girlhood: combing a doll's hair, doing laundry with a mother, smoking a cigarette at a state fair. With each view, we gain a greater understanding of (...) the connections between mother and daughter, and by extension the larger world of family, friends, and society. Pinney's approach to interpreting girlhood became more complicated and complex when her daughter, Emma, was born eight years ago. Emma's childhood evoked in Pinney her own girlhood and gave her work new meaning and purpose. Ultimately, Regarding Emma shares with all of us the incremental and the ritualistic changes that take place in a woman's life over time. Her photographs are artistic and social documents that reveal the subtle and bold aspects of feminine identity—documents whose reach will extend well beyond the walls of America's leading galleries and museums into the hearts and homes of everyday Americans. "Melissa Ann Pinney is making powerful art. In matters of light, color, and composition she is flawless. But these are not simply constructions of elements. These photographs bear witness to the speed at which the little girl becomes the old woman, to the fleeting, breathless beauty of childhood, to life itself, which leaves us stunned in its wake."—Ann Patchett, from the Foreword "Melissa Ann Pinney provides a compelling portrait of American girls as they make their way from infancy to adulthood. Using her daughter's childhood as a point of departure, she traces the complex terrain of adolescence and budding femininity. The results are photographs marked by empathy and grace."—Sylvia Wolf, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City "These photographs by Melissa Ann Pinney impart a sense of the special and sacred everyday rituals we take for granted. She appreciates at once the transient nature of what she finds and its gravity. Her pictures describe so well the wonder, and beauty, and centrality of the things we know best and the people we see often."—Sandra S. Phillips, Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art "Melissa Ann Pinney's record of life with her daughter, Emma, adds a new and touching chapter to our knowledge of the lives of women and girls."—Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon and a staff writer for The New Yorker "Melissa Pinney's passionate, painstaking investigation of the stages of women's lives is impressive for its rigor and courage. Her themes aren't imposed on the pictures or on the women, men, and children who people them; instead, they arise from her attentive study of particularities— of the ways human lives are etched on the surfaces of faces and the positions of bodies in real spaces and places, mundane but radiant. When she turns from the lives of others to her own life, the shift is seamless but the volume swells, the emotions grow more pointed and the paradoxes more painful, joyous, and direct. This is remarkable work by an artist at the height of her powers."—Peter Bacon Hales, author of William Henry Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape. (shrink)

The tropical lowlands of southern Mexico and Central America are composed of a complex mosaic of landscapes that presented a variety of possibilities and challenges to the subsistence practices of the ancient Maya. The Yalahau Regional Human Ecology Project has been investigating ancient Maya agricultural practices and use of resources in a unique fresh-water wetland zone located in the northeast corner of the Yucatán Peninsula. While containing only a sparse population today, the Yalahau region once supported numerous Maya (...) communities and civic-ceremonial centers, particularly during the Late Preclassic and Early Classic periods, between approximately 100 B.C. and A.D. 450. Our investigations have developed evidence that the ancient Maya manipulated and cultivated the wetland landscape of the region, used soil or algae from the wetlands to enrich upland garden plots, and cultivated trees within their communities. We suggest that the study of ancient Maya agricultural practices can contribute to sustainable development of the area today and in the future. (shrink)

Management faces complex race related issues in which groups arguing entitlement appear to claim benefits historically enjoyed by others. Thus many affirmative action issues provoke animosity because they are framed as zero sum problems. To some extent they are zero sum. Therefore, rationales for corporate policy must address that forthrightly. Up to now the corporate justification has been weak. The article describes a social debt owed interracially resulting from the accumulation of current class benefits from past discrimination, and asserts that (...) affirmative action policies have a firm ethical basis inasmuch as they are affectively redistributing benefits to pay the social debt. (shrink)