Apresenta um modelo de estrutura social em que vivem os índios Xokleng baseado na execução de ritos de passagem em família

Este livro, escrito por um dos melhores etnólogos modernos, é uma obrigação para os especialistas, assim como leitores em geral interessados ​​em obter uma visão profunda da cosmologia de índios da Amazônia. It provides the reader with a model for symbolic interpretation of rituals, myths, deities, astronomical cycles and everyday life aspects of the Desana, an ethnic indigenous group that lives near the Colombian Vaupés River. Ele oferece ao leitor um modelo de interpretação simbólica de rituais, mitos, deuses, ciclos astronômicos e aspectos da vida cotidiana do Desana, um grupo étnico indígena que vive perto do rio Vaupés colombiano. The author uses a linguistic approach to analyze the detailed interviews with his informants, who are acculturated shamans, whom describe to minimum detail the symbolic meaning of their spiritual and material culture. O autor usa uma abordagem lingüística para analisar as entrevistas detalhadas com seus informantes, que são aculturados xamãs, que descrevem a mínimos detalhes o significado simbólico de sua cultura material e espiritual. The index is very useful for research of particular themes. O índice é muito útil para a pesquisa de temas específicos

Culture and Practical Reason makes a substantial contribution to current discussions within anthropology. Sahlins uses the anthropological concept of culture, as founded upon meaning and symbols, to successfully challenge a mode of thought which is pervasive in modern consciousness, namely, “practical reason”

Aborda um estudo de estrutura política indigenistas Parintintin

When Western scholars write about non-Western societies, do they inevitably perpetuate the myths of European imperialism? Can they ever articulate the meanings and logics of non-Western peoples? Who has the right to speak for whom? Questions such as these are among the most hotly debated in contemporary intellectual life. In How "Natives" Think, Marshall Sahlins addresses these issues head on, while building a powerful case for the ability of anthropologists working in the Western tradition to understand other cultures; In recent years, these questions have arisen in debates over the death and deification of Captain James Cook on Hawai'i Island in 1779. Did the Hawaiians truly receive Cook as a manifestation of their own god Lono? Or were they too pragmatic, too worldly-wise to accept the foreigner as a god? Moreover, can a "non-native" scholar give voice to a "native" point of view? In his 1992 book The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, Gananath Obeyesekere used this very issue to attack Sahlins's decades of scholarship on Hawaii. Accusing Sahlins of elementary mistakes of fact and logic, even of intentional distortion, Obeyesekere portrayed Sahlins as accepting a naive, enthnocentric idea of superiority of the white man over "natives"—Hawaiian and otherwise. Claiming that his own Sri Lankan heritage gave him privileged access to the Polynesian native perspective, Obeyesekere contended that Hawaiians were actually pragmatists too rational and sensible to mistake Cook for a god; Curiously then, as Sahlins shows, Obeyesekere turns eighteenth-century Hawaiians into twentieth-century modern Europeans, living up to the highest Western standards of "practical rationality." By contrast, Western scholars are turned into classic custom-bound "natives", endlessly repeating their ancestral traditions of the White man's superiority by insisting Cook was taken for a god. But this inverted ethnocentrism can only be supported, as Sahlins demonstrates, through wholesale fabrications of Hawaiian ethnography and history—not to mention Obeyesekere's sustained misrepresentations of Sahlins's own work. And in the end, although he claims to be speaking on behalf of the "natives," Obeyesekere, by substituting a home-made "rationality" for Hawaiian culture, systematically eliminates the voices of Hawaiian people from their own history; How "Natives" Think goes far beyond specialized debates about the alleged superiority of Western traditions. The culmination of Sahlins's ethnohistorical research on Hawaii, it is a reaffirmation for understanding difference

Examina o aparecimento e a evolução da sociedade colonial na região de São Paulo durante o século XVI e XVII. Reavalia a história da formação da sociedade paulista