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Contains chapters on the origin of Alaskans, the Tlingit language, family, community, appearance, dress, totemism, legends, education, etc.
In Memory Eternal, Sergei Kan combines anthropology and history, anecdote and theory to portray the encounter between the Tlingit Indians and the Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska in the late 1700s and to analyze the indigenous Orthodoxy that developed over the next 200 years. As a native speaker of Russian with eighteen years of fieldwork experience among the Tlingit, Kan is uniquely qualified to relate little-known material from the archives of the Russian church in Alaska to Tlingit oral history and his own observations. By weighing the one body of evidence against the other, he has reevaluated this history, arriving at a persuasive new concept of “converged agendas”—the view that the Tlingit and the Russians tended to act in mutually beneficial ways but for entirely different reasons throughout the period of their contact with one another. The Russian-American Company began operations in southeastern Alaska in the 1790s. Against a description of Tlingit culture at the time of the Russians’ arrival, Kan examines Russian Orthodox theology, ritual practice, and missionary methods, and the Tlingit response to them. An uneasy symbiosis characterized the early era of the Russian-American Company, when the trading relationship outweighed any spiritual or social rapprochement. A second, major focus of Kan’s study is the Tlingit experience with American colonial domination. He attributes a sudden revival of Tlingit interest in Orthodoxy in the 1880s as their attempt to maintain independence in the face of concerted efforts by the newcomers (and especially Presbyterian missionaries) to Americanize them. Memory Eternal shows the colonial encounter to be both a power struggle and a dialogue between different systems of meaning. It portrays Native Alaskans not as helpless victims but as historical agents who attempted to adjust to the changing reality of their social world without abandoning fundamental principles of their precolonial sociocultural order or their strong sense of self-respect.
This Is A New Release Of The Original 1914 Edition.
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ... DISEASES WHILE certain diseases have always been found among the Thlingets, others that now afflict them are of recent introduction. Tumours, cancers and toothache were unknown to them until within recent years. The older ones have yet sound and excellent teeth while the rising generation experience the white people's misfortune of cavities, toothache and dental torture. A certain woman eighty years old or more, and known to us, has never had the toothache, and every tooth in her head to-day is as sound as a dollar. On the other hand, a woman yet in her twenties has had half of her teeth extracted and several of the remaining ones filled. The white man's food, especially his sweetmeats, which are now freely indulged in by the natives, is, no doubt, largely the cause of this change. While consumption is now the most prevalent disease among them, we are told by the natives themselves and by careful historians that it is an imported disease. "The Indian calls tuberculosis ' the white man's disease, ' and so far as I have been able to learn it was practically unknown to him in his uncivilized state." It is common to hear consumption spoken of among our own people as " The Great White Plague." This would indicate that it is surely the white man's disease. "Whatever its origin with the natives, it is certain that it has a fearful hold on them. Dr. Paul C. Hutton, surgeon and physician at Fort William H. Seward, Haines, Alaska, in a published report for the year 1907, states that he found on investigation 20.6 per cent of the natives of that place afflicted with undisputed tuberculosis, 12 per cent of probable cases of pulmonary form, and 16.2 per cent of tuberculosis other than pulmonary. While every village has its quota of consumption, yet we...
This book focuses on anthropological questions and methods, and is offered as a supplement to textbooks on the anthropology of religion. It is designed to help students collecting and interpreting their own fieldwork or archival data and relating their findings to the work of others.