Word: totem
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...occasionally departs from animal husbandry to dwell upon balmy Santa Marta's social and racial ferments. It seems that the happy islanders, almost all of some Negro ancestry, sometimes get irritated by the snootiness of the British colonial plantation owners. Their self-seeking messiah (played like a talking totem pole by Singer Harry Belafonte) is trying to improve their lot by shaking hands with all of them, sullenly muttering into his champagne at white folks' garden parties, making louder speeches over coconut milk about his dedication to equality and self-government. Belafonte's biggest job, however...
...operational definition of concepts, and the degree to which it can be applied in the social sciences. Here a defense of Hugh O'Neil, the great Earl of Tyrone, ends in an explanation of Elizabethan expansion as the result of a price squeeze on the gentlemen of England. There Totem and Taboo is tabooed, with anthropological reasons. Here some pellet-counters thrash out the merits of the rat and the hamster as laboratory animals. There the probable next moves of the Rubber Workers Union are mapped...
...Ferren as "breaking through the sound barrier." In fact, some such move has long been in the offing. Abstractionist Willem de Kooning first tried it with his grotesque woman images (TIME, April 4, 1953), only to relapse into abstraction. Drip Originator Jackson Pollock was himself struggling with half-glimpsed totem images before his death in an auto crash last August. Younger painters are now pulling and punching areas of pigment on their canvases to achieve a new-found "landscape look" that has been dubbed abstract impressionism...
This four-character play, thinly disguised as a novel, tells the story of a prodigal but unpenitent son. Charlie Morrow, a low man on the Madison Avenue totem pole, who has "always been so ready to be rich," drives up to Connecticut in a mortgaged Cadillac to hear the reading of his father's will. In the family law office, Charlie spends an idle 15 minutes making a conquest of Ellen, a pretty secretary, a girl who proves singularly susceptible to a combination of old jokes and rueful self-pity. But after this pleasant diversion, the will...
...which spelled cultural disaster elsewhere, had a tonic effect on the avid, acquisitive fisheaters of the Northwest. The steel tools they got in trading started a great, final flowering of the traditions of wood sculpture that had been slowly evolving for centuries. Its most spectacular achievement: the giant totem pole that emerged within a century from the small carved house post...