A Kindly Scrutiny of Human Nature: Essays in Honour of Richard Slobodin

by Richard J. Preston (Editor)

Overview

A Kindly Scrutiny of Human Nature is a collection of essays honouring Richard (Dick) Slobodin, one of the great anthropologists of the Canadian North.

A short biography is followed by essays describing his formative thinking about human nature and human identities, his humanizing force in his example of living a moral, intellectual life, his discernment of people’s ability to make informed choices and actions, his freedom from ideological fashions, his writings about the Mackenzie District Métis, his determination to take peoples experience seriously, not metaphorically, and his thinking about social organization and kinship.

Contributors include Sam Ajzenstat, Michael Asch, David J. Damas , Harvey A. Feig, Kenneth Little, Antonia Mills, Richard J. Preston, Mary Black Rogers, and Robert Wishar. An unpublished paper about a 1930s caribou hunt in which he participated finishes the collection, giving Dick the last word.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781554587681
Publisher:	Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publication date:	04/05/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	145
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Richard J. Preston is nominally retired (Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, McMaster University) and hopes to continue his forty-plus-year span of sojourning and work with the people of the James Bay region, focusing on the cultural dimensions of globalization and tracing the emergence of the Cree concept of community. His publications include Cree Narrative: Expressing the Personal Meanings of Events, second edition (2002), and a great many papers.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents for
A Kindly Scrutiny of Human Nature: Essays in Honour of Richard Slobodin, edited by Richard J. Preston

Introduction | Richard J. Preston and Harvey A. Feit

Richard Slobodin’s Ethnography and Human Nature | Richard J. Preston

Dick Slobodin: The Anthropology of a Divided Self | Sam Ajzenstat

Slobodin as Example: A Note of a Dialectics of Style | Kenneth Little

Writing against the Grain of Materialist Orthodoxy: Richard Slobodin and the Teetl’it Gwich’in | Robert Wishar and Michael Asch

Histories of the Past, Histories of the Future: The Committed Anthropologies of Richard Slobodin, Frank G. Speck, and Eleanor Leacock | Harvey A. Feit

Slobodin “Among the Métis” 1938–1998: Anthropologist, Scholar, Historian, and Fieldworker par excellence | Mary Black-Rogers

Richard Slobodin and the Creation of the Amerindian Rebirth Book | Antonia Mills

Richard Slobodin as Scholar of Societies | David J. Damas

Caribou Hunt | Richard Slobodin

Richard Slobodin Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

‘‘These essays are loving, thoughtful and well-crafted. The book is a little gem, in fitting tribute to the thoughtful and well-crafted work of Richard Slobodin, one of the founders of the McMaster UniversityDepartment of Anthropology.... Harvey Feit's contribution, in addition to being a tribute to his friend and colleague, offers a substantial review of the literature and attendant controversies about band organization and land tenure amoung eastern Algonquians in relation to Slobodin's Gwich'in ethnography.... It is a must read for students wanting a succinct and even-handed review of this controversy anthropology.''

Robin Ridington