Sergei Kan

Coming to Shore: Northwest Coast Ethnology, Traditions, and Visions

The Northwest Coast of North America was home to dozens of Native peoples at the time of its first contact with Europeans. The rich artistic, ceremonial, and oral traditions of these peoples and their preservation of cultural practices have made this region especially attractive for anthropological study. Coming to Shore provides a historical overview of the ethnology and ethnohistory of this region, with special attention given to contemporary, theoretically informed studies of communities and issues. The first book to explore the role of the Northwest Coast in three distinct national traditions of anthropology- American, Canadian, and French-Coming to Shore gives particular consideration to the importance of Claude Levi-Strauss and structuralism, as well as more recent social theory in the context of Northwest Coast anthropology. In addition contributors explore the blurring boundaries between theoretical and applied anthropology as well as contemporary issues such as land claims, criminal justice, environmentalism, economic development, and museum display. The contribution of Frederica de Laguna provides a historical background to the enterprise of Northwest Coast anthropology, as do the contributions of Claude Levi-Strauss and Marie Mauze.

Clan Mothers and Godmothers: Tlingit Women and Russian Orthodox Christianity, 1840-1940

Utilizing archival as well as ethnographic field data, this essay traces the history of the Tlingit womens conversion to Russian Orthodox Christianity. Their initial limited exposure to Orthodoxy, which occurred during the Russian-American Company era and was structured by larger trading, military, and socio-economic relationships between the Russians and the Tlingit, is contrasted with their massive conversion to Orthodoxy in the I880s, two decades after the purchase of Alaska by the United States. While examining the various political, social, and religious aspects of that conversion, the essay also explores the native womens own interpretations of Orthodoxy, which has remained the favorite denomination of the more culturally conservative segment of the Tlingit community throughout the twentieth century

Anthropology of death in the late 1980s

Badone, Ellen. The Appointed Hour: Death, Worldview, and Social Change in Brittany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. XVI + 366 pp. including maps, figures, notes, bibliography, and index.

Symbolic Immortality: The Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century

39.95 cloth. Watson, James L. and Evelyn S. Rawski, (Eds.). Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. XV + 334 pp. including glossary/index.

Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries

40.00 cloth. Cederroth, S., C. Corlin, and J. Lindstrom, (Eds.). On the Meaning of Death: Essays on Mortuary Rituals and Eschatological Beliefs. Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology No. 8. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International. 1988. 302 pp., including chapter notes and chapter references. No price.