(hardcover, no dust jacket present. well read binding, som...)
hardcover, no dust jacket present. well read binding, some pages are creased to spine. second to last page of book binding is starting to break and is exposed. well reading binding. limited markings or creasing- previous owner's name written on inside first page. corners of covers are bent. limited chipping or tearing to edges. white stains on back cover. pages slightly yellowing.
The Sacrifice to the Morning Star by the Skidi Pawnee (1922) Illustrated Edition
(The Morning Star sacrifice was performed only by the Skid...)
The Morning Star sacrifice was performed only by the Skidi band of the Pawnee. There seems good evidence that it was carried out somewhat unwillingly, and that the officiating priests always found it a sore trial. Its performance was considered a religious duty, and this ceremony must not be confused with the torturing of captives as practiced by several of the eastern tribes. The opposition to the sacrifice within the tribe itself increased until in about 1818 a young man, named Petahlayshahrho, rescued the victim in dramatic fashion, untying her from the scaffold at the moment of sacrifice and riding away with her.
Ralph Linton was an American anthropologist and popular writer. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1928–1937), Columbia University (1937–1946), and Yale University (1946–1953).
Background
Ralph Linton was born on February 27, 1893 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Isaiah Waterman Linton, owner of a chain of restaurants, and Mary Elizabeth Gillingham Linton. He was originally named Rolfe for his ancestor John Rolfe, who had married Pocahontas of Virginia, but later he changed the spelling of his name to the more conventional form. Linton's complicated personality and complex mind were shaped by family tradition and by his rebellion against it. The Hicksite faction of the Quakers, to which his family belonged, had split from the older meetings in objection to their evangelical trend and increasing worldliness. "In the world but not of it, " the Hicksites maintained an austerity and severity that glorified labor, industry, and intellect but condemned much of high culture as "gaiety. " Linton's favorite studies in literature and natural history were encouraged, but his tendencies to romanticism and aesthetics were derided. He rebelled against his early introduction to hard labor and industry at home and in his father's restaurants--from the time he was ten he spent his vacations working--and against his father's severe judgments and harsh values. As a result of his upbringing he retained an incongruous mixture of worldly and insular traits, which made him both generous and wary.
Education
Linton attended school in Moorestown, New Jersey. Later he entered Swarthmore College in 1910 but did poorly and was expelled at the end of the year. Befriended by Spencer Trotter, a biologist who taught a general science course, he was readmitted on probation and majored in biology. Linton was inspired by Trotter and by Frank G. Speck, who taught a few courses in anthropology. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor of Arts from Swarthmore in 1915. He was admitted immediately to the graduate school of the University of Pennsylvania and received the Master of Arts in anthropology in 1916. He then entered the graduate school at Columbia University, where he fared poorly. In 1919 after the war he returned to Columbia University but he was met coldly by Franz Boas, Columbia's preeminent anthropologist, who harbored a strong pacifist and pro-German bias. Linton left Columbia for Harvard, where he received the Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1925, although he had spent less than a year (1919 - 1920) in residence there. His thesis, "The Material Culture of the Marquesas Islands, " was published in 1923 in the Bishop Museum's Memoirs series.
Career
Linton spent the summer of 1912 with an archaeological expedition in the Mesa Verde area near New Mexico, and the following winter with an expedition at Quirigu, Guatemala. In 1915 he spend the summer excavating in New Jersey for the University Museum. At the Coens-Crispin farms near Medford, New Jersey, Linton and B. W. Hawkes explored a region known to Linton from a local friend. They excavated a portion of a spectacular Archaic site dating from about 2000 B. C. , but dug carelessly and left after a short time to excavate along the coast, where they accomplished nothing. The report on their preliminary excavation was published by the museum as A Pre-Lenape Site in New Jersey (1917). It was beautifully written and illustrated, but offered none of the crucial information needed for dating or cultural contexts.
In 1916 he spent the summer working for Earl Morris near Aztec, New Mexico. He spent the early part of the summer of 1917 with an excavation group in southern Illinois; in August he enlisted in the Army, serving in the Forty-second (Rainbow) Division until the fall of 1919. This period was an eventful one in his life. He was read out of the Friends Meeting for his willingness to bear arms, wrote and published some war poetry, lost his father, and was gassed and wounded.
In 1920 Linton was sent to the Marquesas Islands by the B. P. Bishop Museum of Honolulu, Hawaii, to conduct an archaeological survey. It was during the two years Linton spent in Polynesia that his interest shifted from archaeology to cultural anthropology. Upon his return from the Marquesas in 1922, Linton was employed by the Field Museum of Natural History (now the Chicago Museum of Natural History) as an assistant curator in North American ethnology. He wrote several American papers from notes and specimens in the Field collections. He also accomplished his most puzzling literary work when he ghostwrote Warren King Moorehead's "The Hopewell Mound Group of Ohio" (1922). Moorehead had excavated the site for the Columbian Exposition in 1892 and his specimen findings were at the Field Museum, but Linton drew his report entirely from Moorehead's recollections, making no use of the available specimens or of other data on Hopewell.
In 1925 Linton went to Madagascar for the Field Museum, spending two and a half years studying native life and collecting specimens for the museum. When he returned in 1928, he was appointed an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. He was promoted to full professor a year later. At Wisconsin he continued to work in local archaeology and began some work with Plains ethnology. Two years later Linton published his Study of Man, a popular introduction to cultural anthropology, notable for its literary polish and elegant thought. This book, the first of a series of studies directed to a general public, contributed greatly to Linton's professional advancement. Its publication was central to his being selected to succeed Boas upon the latter's retirement from Columbia in 1937.
Linton became chairman of the department of anthropology the following year. At Columbia, Linton maintained a poor relationship with the autocratic Boas, who continued in residence until 1946, and had bitter contacts with Boas' students. The situation was more damaging to Linton himself than it was to the department; nevertheless, he continued his work, writing articles and collaborating on books in psychological anthropology and personality. A culmination of his thought is represented by Cultural Background of Personality (1945) and by The Science of Man in the World Crisis (1945), which he edited. In 1946 Linton accepted the Sterling professorship of anthropology at Yale, where he remained for the rest of his life. In 1955 he published his posthumous book The Tree of Culture. He died in New Haven, Connecticut.
Linton's place in anthropology is that of a creative thinker and clear synthesizer of diverse knowledge. His great sweeping ideas, cast in admirable prose, continue to appeal with all the wonder of great literature. Indeed, as more knowledge becomes available in the fields Linton mastered, it becomes more obvious that he was, in fact, a writer and teller of romances. The data, details, and examples with which he bolstered his discussions frequently turn out to have been incorrect, misstated, distorted, or untestable. His general scorn for documentation makes it nearly impossible to locate his sources, and when found, they are frequently seen to have been reworked in his imagination. His major studies of the social orders of the Marquesas and of Madagascar are essentially literary creations, in which he remade unsystematic field observations and readings into accounts of appealing societies that came to have their own life in his mind. None of the detailed information is reliable, but none is essential to the conceptual structure that Linton erected about it. As one of the greatest of storytellers, he left a wonderful legacy of romance and sound ideas, all interwoven like the fabric of his tales.
Achievements
Ralph Linton has been listed as a noteworthy anthropologist by Marquis Who's Who.
Quotations:
"The tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic and political patterns …it is safe to predict that… such social inventions as modern-type capitalism, facism and communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed towards the adjustment of modern society to modern methods. "
"The last thing a fish would ever notice would be water. "
"It seems to be a general rule that sciences begin their development with the unusual. They have to develop considerable sophistication before they interest themselves in the commonplace. "
Membership
Linton was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950.
Connections
In 1915 Linton married his classmate, Josephine Foster. In 1922, Linton married Margaret A. McIntosh. They had one son. The marriage ended in divorce in 1933. In 1935 he married Adelin Sumner Briggs Hohlfeld, a writer.
