
Savage Kin
Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists
Margaret M. Bruchac(Author)
University of Arizona Press
Published on 10. April 2018
Book
Hardback
280 pages
978-0-8165-3706-8 (ISBN)
Description
In this provocative new book, Margaret M. Bruchac, an Indigenous anthropologist, turns the word savage on its head. Savage Kin explores the nature of the relationships between Indigenous informants such as Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Mohegan), Jesse Cornplanter (Seneca), and George Hunt (Tlingit), and early twentieth-century anthropological collectors such as Frank Speck, Arthur C. Parker, William N. Fenton, and Franz Boas.
This book reconceptualizes the intimate details of encounters with Native interlocutors who by turns inspired, facilitated, and resisted the anthropological enterprise. Like other texts focused on this era, Savage Kin features some of the elite white men credited with salvaging material that might otherwise have been lost. Unlike other texts, this book highlights the intellectual contributions and cultural strategies of unsung Indigenous informants without whom this research could never have taken place.
These bicultural partnerships transgressed social divides and blurred the roles of anthropologist/informant, relative/stranger, and collector/collected. Yet these stories were obscured by collecting practices that separated people from objects, objects from communities, and communities from stories. Bruchac's decolonizing efforts include "reverse ethnography"-painstakingly tracking seemingly unidentifiable objects, misconstrued social relations, unpublished correspondence, and unattributed field notes-to recover this evidence. Those early encounters generated foundational knowledges that still affect Indigenous communities today.
This book also contains unexpected narratives of human and other--than-human encounters-brilliant discoveries, lessons from ancestral spirits, prophetic warnings, powerful gifts, and personal tragedies-that Native and non-Native readers alike will find deeply moving.
This book reconceptualizes the intimate details of encounters with Native interlocutors who by turns inspired, facilitated, and resisted the anthropological enterprise. Like other texts focused on this era, Savage Kin features some of the elite white men credited with salvaging material that might otherwise have been lost. Unlike other texts, this book highlights the intellectual contributions and cultural strategies of unsung Indigenous informants without whom this research could never have taken place.
These bicultural partnerships transgressed social divides and blurred the roles of anthropologist/informant, relative/stranger, and collector/collected. Yet these stories were obscured by collecting practices that separated people from objects, objects from communities, and communities from stories. Bruchac's decolonizing efforts include "reverse ethnography"-painstakingly tracking seemingly unidentifiable objects, misconstrued social relations, unpublished correspondence, and unattributed field notes-to recover this evidence. Those early encounters generated foundational knowledges that still affect Indigenous communities today.
This book also contains unexpected narratives of human and other--than-human encounters-brilliant discoveries, lessons from ancestral spirits, prophetic warnings, powerful gifts, and personal tragedies-that Native and non-Native readers alike will find deeply moving.
Reviews / Votes
A must-read for anyone interested in gaining a critical understanding of the history of anthropologists' relationships with their research subjects and the unheralded contributions those people made to the work of preeminent scholars in the field."" - Joe E. Watkins, University of Maryland""Through an astonishing amount of research, Bruchac has brought to light important histories that have been glossed over and in some cases erased from the history of anthropology, to its detriment."" - Susan Rowley, University of British Columbia
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Tucson
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
25 black & white illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
825 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8165-3706-8 (9780816537068)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Margaret M. Bruchac is an assistant professor of anthropology and the coordinator of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Dreaming Again: Algonkian Poetry and co-editor of Indigenous Archaeologies: A Reader on Decolonization.