20%OFF

Stock image for illustration purposes only - book cover, edition or condition may vary.
The Fire of the Jaguar
Terence Turner
€ 34.99
€ 28.15
FREE Delivery in Ireland
Description for The Fire of the Jaguar
Paperback. Num Pages: 305 pages. BIC Classification: 1KLSB; JHMC. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 250 x 150 x 15. Weight in Grams: 666.
Not since Clifford Geertz's Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight has the publication of an anthropological analysis been as eagerly awaited as this book, Terence S. Turner's The Fire of the Jaguar. His reanalysis of the famous myth from the Kayapo people of Brazil was anticipated as an exemplar of a new, dynamic, materialist, action-oriented structuralism, one very different from the kind made famous by Claude Levi-Strauss. But the study never fully materialized. Now, with this volume, it has arrived, bringing with it powerful new insights that challenge the way we think about structuralism, its legacy, and the reasons we have moved away from it. In these chapters, Turner carries out one of the richest and most sustained analysis of a single myth ever conducted. Turner places the Fire of the Jaguar myth in the full context of Kayapo society and culture and shows how it became both an origin tale and model for the work of socialization, which is the primary form of productive labor in Kayapo society. A posthumous tribute to Turner's theoretical erudition, ethnographic rigor, and respect for Amazonian indigenous lifeworlds, this book brings this fascinating Kayapo myth alive for new generations of anthropologists. Accompanied with some of Turner's related pieces on Kayapo cosmology, this book is at once a richly literary work and an illuminating meditation on the process of creativity itself.
Product Details
Publisher
HAU
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2017
Condition
New
Weight
665g
Number of Pages
305
Place of Publication
IL, United States
ISBN
9780997367546
SKU
V9780997367546
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-50
About Terence Turner
Terence S. Turner (1935 2015) was emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and a visiting professor of anthropology at Cornell University. He wrote extensively on the Kayapo throughout his career.
Reviews for The Fire of the Jaguar
This collection of published and previously unpublished papers on Kayapo cosmology by the late Terry Turner (1935-2015) offers a sustained analysis of a single Kayapo myth: Fire of the Jaguar. The book places the myth within the broader context of Kayapo society and culture, showing how it came to be both an origin tale and a model for childhood socialization. In a refreshingly honest, jargon-free foreword, noted anthropologist David Graeber writes that Turner's main goal in examining the jaguar myth was to see 'mythic thought' as a way that the highest level of self-organization appears, as it were, from below. Put another way, Turner sought to understand myth, ritual, and social organization as generative processes of social reproduction. Based on five decades of fieldwork among the Kayapo of Central Brazil, the papers in this volume enable readers to glimpse how the tiniest of ethnographic details can be fused into a seamless whole in the life and works of a single scholar. For more than 50 years, Turner advocated a dynamic, materialist, action-oriented structuralism that was different from that made famous by Claude Levi-Strauss. Since Turner's prose style can be impenetrable, this brilliant theoretical synthesis requires considerable commitment on the part of the reader. Highly recommended.
Choice
Choice