David M. Guss's Books

The Festive State

Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance

By: David M. Guss

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The Festive State

Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance

By: David M. Guss

If, as David Guss argues, culture is a contested terrain with constantly changing contours, then festivals are its battlegrounds, where people come to fight and dispute in large acts of public display. Festive behavior, long seen by anthropologists and folklorists as the "uniform expression of a collective consciousness, is contentious and often subversive," and The Festive State is an eye-opening guide to its workings. Guss investigates "the ideology of tradition," combining four case studies in a radical multisite ethnography to demonstrate how in each instance concepts of race, ethnicity, history, gender, and nationhood are challenged and redefined. In a narrative as colorful as the events themselves, Guss presents the Afro-Venezuelan celebration of San Juan, the "neo-Indian" Day of the Monkey, the mestizo ritual of Tamunangue, and the cultural policies and products of a British multinational tobacco corporation. All these illustrate the remarkable fluidity of festive behavior as well as its importance in articulating different cultural interests.

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Page Count

270

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

052092486X

ISBN 13

9780520924864

To Weave and Sing

Art, Symbol, and Narrative in the South American Rainforest

By: David M. Guss

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To Weave and Sing

Art, Symbol, and Narrative in the South American Rainforest

By: David M. Guss

To Weave and Sing is the first in-depth analysis of the rich spiritual and artistic traditions of the Carib-speaking Yekuana Indians of Venezuela, who live in the dense rain forest of the upper Orinoco. Within their homeland of Ihuruna, the Yekuana have succeeded in maintaining the integrity and unity of their culture, resisting the devastating effects of acculturation that have befallen so many neighboring groups. Yet their success must be attributed to more than natural barriers of rapids and waterfalls, to more than lack of "contact" with our "modern" world. The ethnographic history recounted here includes not only the Spanish discovery of the Yekuana but detailed indigenous accounts of the entire history of Yekuana contact with Western culture, revealing an adaptive technique of mythopoesis by which the symbols of a new and hostile European ideology have been consistently defused through their incorporation into traditional indigenous structures. The author's initial point of departure is the Watunna, the Yekuana creation epic, but he finds his principal entrance into this mythic world through basketry, focusing on the eleborate kinetic designs of the round waja baskets and the stories told about them. Guss argues that the problem of understanding Yekuana basketry is the problem of understanding all traditional art forms within a tribal context, and critiques the cultural assumptions inherent in our systems of classification. He demonstrates that the symbols woven into the baskets function not in isolation but collectively, as a powerful system cutting across the entire culture. To Weave and Sing addresses all Yekuana material culture and the greater reality it both incorporates and masks, discerning a unifying configuration of symbols in chapters on architectural forms, the geography of the body, and the use of herbs, face paints, and chants. A narrow view of slash-and-burn gardens as places of mere subsistence is challenged by Guss's portrait of these exclusively female spaces as systematic inversions of the male world, "the sacred turned on its head." Throughout, a wealth of narrative and ritual materials provides us with the closest approximation we have to a native exegesis of these phenomena. What we are offered here is a new Poetics of Culture, ethnography not as a static given but as a series of shifting fields, wherein culture (and our image of it) is constantly recreated in all of its parts, by all of its members.

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Page Count

289

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

052091063X

ISBN 13

9780520910638

Watunna

An Orinoco Creation Cycle

By: Marc de Civrieux,David Guss

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Watunna

An Orinoco Creation Cycle

By: Marc de Civrieux,David Guss

Originally published in Spanish in 1970, Watunna is the epic history and creation stories of the Makiritare, or Yekuana, people living along the northern bank of the Upper Orinoco River of Venezuela, a region of mountains and virgin forest virtually unexplored even to the present. The first English edition of this book was published in 1980 to rave reviews. This edition contains a new foreword by David Guss, as well as Mediata, a detailed myth that recounts the origins of shamanism.

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Page Count

240

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0292715897

ISBN 13

9780292715899

The 21 Escapes of Lt Alastair Cram

A Compelling Story of Courage and Endurance in the Second World War

By: David M. Guss

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The 21 Escapes of Lt Alastair Cram

A Compelling Story of Courage and Endurance in the Second World War

By: David M. Guss

A genuinely new Second World War story, The 21 Escapes of Lt Alastair Cram by David M. Guss is a riveting account of the wartime exploits of the Scotsman. It is a tale of courage in the face of extraordinary odds and a testament to one man's dogged determination never to give up. ‘The greatest serial escaper of the Second World War’ – The Times 'Endlessly fascinating. Cram's story sizzles with adventure' – Giles Milton, Sunday Times In November 1941 Lt Alastair Cram was taken prisoner in North Africa as a devastating tank battle unfolded as Operation Crusader struggled to relieve Tobruk. His capture began a four year-long odyssey as he passed through twelve different POW camps, three Gestapo prisons and one asylum. Determined to regain his freedom, he became a serial escapee fleeing his captors no fewer than twenty-one times. The most dramatic of these attempts was from Gavi, the ‘Italian Colditz’. This maximum-security prison built inside a thousand year old stone fortress was for the pericolosi, those classified as the ‘most dangerous’ prisoners due to their unrelenting desire to escape. It was here that Alastair met David Stirling, the legendary founder of the SAS, and cooked up the plan for the ‘Cistern Tunnel’, one of the most audacious but little-known mass escape attempts of the entire war. ______________ 'Fascinating' – Daily Express 'An enthralling portrait of true courage' Sunday Express S Magazine

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Page Count

352

Publisher

Pan Macmillan

Published Date

ISBN 10

150982958X

ISBN 13

9781509829583

The Festive State

Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance

By: David M. Guss

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The Festive State

Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance

By: David M. Guss

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Page Count

270

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

052092486X

ISBN 13

9780520924864

To Weave and Sing

Art, Symbol, and Narrative in the South American Rainforest

By: David M. Guss

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To Weave and Sing

Art, Symbol, and Narrative in the South American Rainforest

By: David M. Guss

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

289

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520420527

ISBN 13

9780520420526

Book's by David M. Guss

The Festive State

The Festive State

To Weave and Sing

To Weave and Sing

Watunna

Watunna

The 21 Escapes of Lt Alastair Cram

The 21 Escapes of Lt Alastair Cram

The Festive State

The Festive State

To Weave and Sing

To Weave and Sing

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