DAVID HICKS

An original perspective on the critical period of 1974-1975 in the history of East Timor. This book describes how the language of politics helped to shape the events that brought about the decolonization of Portuguese Timor, its brief independence as The Democratic Republic of East Timor, and its recolonization by an Asian neighbor. Routledge. 2015. 236 pages. Hardback 9781138021075 (ISBN: 978-1-13-802107-5); Paperback 9781138476356 (ISBN 978-1-13-847635-6); eBook (VitalSource) 9781315778068 (ISBN: 978-1-31-577806-8).

This collection of writing on religion has been designed to fill the needs of teachers of undergraduate and graduate courses in the Anthropology of Religion or Comparative Religion, and who may wish to use it either as a stand-alone text or as a supplement to another book or books. In compiling this reader, my purpose has been to offer a text that is instructor- and student-friendly. Any anthology reflects its compiler’s own preferences and sense of what other teachers may desire but these selections represent an eclectic perspective rather than any single theoretical approach to the understanding of ritual and belief. Among the diverse theoretical approaches presented are structural-functionalism, structuralism, Malinowskian functionalism, cultural materialism, and cultural evolutionalism as well as readings that exemplify synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The anthology offers a mix of classic readings and more recent studies, and the major world religions are included along with examples from the religions of traditional cultures. A generous range of religious traditions as possible from various times and places have been chosen and among the well-known scholars of religion whose works appear here are Margery Wolf, Evon Z. Vogt, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Bronislaw Malinowski, Edmund Leach, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, Eric Wolf, Alice Beck Kehoe, Peter Worsley, Max Weber, and Claude-Lévi-Strauss. There are twelve chapters: 1. Perspectives; 2. Myth, Cosmology, and Symbolic Classification; 3. Gods, Spirits, and Souls; 4. Ritual; 5. Practitioners of Ritual; 6. Body and Mind; 7. Magic and Witchcraft; 8. Death; 9. Sexuality and Gender; 10. The Natural Environment; 11. Agents of Change; 12. New Religious Movements.

When it appeared in 1976 Tetum Ghosts and Kin was the first description of any traditional community in East Timor,one half of an island lying to the north of Australia in the Malay archipelago, written by a professional anthropologist. Based upon 13 months of field research carried out by my wife, Maxine Hicks, and me in 1966-1967 in the region of Viqueque, it has become the standard work on village life in what until the 1970s was known as Portuguese Timor. Its initial publication by Mayfield Publishing Company was followed by a reissue by Waveland Press, in 1988, and has this year appeared in a completely rewritten second edition that includes new material and an update based upon three further vists I made to the country in 1999 and 2001. Earlier, in 1988, an Indonesian edition, translated into the Indonesian language, had appeared as Roh Orang Tetum di Timor Timur, by the Penerbit Sinar Harapan publishing company in Jakarta, Indonesia. This translation has made it possible for readers in all regions of East Timor to learn how the people of one of the country's regions, Viqueque, live. Besides being essential reading for scholars interested in the peoples of East Timor, Tetum Ghosts and Kin will be useful for anyone interested in learning about how the majority of East Timorese inhabitants live today as well as in the decade preceding the invasion of their country by the Indonesian army in 1976 because many of the traditions described in the book continue to shape Timorese lives.

Before my colleague, Dr. Margaret A. Gwynne, and I embarked on the preparation of this anthropology text neither of us had ever found a textbook entirely suitable for our first-year students, and colleagues occasionally told us they had encountered the same lack. Some available textbooks seemed unnecessarily pedantic; others dwelt on material remote from contemporary students’ interests; still other seemed to us too abstract. What we needed was an introduction as comprehensive as any single textbook could reasonably be, covering the basic subjects to which instructors would wish to expose their introductory students; that would introduce certain new materials commonly shortchanged in currently available textbooks (such as women and culture, the human body as a vehicle for cultural expression and sexuality from a cross-cultural point of view); and that would engage the attentions of, and even excite, undergraduate students. So we wrote Cultural Anthropology to satisfy these needs. Margaret and me were guided by two related premises: that American college students are interested in their own cultural experience and that the comparative study of their own culture with others will result in a deeper appreciation of other cultures. We focus on familiar aspects of Western culture that find parallels in other cultures since we believe this approach will foster young adult readers’ appreciation of the ethnic diversity that constitutes an ever-increasing element in the lives of American students. This second edition of Cultural Anthropology is organized around the four themes of cultural relativism, holism, women and anthropology, and applied anthropology. We have no theoretical axe to grind, and we treat the most influential perspectives and approaches in cultural anthropology evenhandedly. The book has sixteen chapters: 1.Anthropology and Anthropologists; 2. The Nature of Culture; 3. Anthropological Perspectives; 4. Fieldwork; 5. Language; 6. Making a Living; 7.Economics; 8.Sex, Gender, and Sexuality; 9. Family and Descent; 10.Marriage; 11.Groups; 12. Politics and Social Control; 13. Belief Systems; 14. Expressive Culture; 15. Culture and the Human Body; 16. Culture Change and Anthropology’s Response.

Like Tetum Ghosts and Kin this book deals with the social life of the Tetum people living in the region of Viqueque in Portuguese Timor, but its emphasis is upon the oral tradition and the role women play in the rituals of birth and marriage. The anthropological approach I adopt as a means of interpreting these aspects of social life is that known as structural analysis, and I argue that two themes influence the ritual lives of the Tetum: "conjunction-leading-to-creation" and "disjunction-leading to re-creation."

The majority of the ten essays collected together in this volume exemplify the structural approach to the analysis of social facts and they focus on the ethnography of two southern Brazilian ethnic groups -- the Kaingang and the Aweikoma and two ethnic groups from East Timor -- the Mambai and the Tetum. Six of these studies have not been published previously, and among the topics discussed are relationships terminologies, ritual,kinship, marriage, and belief.

Six essays, five of which earlier appeared in various anthropology journals, together with an original essay, are gathered together in this volume. Their subject matter includes relationship terminologies, marriage alliance systems, myths, and social classification.