Mary W. Helms Libri

Exploring the intersection of travel and knowledge, the book delves into how different cultures perceive space and distance in relation to their cosmologies. It highlights the political significance of information gained from distant lands, featuring diverse travelers like Hindu pilgrims, Islamic scholars, and Indigenous traders. The narrative also examines the extensive interactions between Europeans and native peoples, revealing the cultural clashes stemming from differing expectations about the unknown. Through these insights, the author uncovers the profound impacts of long-distance journeys on societies.

Offers a new paradigm for understanding traditional societies that will be of interest to all anthropologists and archaeologists

What do long-distance travelers gain from their voyages, especially when faraway lands are regarded as the source of esoteric knowledge? Mary Helms explains how various cultures interpret space and distance in cosmological terms, and why they associate political power with information about strange places, peoples, and things. She assesses the dive

In many non-industrial, non-Western societies, power and prestige are closely linked to the extent of an individual's or group's perceived connection to the supernatural realm, which also explains and validates tangible activities such as economic success, victories in war, or control over lucrative trade. Affines (in-laws), ancestors, and aristocrats, in particular, are connected to the realm of creative cosmological origins (i.e., to Genesis), which accords them distinctive, supernatural powers and gives them a natural and legitimate right to worldly authority. This is the hypothesis that Mary W. Helms pursues in this broadly cross-cultural study of aristocracy in chiefly societies. She begins with basic ideas about the dead, ancestors, affines, and concepts of cosmological origins. This leads her to a discussion of cosmologically defined hierarchies, the qualities that characterize aristocracy, and the political and ideological roles of aristocrats as wife-givers and wife-takers (that is, as in-laws). She concludes by considering various models that explain how societies may develop or define aristocracies.