Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850-1990 - Paperback

by Thomas Buckley (Author)

This colorful, richly textured account of spiritual training and practice within an American Indian social network emphasizes narrative over analysis. Thomas Buckley's foregrounding of Yurok narratives creates one major level of dialogue in an innovative ethnography that features dialogue as its central theoretical trope. Buckley places himself in conversation with contemporary Yurok friends and elders, with written texts, and with twentieth-century anthropology as well. He describes Yurok Indian spirituality as "a significant field in which individual and society meet in dialogue-cooperating, resisting, negotiating, changing each other in manifold ways. 'Culture, ' here, is not a thing but a process, an emergence through time."

Front Jacket

The most in-depth, complex, and analytically sophisticated portrayal of Yurok spirituality ever written by an anthropologist [and] the most important ethnographic work about the Yurok in general since Kroeber's work in the early twentieth century.--Les W. Field, author of The Grimace of Macho Ratón

"Its description of Yurok religious practice in recent times is both sympathetic and insightful, providing an interweaving series of narratives and interpretations. The author makes an eloquent case for cultural continuity."--Michael Harkin, author of The Heiltsuks

Author Biography

Thomas Buckley is an independent scholar and writer living in Maine. He previously taught anthropology and American Indian studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and coedited Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation (California, 1988).