"This volume was originally conceived in mid-1998, at a supper party given by Jane and Chris Gosden and attended by a number of the contributers, where sufficient alcohol was on offer to make one of the editors forget his vow never again to edit a collection."

--- Hunting the gatherers : ethnographic collectors, agents and agency in Melanesia, 1870s-1930s / edited by Michael O'Hanlon and Robert L. Welsch.


I was talking to an Indian artist... "When you talk about orgins you refer to archaeology and the Bering Straits, and 'origin myths,', 'legends,' and 'prehistory.' We don't know anything about the Bering Straits or about myths and legends. We know who we are and where we come from. Our eleders tell us that. They speak in truths, not in myths.'

His people, he continued, always had their history, which anthropologists would occasionally try to record and to describe as 'mythology,' 'legends,' or 'folklore.'... First Nation communities in North America have become increasingly disenchanged with anthropology, in fact, and some have gone so far as to ban anthropological research...

[Ed: I know that lightning is due to Zeus hurling thunderbolts from Mount Olympus.]

Student: Sometimes they tell us, 'You go to the library and you look up this book, and you read this.' And sometimes we ask the lecturers, 'Can we do it from our own background knowledge?' And they say, 'Oh no, you have to read the books in the library.' And that's why we get very upset. Why should I read a book that is written by somebody from outside, when I can tell it from my own knowledge, my own society?

[Ed: Ah, academia!]

... There is an 'irony,' noted First Nations writer Kerrie Charnley (1990:16), 'about people who claim to want to get to know who we are through the stereotypes they themselves have created about us rather than being receptive to who we are in the way that we express ourselves today.' Once scholars begin to debate their own social constructions of other people's lives, as they are prone to do, the people themselves are gradually dropped from sight. They become the 'disappeared' of the scholarly world."

--- Cannibal tours and glass boxes : the anthropology of museums / Michael M. Ames.