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Standing
Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850-1990 by Thomas Buckley University of California Press 2002 This
colorful, richly textured account of spiritual training and practice
within an American Indian social network emphasizes narrative over analysis.
Thomas Buckley's foregrounding of Yurok narratives creates one major
level of dialogue in an innovative ethnography that features dialogue
as its central theoretical trope. Buckley places himself in conversation
with contemporary Yurok friends and elders, with written texts, and
with twentieth-century anthropology as well. He describes Yurok Indian
spirituality as "a significant field in which individual and society
meet in dialogue--cooperating, resisting, negotiating, changing each
other in manifold ways. 'Culture,' here, is not a thing but a process,
an emergence through time." Standing Ground is not a particularly technical work, however, Buckley has tried to keep the stories and their tellers in the foreground. These stories range from transcribed tape recordings and extensive field notes that he compiled with Yurok teachers in the 1970s to his own stories about his time on the Klamath. |
