Loon: Memory, Meaning, and Reality in a Northern Dene CommunityIn August 1975 at Foxholm Lake on the reserve of the Chipewyan, a Northern Dene people, in the Northwest Territories of Canada, the anthropologist Henry S. Sharp and two members of the Mission Band encountered a loon. Loons are prized for their meat and skin, so the two Chipewyan tried?thirty times?to kill it. The loon, in a brazen display of power, thwarted these attempts and in doing so revealed itself to be a "spirit." In this book, Sharp embarks on a narrative exploration of the Chipewyan culture that examines the nature of a reality within which wild animals are both persons and spirits. In an unforgettable journey through the symbolic universe and daily life of the Chipewyan of Mission, his work uses the context and meaning of the loon encounter to show how spirits are an actual and almost omnipresent aspect of life. ø To explain how the Chipewyan create and order the shared reality of their culture, Sharp develops a series of analytical metaphors that draw heavily on quantum mechanics. His central premise: reality is an indeterminate phenomenon created through the sharing of meaning between cultural beings. In support of this argument, Sharp examines such topics as the nature of time, power, gender, animals, memory, gossip, magical death, and the construction of meaning. Creatively argued and evocatively written, his work presents a compelling picture of one people engaged in the human struggle to create meaning. |
Contents
Loon | 1 |
Mission | 5 |
Indeterminacy | 29 |
Foxholm Lake | 34 |
The Whites Land | 42 |
Loon II | 44 |
Wild Things | 48 |
Time | 59 |
Talking about Things | 95 |
Loon IV | 109 |
Meaning | 117 |
Death by Meaning | 125 |
Event and Memory | 142 |
Future Memory | 163 |
Loon V | 177 |
Notes | 183 |
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Common terms and phrases
actions adults animal/persons animals Anthropology aspects became become began behavior Birchtown bush cabins camp Canada Canadian caribou causality Charley Charley's Chipewyan culture context created Dene culture Dene lives Dene reality Dene Tha Dene thought Denegothera determined Discha dogs dreams effect encounter ethnography exist experience explanation field of meaning fight folk physics Foxholm Lake giant fish giant otters Gleacho gossip Hudson's Bay Company human hunters hunting indeterminacy Indian inkoze interaction interpretation issue kill knew knowledge Koyukon Lake Athabasca land Lived-with-the-wolves loon Magic Boy memory miles Mission Band Mission Chipewyan Mission Dene Mission Lake nature North Northern Athapaskan person Phil Phil's physical population power/knowledge presence rational ravens RCMP realm reincarnation relationships remains role shared Sharp sled dogs snow snowmobile social species symbols talked Teacher things tion trapping understanding Uranium City village Wellington Western winter wolf wolves
Popular passages
Page 204 - Li, FANG-KWEI 1933 A list of Chipewyan stems. International Journal of American Linguistics 7:122151.
References to this book
Nature (La) nature des esprits dans les cosmologies autochtones / Nature of ... Limited preview - 2007 |