In 1897, Morris Jesup, president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, sponsored a five-year expedition to Alaska and Siberia. Under the direction of anthropologist Franz Boas, research teams studied the cultural and biological similarities and differences among the peoples living on both sides of the Bering Strait. Now, 100 years after the expedition, this book presents a valuable record of this event. 83 photos.
The authors take readers deep into the heart of this ancient country in search of the cultural, social, and religious drives that inform their traditional way of life. Simultaneous.
Statues, paintings, and masks—like the bodies of shamans and spirit mediums—give material form and presence to otherwise invisible entities, and sometimes these objects are understood to be enlivened, agentive on their own terms. This book explores how magical images are expected to work with the shamans and spirit mediums who tend and use them in contemporary South Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, Bali, and elsewhere in Asia. It considers how such things are fabricated, marketed, cared for, disposed of, and sometimes transformed into art-market commodities and museum artifacts.