The Bará, or Fish people of the Northwest Amazon form part of a network of intermarrying local communities - each community speaks a different language and marriages must take place between people from different communities with different languages. Here, Jean Jackson discusses Bar· marriage, kinship, spatial organization and other features of their social landscape.

A hilarious love story about a teenager and a fish. Royce Rowland is a 17-year-old sexual and social reprobate who has been sent to sea with a tough skipper in an effort to straighten him out. But, as with everything, Royce goes on board with his own interests at heart: he wants to trawl for the fabled giant squid. He does catch something unexpected, but it isn't a squid, and in its wake comes a conning prostitute who is determined to make off with the haul. And so Royce embarks on a Odyssean journey pursuing his catch through New Zealand waters and on to Japan. En route, he is to discover true love - for a fish . . .

The Wakuenai of the upper Rio Negro region in southern Venezuela a form of singing called malikai for ceremonies of childbirth, initiation, and healing. This ritual chanting, a rich amalgam of myth and music, serves as a means of integrating individuals into a vertical hierarchy of powers relations between mythic ancestors and human descendants. In Keepers of the Sacred Chants, Jonathan Hill shows how the musical and semantic transformations of everyday discourse in malikai integrate the everyday world into a poetic process of empowerment. He interprets malikai through mythic narratives that explain the cosmos as an ongoing process of musically naming-into-being the species, objects, and activities that define individual humanness and society, and he further shows how semantic and musical meanings are joined to construct each chant and how these chants are manipulated in different contexts. Hill explains how the musical elements of malikai contribute to the success of performance, comparing different genres for which different musical criteria are appropriate. He considers the integration of speech and song through a close analysis of such elements as microtonal pitch rise, rhythm, and timbre, showing how these features are linked to poetic speech and imbued with social power. Hill's penetrating study of malikai is made within the context of Wakuenai history and cosmology and considers influences resulting from contact with the outside world. Because Northern Arawakan-speaking peoples have received less attention than others of the region, his book thus makes a significant contribution to Amazonian ethnography. It is the author's focus on malikai, however, that commends keepers of theSacred Chants to all interested in the multitextured uses of song and story by peoples of the world.

*BY THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE* 'Laxness at his best: a reminder of the mad hilarity of the Icelandic sensibility. An endearing and unforgettable voice' Nicholas Shakespeare Abandoned as a baby, Alfgrimur is content to spend his days as a fisherman living in the turf cottage outside Reykjavik with the elderly couple he calls grandmother and grandfather. There he shares the mid-loft with a motley bunch of eccentrics and philosophers who find refuge in the simple respect for their fellow men that is the ethos at the Brekkukot. But the narrow horizons of Alfgrimur's idyllic childhood are challenged when he starts school and meets Iceland's most famous singer, the mysterious Garoar Holm. Garoar encourages him to aim for the 'one true note', but how can he attain it without leaving behind the world that he loves? 'It is a novel (a world) that transmits something of the wonder of life' Murray Bail

The Baniwa Indians of the Northwest Amazon have engaged in millenarian movements since at least the middle of the nineteenth century. The defining characteristic of these movements is usually a prophecy of the end of this present world and the restoration of the primordial, utopian world of creation. This prophetic message, delivered by powerful shamans, has its roots in Baniwa myths of origin and creation. In this ethnography of Baniwa religion, Robin M. Wright explores the myths of creation and how they have been embodied in religious movements and social action—particularly in a widespread conversion to evangelical Christianity. He opens with a discussion of cosmogony, cosmology, and shamanism, and then goes on to explain how Baniwa origin myths have played an active role in shaping both personal and community identity and history. He also explores the concepts of death and eschatology and shows how the mythology of destruction and renewal in Baniwa religion has made the Baniwa people receptive to both Catholic and Protestant missionaries.

Did you know that half of all the animals in the world that have backbones are fish? There are more kinds of fishes than there are amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals added together. And scientists are discovering more species of fish almost weekly. Brilliantly colored or camouflaged, as big as a whale or smaller than a little fingernail, fishes are found almost everywhere there is water. The Fish Classes explores the origins of the first fishes, with a glimpse of some of the extraordinary varieties that became extinct long ago. The book also examines the five classes of modern fishes, surveys their physical features, habitats, and ways of life, as well as some of the threats they face today. Book jacket.

Long out-of-print, My Old People Say has remained a primary resource for students of the history and culture of northwestern North America. Catherine McClellan’s three decades of collaboration with the Inland Tlingit, Tagish and Southern Tutchone resulted in two splendid, scholarly volumes that document rich and detailed memories of late nineteenth century social organization, subsistence strategies and resource allocation, as well as aesthetic, spiritual and intellectual traditions.

Is a jellyfish a fish? How long do fish live? What is estivation? Expand your knowledge of these fascinating vertebrates in this amazing book!

Based on over five years of ethnographic research [carried out] in the southwest Yukon, Sovereignty's Entailments is a close ethnographic analysis of everyday practices of state formation in a society whose members do not take for granted the cultural entailments of sovereignty.