Search results for ""Author Ekkehart Malotki""
University of Nebraska Press Kokopelli: The Making of an Icon
Kokopelli the flute player is one of the most popular icons that American culture has adopted from the Native peoples of North America. The Kokopelli name and image are everywhere, adorning everything from jewelry, welcome mats, T-shirts, and money clips to motels, freeway underpasses, nature trails, nightclubs, and string quartets. Kokopelli evokes mystery and wonder, ancient ceremonies and spirituality, Mother Earth and the purity of nature. But what exactly is Kokopelli? Just how Native American is this ubiquitous flute player? In this fascinating book, the distinguished scholar of Hopi culture and history Ekkehart Malotki describes the development of the Kokopelli phenomenon in American mass culture from its beginning to Kokopelli’s present status as pan-Southwestern icon. He explores the figure’s connections with the Hopi kachina god Kookopölö and Maahu, the cicada, and discusses how this rock-art image has been appropriated and misunderstood. Kokopelli sheds light on a little-understood aspect of Hopi culture and testifies to the continuing power of Native cultures to spark the popular imagination and interest of outsiders.
£23.39
University of Nebraska Press Hopi Animal Stories
The fascinating world of the Hopis is brought to light in this original and informative collection of thirty animal tales featuring Field Mouse, Coyote the Trickster, Cicada and his flute, Medicine Man Badger, the Chipmunk Girls and the Antelope Kids, and many other manifestations of serpents, insects, and birds. These ancient folk tales are traditionally told in midwinter, when the nights are long and cold and all the crops are in. Highly entertaining, the narratives reveal attitudes toward important aspects of Hopi culture, such as courtship and relations between the sexes, friendship, courage, industry, healing, and the treatment of children. Ekkehart Malotki, who compiled the original tales in the Hopi vernacular, has meticulously edited and translated the tales in this special English language edition. An introduction by the distinguished folklorist Barre Toelken examines the cultural relevance of Hopi oral literature and places the tales within a wider, comparative context.
£20.99
University of Washington Press Early Rock Art of the American West: The Geometric Enigma
A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE The earliest rock art - in the Americas as elsewhere - is geometric or abstract. Until Early Rock Art in the American West, however, no book-length study has been devoted to the deep antiquity and amazing range of geometrics and the fascinating questions that arise from their ubiquity and variety. Why did they precede representational marks? What is known about their origins and functions? Why and how did humans begin to make marks, and what does this practice tell us about the early human mind? With some two hundred striking color images and discussions of chronology, dating, sites, and styles, this pioneering investigation of abstract geometrics on stone (as well as bone, ivory, and shell) explores its wide-ranging subject from the perspectives of ethology, evolutionary biology, cognitive archaeology, and the psychology of artmaking. The authors’ unique approach instills a greater respect for a largely unknown and underappreciated form of paleoart, suggesting that before humans became Homo symbolicus or even Homo religiosus, they were mark-makers - Homo aestheticus.
£32.40