John Hoopes

LAQ volume 36 issue 2 Cover and Front matter - Volume 36 Issue 2

Anthropos - internationale Zeitschrift für Völkerkunde wird vom Anthropos Institut St. Augustin seit 1906 zweimal jährlich herausgegeben. Ursprünglich als Sprachrohr für katholische Missionarsarbeit geplant, gilt sie heute als wichtige Fachzeitschrift der allgemeinen Ethnologie. Sie behandelt sowohl kulturelle als auch sprachliche Themen in mehreren Sprachen, mit Schwerpunkt auf den Völkern des gesamtamerikanischen und afrikanischen Kontinents. Anthropos is the international journal of anthropology and linguistics, founded in 1906 by Wilhelm Schmidt, missonary and member of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD). Its main purpose is the study of human societies in their cultural dimension. In honor of Wilhelm Schmidt‘s legacy, the cultivation of anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, and religious studies remain an essential component oft he Anthropos Institute – the organizational carrier of the journal. The vihuela de arco, a musical instrument with a remote background in fourteenth-century Spain and frequently used in Renaissance music, was introduced to America and the Upper Amazon after the Spanish invasion. In Europe it stopped playing at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but today an adaptation of it subsists in the Upper Amazon, incorporated into the systems of musical thought of the Shuar, Achuar and Shiwiar societies that share cultural and linguistic similarities, as well as in the Kichwa people of Sarayaku, an aspect that configures an important musicological finding of the 21st century. It was 1612, when in the kingdom of Loango (Central Africa), a young prince saw his king drinking palm wine; in so doing, be it inadvertently, the beloved heir apparent had contravened standard food regulations promulgated in order to protect the physical well-being of the royal person. The “guilty” offender has accordingly been executed. In this article we investigate how these events at the Loango court have been perceived and treated throughout the ages by all kind of observers, direct as well as indirect, but all of European extraction, our idea being that “the point of history is to study historians, not to study the past” (Evans 1997: 98). Berlin’s spätis (businesses that are similar to corner shops and open late hours and on Sundays) provide their customers with temporal flexibility. Amidst globally-rising xenophobic sentiments, Turkish owners and workers of these shops utilize this temporal quality and organize their work to accommodate the temporal needs of their diverse customers. They synchronize with the life of their neighborhoods and engage in speedy transactions. This temporal arrangement provides a powerful lens to consider how minorities’ labor forms the temporal infrastructure of their cities and make minorities vital for their countries. Whereas this case might appear as an example of good things happening in the midst of today’s overwhelming negativity, the article encourages research into the labor behind such “good things.” Thus, the essay adds to the “anthropology of the good” by showing that things that appear to be “good” might necessitate certain forms of labor, in this case, that of minorities. Tungus-Manchu and Samoyed peoples inhabit adjacent territories and live in a similar environment since antiquity. Both of these language families also underwent divergence at roughly the same time. It is interesting to see which dwelling names can be reconstructed for the different proto-language states of these families, and with which ethnographically or archaeologically attested dwelling types these words can be correlated. The aim of this article is to describe and analyze the contribution of Stanisław Poniatowski to the ethnological study of Siberia - the region that has always attracted travelers and discoverers. Even those who had been exiled by the tsarist regime in the second half of the 19th century not only intended to survive in the new, harsh environment, but also frequently conducted their own geographic, ethnographic, or botanical research. The turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was also the time of the first academic expeditions to Siberia, such as the one led by Vladimir G. Bogoraz (1894-1896), a Russian ethnographer and linguist, during which systematic research in various fields of humanities and natural sciences was conducted. The scientific contribution of Stanisław Poniatowski to Siberian studies is based, in the first place on his extensive and detailed fieldwork which, nonetheless, would not be possible without the support given by the acclaimed Czech anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička. Thanks to his assistance, Poniatowski’s expedition could be carried on and produce unique ethnographic data on relatively unknown peoples of that region of Asia. The author describes and analyzes the divination with coca leaves in the central Andean area, paying a particular attention to the linguistic structures used in the process. He demonstrates that coca leaves not only play an important role in the traditional ritualism but also strengthen social relations and articulate the cosmovision. This article deals with the Mapuche religion as seen by Spanish chroniclers who wrote about the indigenous peoples of Chile. In these documents, we find numerous religious elements that help us understand the mythology and beliefs of the Mapuche at the beginning of the conquest. Addressing the subject of his study, the author analyzes the works of those chronicles in order to create a general panorama of their vision of indigenous religions, taking into account certain methodological problems that such study entails, e.g. religiocentrism and religious syncretism. Based on ethnographic data collected in two Peruvian peasant communities on telluric worships, in this article I analyze the symbolic forms of the ritual interaction...