Robin Ridington

Beaver Dreaming and Singing

Diamond Jenness must have been a magnificent field worker, for the description he gives us of the Indian worlds he visited are rich in the kind of detail that only a trusted and sympathetic friend would be told. In his fine ethnography of the Sekani Indians he gives us fifteen pages of vivid first person accounts of Sekani religious practice.1 We are told of people who died and returned to become medicine men, and of a variety of personal medicines and spirit quests. Because Jennesss account is so detailed, concrete and true to what he was told, one glimpses that the Northern Athabascan conceptual world must be more complex than their social institutions, a world of totemic thought set in a shamanic cosmic structure. Nonetheless, the descriptive excellence of Jennesss work and a great deal of North American ethnography in the Boasian tradition leaves the reader tantalized but curi ously unfulfilled because of its inability to find an appropriate conceptual framework with which to translate the meaning of what it describes.

Narrative Technology and Eskimo History

The University of Alaska Press is to be congratulated for its ambitious program of publishing both original works about the state’s native peoples and reprints of classics long out of print. For many years I taught a survey course on native peoples of North America. Each year I would go to the library and take out the increasingly well-worn  edition of Knud Rasmussen’s Across Arctic America. The book and the people it portrays became like old friends. Each year I would tell my students, ‘‘Somebody should really reprint this wonderful book.’’ I thank the University of Alaska Press for bringing Rasmussen’s narrative back into circulation. All three books reviewed in this essay reflect the work of people who have devoted their lives to Arctic research. I begin with Ernest S. Burch Jr.’s

Written on the heavens: Recent studies in archaeoastronomy

Aveni, Anthony F., ed. The Lines of Nazca. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1990. xii + 343 pp. including references, appendices, and index.

Visions of the cosmos: Recent explorations of new world cosmology

60.00 cloth. Aveni, Anthony F., ed. World Archaeoastronomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. xiii + 504 pp. including chapter references and index.

Kinship and the Drum Dance in a Northern Dene Community

125.00 cloth.

In Doig People's Ears: Portrait of a Changing Community in Sound

Freidel, David, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker. Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shamans Path. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1993. 543 pp. including chapter references and index.

Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships

30:00 cloth. Farrer, Claire R. Living Lifes Circle: Mescalero Apache Cosmo‐vision. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1991. xiii + 274 pp. including chapter references and index.

The Thick and the Thin: On the Interpretive Theoretical Program of Clifford Geertz [and Comments and Reply]

24.95 cloth. Dover, Robert V. H., Katharine E. Seibold, and John H. McDowell, eds. Andean Cosmologies Through Time: Persistence and Emergence. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1992. viii + 274 pp. including chapter references and index.

Knowledge, Power, and the Individual in Subarctic Hunting Societies

29.95 cloth.

Trail to Heaven: Knowledge and Narrative in a Northern Native Community

Features important information about Dene community life in the 1960s during the crucial period immediately following the move from bush to town. Deals extensively with the traditional economy, the structure of Dene Kinship, its role in social organization, and the role of the drum dance in the social life of the community under rapidly-changing circumstances.