Ethnology in The Books Store

Making use of his own research experiences in Papua New Guinea, Southern Ontario, and Newfoundland, Wayne Fife teaches students and new researchers how to prepare for research, conduct a study, analyze the material (e.g. create new social and cultural theory), and write academic or policy oriented books, articles, or reports. The reader is taught how to combine historic and contemporary documents (e.g. archives, newspapers, government reports) with fieldwork methods (e.g participant-observation, interviews, and self-reporting) to create ethnographic studies of disadvantaged populations. Anthropologists, Sociologists, Folklorists, and Educational researchers will equally benefit from this critical approach to research.

In 1868, Jack Renton, a teenage Scots sailor, was shanghaied in San Francisco. In 1876, he was rescued from captivity on the Pacific island of Malaita, home to a fearsome tribe of headhunters. After the rescue, in a sensational best-selling memoir, Renton recounted his eight-year adventure: how he jumped ship and drifted two thousand miles in an open whaleboat to the Solomon Islands, came ashore at Malaita, was stripped of his clothes, possessions and his very identity, but lived to serve the island's tribal chief Kabou eventually as his most trusted adviser. For all the authenticity and riveting detail, however, it turns out that Renton's chronicle glossed over key events that made him the man that Kabou said he loved, "as my first-born son." Mining the oral history passed down in detail from generations of Malaitans, documentary filmmaker Nigel Randell spent seven years piecing together a more complete and grislier account of Renton's experience—as a man forced to assimilate in order to survive. While The White Headhunter is the story of a man transformed by an island, it is also the story of a man who transformed the island as he prepared it for the onslaught of Western civilization.

This sumptuous new book reveals more than 300 fabric "paintings" made and worn by the women of the Kuna, a tribe of indians that live on the coral islands off Panama's Atlantic coast. Lively, varied, original and full of humor, Mola art has an astonishing relationship with tradition but in many ways looks contemporary and is prized by museums and private collectors throughout the world. The lavish images reveal the setting, lifestyle, gestures and beauty of the Kuna women practising their art. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has praised Michel Perrin's brilliant demonstration of the links between Mola textile art and Kuna ritual and body decoration. Perrin depicts the significant events that took place during his field research and shares with us his discussions with the Kuna women and their opinions about techniques and aesthetics. The book also includes excerpts from myths and traditional accounts about the rituals, animals, plants, and objects that have stimulated the imagination and inspired the Kuna women to create these magnificent design