Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists

Description

Author: Bruchac, Margaret M.

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Pub Date: 2018

Binding: Paperback

Condition: Good.  Binding tight.  No marks, tears, bends or folds.  Appears unused.

Notes: A re-examination of the relationships between anthropologists and their indigenous informants.  “The concept of imagining North American Indigenous people as ‘savages’ was central to the anthropological project because it positioned them as theoretically uncivilized and primitive and, therefore, perfect candidates for study as ‘Others.’  As Edward Said notes, the establishment of categorical distinctions among different groups of people was instrumental in the process of colonizing.  Western colonizers constructed ‘institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles’ to control not just the lives but also the images of colonized subjects.”  (From the Introduction)  Two sides of the same coin–the anthropologist and his/her native informant, this time weighted to the informant.  Franz Boas as villain?