Full name: Thunder Rides a Black Horse: Mescalero Apaches and the Mythic Present

Author: Claire R. Farrer Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Anthropology Purchase/reserch links: Amazon Goodreads Barns&Noble Google Books LibraryThing ISBNs: 9781577666998 9780881338973 1577666992 0881338974

The impressive four-day and four-night Mescalero Apache girls puberty ceremonial provides the structure for Farrer's consideration of the ways in which old myths and legends inform contemporary actions and beliefs. Why people behave as they do is as much a focus as is their actual behavior. Through instructions given to Farrer by Bernard Second, her Apache teacher for fourteen years, readers gain insight into the importance of narrative, not just in ceremony but especially in everyday living on a contemporary Indian reservation in the American Southwest. Sights and smells are almost palpable as the author provides the best in reflexive ethnography by allowing readers to see her as a person rather than an all-knowing anthropologist. She neither romanticizes nor patronizes the Apachean people, who are presented as people with foibles as well as possessing much worthy of admiration. Similar books: Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies by Seth Holmes Consuming Grief by Beth A. Conklin The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis Guests of the Sheik by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches by Marvin Harris The Innocent Anthropologist by Nigel Barley Neanderthal Man by Svante Paabo Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel L. Everett Cannibals and Kings by Marvin Harris Our Kind by Marvin Harris The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing My Cocaine Museum by Michael Taussig The Gift by Marcel Mauss Death Without Weeping by Nancy Scheper-Hughes The Ritual Process by Victor Turner What Color Is the Sacred? by Michael Taussig Mad Dogs, Englishmen, and the Errant Anthropologist by Douglas Raybeck Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes by Robert M. Emerson Cultural Materialism by Marvin Harris