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The Seven Spices: Pumpkins, Puritans, And Pathogens In Colonial New England, Michael Sharbaugh
The Seven Spices: Pumpkins, Puritans, And Pathogens In Colonial New England, Michael Sharbaugh
Michael D Sharbaugh
Water sources in the United States' New England region are laden with arsenic. Particularly during North America's colonial period--prior to modern filtration processes--arsenic would make it into the colonists' drinking water. In this article, which evokes the biocultural evolution paradigm, it is argued that colonists offset health risks from the contaminant (arsenic poisoning) by ingesting copious amounts of seven spices--cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, allspice, vanilla, and ginger. The inclusion of these spices in fall and winter recipes that hail from New England would therefore explain why many Americans associate them not only with the region, but with Thanksgiving and Christmas, …
Language And Living Things, Terence Hays
Language And Living Things, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
Ethnobiology is often regarded as a quaint and excessively particularistic specialty, as its modern practitioners trace the complexities and subtleties of specific systems of folk classification and nomenclature. Their finegrained descriptions and elegant analyses are at once too “thick” and too “thin” for most nonspecialists, who, in any event, await syntheses of what has been learned from such inquiries, preferably in the form of comparative studies in the tradition of anthropology’s concern with generalizations that illuminate the wider human condition. Rising to this challenge, Cecil Brown has long pursued, in numerous papers and now in this book, crosscultural “uniformities” as …
Ndumba Folk Biology And General Principles Of Ethnobotanical Classification And Nomenclature, Terence Hays
Ndumba Folk Biology And General Principles Of Ethnobotanical Classification And Nomenclature, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
Brent Berlin's proposed "general principles of classification and nomenclature" are examined as they apply to folk biology in Ndumba, a Papua New Guinea hzghlands society. Focusing on Ndumba folk zoology, supplemented with a previous analysis of their folk botany, Berlin's analytical schema for ethnobiological classification is supported, but principles of nomenclature in ethnobiology appear to be in need of reconsideration.
"The New Guinea Highlands" Region, Culture Area, Or Fuzzy Set?, Terence Hays
"The New Guinea Highlands" Region, Culture Area, Or Fuzzy Set?, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
The criteria for delineating "the New Guinea Highlands," a fundamental category in Melanesian anthropology, are variable, vague, and inconsistently applied, with the result that there is little clarity or agreement with regard to its characteristics and its membership. So far as the literature is concerned, "the New Guinea Highlands" is a fuzzy set. The common resort to notions of "cores," "margins," or "fringes" is an attempt to preserve an essentialist approach but inevitably leads to the same confusion. The continued use of "the Highlands" as an analytic or theoretical construct carries the costs of misleadingly implied homogeneity, with marginalization of …
Cognitive Foundations Of Natural History, Terence Hays
Cognitive Foundations Of Natural History, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
Since the 1960s, ethnobiology has gone beyond the documentation of plants and animals deemed “useful” in specific societies’ economies, or those that are “good to think” in their cosmological systems, to a nomothetic investigation of folk conceptualizations of the natural world as organizations of cultural knowledge. “General principles” and “universals” in the classification and naming of living things have been proposed that now play a major role in our growing understanding of human cognition.
Failure Of Treatment / Book Review, Terence Hays
Failure Of Treatment / Book Review, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
This is an extraordinary book, and one that I believe is unique in the literature of medical anthropology. Inspired by Victor Turner's "social drama, the extended case method" (p. 3), Gilbert Lewis presents "the ethnography of an illness" (p. 1), a detailed—sometimes day-by-day—account of a protracted illness suffered by Dauwaras, a Gnau-speaking man of the upper Sepik River in Papua New Guinea.
The Sweet Potato And Oceania, Terence Hays
The Sweet Potato And Oceania, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
Debates about the introduction and diffusion of Ipomoea batatas in the Pacific have gone on for a century although largely without the benefit of a thorough botanical understanding of the plant. That is now provided in Yen’s monograph, which synthesizes the results and implications of his own two decades of research with the now massive literature on the subject.
Exchanging The Past, Terence Hays
Exchanging The Past, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
In 1980-1982, Bruce Knauft and Eileen Cantrell conducted fieldwork among the Gebusi people of the remote Nomad region of Western Province, Papua New Guinea. Then, "indigenous customs seemed robust as well as profound" (p.13), including one of the highest homocide rates in the world, rooted sorcery accusations derived from spirit medium seances.
Tzeltal Folk Zoology, Terence Hays
Tzeltal Folk Zoology, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
In some respects, this volume might be viewed as a companion piece to Berlin et al.’s Principles of Tzeltal Plant Classification. It deals with the same people of highland Chiapas, Mexico, and an earlier version was Hunn’s doctoral thesis, supervised by Berlin. Nevertheless, it can also clearly stand on its own as a significant contribution to ethnology, with additional relevance to biosystematists, ecologists, linguists, and psychologists.
Auyana, Terence Hays
Auyana, Terence Hays
Terence Hays
Sterling Robbins was one of four ethnographers who conducted fieldwork in the early 1960s as part of James B. Watson’s New Guinea Micro-evolution Project. As such he was unavoidably caught in the turmoil over how to deal with the “loose structure” of New Guinea highland societies.