NCW Libraries

"Many of us are alarmed by the accelerating rates of extinction of plants and animals. But how many of us know that human cultures are going extinct at an even more shocking rate? While biologists estimate that 18 percent of mammals and 11 percent of birds are threatened, and botanists anticipate the loss of 8 percent of flora, anthropologists predict that fully 50 percent of the 7,000 languages spoken around the world today will disappear within...

"Our world was made on and by the Silk Roads. For millennia it was here that East and West encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas and cultures, the birth of the world's great religions, the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. From the first cities in Mesopotamia to the growth of Greece and Rome to the depredations by the Mongols and the Black Death to the Great Game...

"To the Mansours, an Arab American family living in Seattle, love knows no borders. But despite our best efforts, sometimes love-and family-are foreign to us. American-born Margaret Mansour wants nothing more than to rekindle the struggling twenty-year marriage to her Palestinian husband, Ahmed-but not if it means uprooting their home and children in America and moving halfway across the world. Young and ambitious Alison Mansour has a degree in Near...

La cultura da a los seres humanos un sentido de identidad. Este título examina cómo las culturas de todo el mundo se mezclan y cambian en respuesta a la migración y el asentamiento. Este fascinante libro examina: la superioridad cultural: suprimir o abusar de la cultura de un pueblo indígena; coerción o conversión: obligar a otra cultura a adoptar creencias o una forma de vida, o cuando se "convierte" voluntariamente; integración: adoptar las...

As the earliest "ethnographic" accounts of the Native peoples of northern North America, fur-trade records have long been mined for data by legal researchers, historians, and anthropologists. Traders' Tales provides the first sustained critical analysis of these fascinating historical documents. Drawing on the latest techniques in ethnohistory and cultural and literary theory, Elizabeth Vibert unpacks the assumptions behind traders' views - assumptions...