Our Primitive Contemporaries

Rimbault Press, 2007. Softcover. Very Good. 5x1x8. This study of 18 primitive societies in every continent but Europe was first published in 1934 and was a standard text in anthropology courses for decades. Includes one chapter on Tasmania, and one chapter on the Aranda tribe; Tasmania; approx. census before white contact Law, general life, water transport, food, shelters, baskets; Initiation (scarification), funeral rites, mourning, disposal of dead, abortion, infanticide, magic and witchcraft, music, dances, percussion instruments, stick-beating, personal adornment, recreation, effect of early contact; Aranda; physical appearance, general ecology, food, cooking, artefacts - carrying bags and other implements, weapons, social organization, totemic system, religious beliefs, abortion, infanticide, childbirth, childhood, initiation rites. George Peter Murdock, (1897 - 1985) was an American anthropologist who specialized in comparative ethnology, the ethnography of African and Oceanic peoples, and social theory. He is perhaps most notable as the originator, in 1937, of the Cross-Cultural Survey, a project of the Institute of Human Relations of Yale University, in which a vast amount of anthropological data was cataloged so that any known aspect of a society’s culture could be quickly summoned from a data bank.