
Archaeology, Language, and History
Essays on Culture and Ethnicity
John Edward Terrell(Author)
Praeger Publishers Inc
Published on 28. February 2001
Book
Hardback
328 pages
978-0-89789-724-2 (ISBN)
Description
Ever since Darwin, the world has been struggling with the mystery of human diversity. As the historian Peter Bowler has written, an evolutionary interpretation of the history of life on the earth must inevitably extend itself to include the origins of the human race. But this has proved to be a difficult and controversial task. Understanding human origins means accounting not only for the obvious differences between people and cultures around the world, but also for the unity of Homo sapiens as a single biological species. As Stephen Jay Gould has said, flexibility is the hallmark of human evolution. Because so much of who we are is learned rather than genetically predetermined, a satisfactory understanding of human evolution--to use old parlance--must account both for the human body and the human soul.
At any single moment of time, it is always possible to find instances where people seem to live in their own world, speak in their own distinctive ways, and have their own exclusive cultural traits and practices. Over the course of time, however, it is not so easy to find places where these dimensions of our diversity stay together. The essays in this collection show why we must stop thinking that race, language, and culture go together, and why we should be wary of the commonsense beliefs that human races exist and that people who speak different languages come from fundamentally different biological lineages.
At any single moment of time, it is always possible to find instances where people seem to live in their own world, speak in their own distinctive ways, and have their own exclusive cultural traits and practices. Over the course of time, however, it is not so easy to find places where these dimensions of our diversity stay together. The essays in this collection show why we must stop thinking that race, language, and culture go together, and why we should be wary of the commonsense beliefs that human races exist and that people who speak different languages come from fundamentally different biological lineages.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 24 mm
Weight
685 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-89789-724-2 (9780897897242)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
JOHN EDWARD TERRELL is Curator of Oceanic Archaeology and Ethnology at the Field Museum of Natural History and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Chicago./e
Content
Introduction by John Edward Terrell The Uncommon Sense of Race, Language, and Culture by John Edward Terrell Ethnogenetic Patterns in Native North America by John H. Moore Soviet Ethnogenetic Theory and the Interpretation of the Past by Richard W. Lindstrom Setting the Boundaries: Linguistics, Ethnicity, Colonialism, and Archaeology South of Lake Chad by Scott MacEachern Manchu-Tungusic and Culture Change Among Manchu-Tungusic Peoples by Lindsay J. Whaley Recognizing Ethnic Identity in the Upper Pleistocene: The Case of the African Middle Stone Age/Middle Paleolithic by Pamela R. Willoughby Demography, Ethnography, and Archaeo-Linguistic Evidence: A Study of Celtic and Germanic from Prehistory into the Early Historical Period by John Hines Contexts of Change in Holocene Britain: Genes, Language, and Archaeology by Martin Paul Evison Ethnolinguistic Groups, Language Boundaries, and Culture History: A Sociolinguistic Model by John Edward Terrell Identity and Contact in Three Jewish Languages by Mark R.V. Southern Languages on the Land: Toward an Anthropological Dialectology by Jane H. Hill Language, Culture, and Community Boundaries Around the Huon Gulf of New Guinea by Joel Bradshaw Index