Frances Karttunen

Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides, and Survivors@@@Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker

Cultural boundaries exist wherever cultures encounter one another. During centuries of contact between native peoples and others in America, countless intermediaries - artists, students, traders, interpreters, political figures, authors, even performers - have bridged the divide. Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker provides a new understanding of the role of these mediators in North America from 1690 to the present. Cultural brokers have shared certain qualities - in particular a thorough understanding of two or more cultures. Living on the edge of change and conflict, they have responded to evolving and unstable circumstances or alliances with a flexibility born of their determination to bring understanding to disparate peoples. No composite portrait can encompass the complexity of the brokerage experience. To convey the many roles of these intermediaries, editor Margaret Connell Szasz has brought together fourteen distinct portraits, crafted by prominent scholars of Indian-white relations, of brokers across the continent and throughout three centuries of American history - in the colonial world, during the expansion of the republic, in the Wild West, and in the twentieth century. This fascinating and inspiring collection speaks eloquently of life on the cultural frontier. Key figures in our pluralistic heritage, cultural brokers are no less important today, as society continues to struggle with diversity.

Mesoamerican languages and colonization

Bernardino de Sahaguns Psalmodia Christiana (Christian Psalmody). Translation and introduction by Arthur J. O. Anderson. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993. Pp. xxxix, 375. Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth and History in Four Ancient Civilizations. By Joyce Marcus. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Pp. xxii, 495. Of the Manners of Speaking That the Old Ones Had: The Metaphors of Andres de Olmos in the TULAL Manuscript. By Judith M. Maxwell and Craig A. Hanson. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992. Pp. 438. Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648–1812. By Robert Patch. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Pp. xii, 329.