Word: anthropologists
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...pleased that Anthropologist Derek Freeman has challenged Margaret Mead's work on Samoa [Feb. 14]. When I lived there in the early 1970s, I asked an elderly Samoan what he thought of Mead's book Coming of Age in Samoa. He replied that the only one who came of age in Samoa was Margaret Mead...
...former Peace Corps volunteer in Western Samoa, I find it as difficult to agree with Derek Freeman's narrow analysis of the Samoan culture as I did with Margaret Mead's. As Anthropologist Bradd Shore accurately pointed out, Samoans can lead contradictory lives. Moreover, they are very adept at telling people what they wish to hear, saying one thing and doing another...
...organize time and myth with music; we mark our lives by it. The death by assassination of John Lennon was an event that mingled music and myth and completed the relationship between the two. Music, as the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once said, "unites the contrary attributes of being both intelligible and untranslatable...
...anthropologist Richard Lee has described an unusual Christmas in a Kung San village in the Kalahari Desert To show his appreciation for the tribe generosity, Lee slaughtered the fattest ox in the neighborhood as a Christmas gift. The Kung responded only with abuse and ridicule, and Lee had to infer that such displays of wealth and superiority are inappropriate. "The interesting thing is the competitive aspect of gift-giving, and that generosity can be interpreted in lots of different ways in different societies...
...sarcasm stops when the insurance man learns of a mysterious cult (the "Names" of the title). The ritual murders committed by these ragged, nomadic zealots are as easy as ABC. Their formula, revealed by Owen Brademas, an aged American anthropologist, is based on polyglot alphabets twisted into a system of worship. The killers simply match the initials of elderly or crippled villagers with those of towns. When the sacrificial names collide, their hammers fall. For Brademas, these deaths reveal a new layer of violence: "We thought we knew this setting. The mass killer in his furnished room, in his century...