Product Description
This is a collection of texts from the Yana, a native Californian people who spoke a Hokan language. The Yana lived in the north-eastern Sacramento region of California, east of Redding and north of Chico. Their mythology was very similar to their neighbors, the Maidu, the Shasta and the Wintun; the trickster, Coyote, plays a very important role. There is no cosmological origin myth recorded here. Rather the mythology starts out in a fully realized dream-time inhabited by animal spirits. They are busy sketching in the world that humans will inhabit. The text, the 'Origin of Sex, Hands, and Death', starts off with an interesting twist: women were originally men, and men were originally women.
The most famous Yana, belonging to a subgroup called the Yahi, was Ishi, billed as 'The last wild Indian'. Ishi stumbled out of the mountains near Oroville in 1911, the year after this monograph was published. Ishi was taken Berkeley where he lived the remainder of his life, studied closely by the anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Thomas Talbot Waterman. Ishi died in 1916. He is the subject of an excellent book by Theodora Kroeber, wife of Alfred Krober, Ishi in Two Worlds. --J.B. Hare
The most famous Yana, belonging to a subgroup called the Yahi, was Ishi, billed as 'The last wild Indian'. Ishi stumbled out of the mountains near Oroville in 1911, the year after this monograph was published. Ishi was taken Berkeley where he lived the remainder of his life, studied closely by the anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Thomas Talbot Waterman. Ishi died in 1916. He is the subject of an excellent book by Theodora Kroeber, wife of Alfred Krober, Ishi in Two Worlds. --J.B. Hare
About the Author
About the Author:
"Edward Sapir (January 26, 1884 - February 4, 1939) was an American anthropologist-linguist, a leader in American structural linguistics, and one of the creators of what is now called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He is arguably the most influential figure in American linguistics, influencing several generations of linguists across several schools of linguistics.
Sapir was born in Lauenburg in Pomerania to an orthodox Jewish family. He received both a B.A. (1904) and an M.A. (1905) in Germanic philology from Columbia, but his linguistic interests proved to be much broader. In the next two years he took up studies of the Wishram and Takelma languages of Southwestern Oregon, and received his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1909. While a graduate student at Columbia he met his mentor, anthropologist Franz Boas, who was probably the person who provided the most initial impetus for Sapir's study of indigenous languages of the Americas. He arranged Sapir's employment in 1907-08 researching the nearly extinct Yana language of northern California, to which he returned briefly in 1915 to work with Ishi, the monolingual last surviving speaker of Yahi (southern Yana).
In the years 1910-1925 he built and directed the Anthropological Division in the Geological Survey of Canada, in Ottawa. When he was first hired, he and Marius Barbeau were the only two, and the first two, full-time anthropologists in Canada. Among the many accomplishments of this very productive period are a substantial series of publications on Nootka and other languages, and his seminal book Language (1921), still important today and eminently readable. As he was leaving for a teaching position at the University of Chicago, one of very few research universities then in the United States, he enabled Leonard Bloomfield to obtain support from Ottawa to do fieldwork on Cree, essential to his project of historical reconstruction in Algonkian. Bloomfield moved to Chicago in 1927 to teach Germanic languages. It appears (Darnell 268-272) that they were congenial but not close. From 1931 to his death Sapir was at Yale University, where he became the head of the Department of Anthropology.
He was one of the first who explored the relations between language studies and anthropology. His students include Fang-kuei Li, Benjamin Whorf, Mary Haas, and Harry Hoijer, but it was one not formally his student who he
"Edward Sapir (January 26, 1884 - February 4, 1939) was an American anthropologist-linguist, a leader in American structural linguistics, and one of the creators of what is now called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He is arguably the most influential figure in American linguistics, influencing several generations of linguists across several schools of linguistics.
Sapir was born in Lauenburg in Pomerania to an orthodox Jewish family. He received both a B.A. (1904) and an M.A. (1905) in Germanic philology from Columbia, but his linguistic interests proved to be much broader. In the next two years he took up studies of the Wishram and Takelma languages of Southwestern Oregon, and received his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1909. While a graduate student at Columbia he met his mentor, anthropologist Franz Boas, who was probably the person who provided the most initial impetus for Sapir's study of indigenous languages of the Americas. He arranged Sapir's employment in 1907-08 researching the nearly extinct Yana language of northern California, to which he returned briefly in 1915 to work with Ishi, the monolingual last surviving speaker of Yahi (southern Yana).
In the years 1910-1925 he built and directed the Anthropological Division in the Geological Survey of Canada, in Ottawa. When he was first hired, he and Marius Barbeau were the only two, and the first two, full-time anthropologists in Canada. Among the many accomplishments of this very productive period are a substantial series of publications on Nootka and other languages, and his seminal book Language (1921), still important today and eminently readable. As he was leaving for a teaching position at the University of Chicago, one of very few research universities then in the United States, he enabled Leonard Bloomfield to obtain support from Ottawa to do fieldwork on Cree, essential to his project of historical reconstruction in Algonkian. Bloomfield moved to Chicago in 1927 to teach Germanic languages. It appears (Darnell 268-272) that they were congenial but not close. From 1931 to his death Sapir was at Yale University, where he became the head of the Department of Anthropology.
He was one of the first who explored the relations between language studies and anthropology. His students include Fang-kuei Li, Benjamin Whorf, Mary Haas, and Harry Hoijer, but it was one not formally his student who he
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