Translating Native Latin American Verbal Art: Ethnopoetics and Ethnography of Speaking

Translating Native Latin American Verbal Art: Ethnopoetics and Ethnography of Speaking. Kay Sammons and Joel Sherzer. eds. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000. 309 pp.     

Anthropological Knowledge and Native American Cultural Practice in the Liberal Polity

U.S. Indian policy is caught between two incommensurable theories or paradigms. First, liberal theory extended the worldviewof early physical science to understand human nature. Providing the conceptual foundation for liberal polities, it largely underwrote U.S. Indian policy into the mid-20th century. Liberal theory recently has been superceded, as theory , by anthropological culture theory, which better accounts for variations between peoples and the realities of human life. The advent of culture theory marks a major paradigm shift within science and public consciousness. Liberal theory, however, remains the foundation for the powerful ideology of liberalism and the institutional practices of Western capitalism and democracy. Thus arise uncomfortable disjunctions—first, between incommensurable theories that both remain vital forces in public life, and, secondarily, between knowledge and practice. This article explores these contending theoretical formations, disjunctions between them, and illustrates how these disjunctions translate into contemporary argument in U.S. Indian policy.     

Y chromosome polymorphisms in Native American and Siberian populations: identification of Native American Y chromosome haplotypes

We have initiated a study of ancient male migrations from Siberia to the Americas using Y chromosome polymorphisms. The first polymorphism examined, a C→T transition at nucleotide position 181 of the DYS199 locus, was previously reported only in Native American populations. To investigate the origin of this DYS199 polymorphism, we screened Y chromosomes from a number of Siberian, Asian, and Native American populations for this and other markers. This survey detected the T allele in all five Native American populations studied at an average frequency of 61%, and in two of nine native Siberian populations, the Siberian Eskimo (21%) and the Chukchi (17%). This finding suggested that the DYS199 T allele may have originated in Beringia and was then spread throughout the New World by the founding populations of the major subgroups of modern Native Americans. We further characterized Native American Y chromosome variation by analyzing two additional Y chromosome polymorphisms, the DYS287 Y Alu polymorphic (YAP) element insertion and a YAP-associated A→G transition at DYS271, both commonly found in Africans. We found neither African allele associated with the DYS199 T allele in any of the Native American or native Siberian populations. However, we did find DYS287 YAP+ individuals who harbored the DYS199 C allele in one Native American population, the Mixe, and in one Asian group, the Tibetans. A correlation of these Y chromosome alleles in Native Americans with those of the DYS1 locus, as detected by the p49a/p49f (p49a,f) probes on TaqI-digested genomic DNA, revealed a complete association of DYS1 alleles (p49a,f haplotypes) 13, 18, 66, 67 and 69 with the DYS199 T allele, while DYS1 alleles 8 and 63 were associated with both the DYS199 C and T allele. Received: 18 November 1996 / Accepted: 19 May 1997     

Autobiographical Memory in the Angry Self

The impact of anger on autobiographical recall was examined in two studies. In Experiment 1, 76 participants differing in trait anger completed an autobiographical memory task (AMT). In Experiment 2, 50 participants with elevated trait anger were either provoked or not provoked and subsequently completed an AMT. Across both studies, participants with high dispositional anger reported more anger-related memories, describing themselves as the primary agent of anger. In Experiment 2, provoked participants reported more memories describing themselves as the target of anger. These findings highlight the distinct patterns of memory recall associated with trait versus state anger. Findings are discussed in terms of retrieval biases operating in angry individuals and proposals stemming from self-memory system models of autobiographical memory.     

Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900

Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900. Ruth B. Phillips. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998. 334 pp.     

Native American Tattoos: Identity and Spirituality in Contemporary America

Influences from counterculture movements and tattooing traditions from around the world have transformed the North American tattoo experience. Consultants' narratives reveal a desire to align with a primal human essence, seen as somehow lost through the process of civilization. Images are intentionally chosen to seek connection with people considered to embody a simpler, truer form of human life; what scholars routinely refer to as the “primitive,” or the Other. In the cases under consideration, an effort is made to connect to a particular so-called primitive, that is, the American Indian. Thus, the current renaissance of tattoo as fine art provides an occasion to reconsider American fascination with “playing Indian” and all things Indian.     

Cahokia: The Great Native American Metropolis

Cahokia: The Great Native American Metropolis. Biloine Whiting Young and Melvin L. Fowler. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 366 pp.     

Native American Oral Traditions: Collaboration and Interpretation.

Native American Oral Traditions: Collaboration and Interpretation. Larry Evers and Barre Toelken. eds. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001. 264 pp.     

Cultural History in the Native Northeast

Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650, Kathleen J. Bragdon. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. 301 pp.
Historic Contact: Indian People and Colonists in Today's Northeastern United States in the Sixteenth through the Eighteenth Centuries. Robert S. Grumet. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. 514 pp.     

Lexical Acculturation in Native American Languages

Lexical Acculturation in Native American Languages. Cecil H. Brown. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 259 pp.     

Drawing from Memory: Hand-Eye Coordination at Multiple Scales

Eyes move to gather visual information for the purpose of guiding behavior. This guidance takes the form of perceptual-motor interactions on short timescales for behaviors like locomotion and hand-eye coordination. More complex behaviors require perceptual-motor interactions on longer timescales mediated by memory, such as navigation, or designing and building artifacts. In the present study, the task of sketching images of natural scenes from memory was used to examine and compare perceptual-motor interactions on shorter and longer timescales. Eye and pen trajectories were found to be coordinated in time on shorter timescales during drawing, and also on longer timescales spanning study and drawing periods. The latter type of coordination was found by developing a purely spatial analysis that yielded measures of similarity between images, eye trajectories, and pen trajectories. These results challenge the notion that coordination only unfolds on short timescales. Rather, the task of drawing from memory evokes perceptual-motor encodings of visual images that preserve coarse-grained spatial information over relatively long timescales as well.