Material Culture and Sacred Landscape: The Anthropology of the Siberian Khanty [Paperback]

Aside from from bringing an important and ill-understood contemporary hunter-gatherer-fisher culture to the fore, Jordan's book offers new and exciting insights into how people perceive and give meaning to the natural landscape and their place within it.A valuable contribution to the study of hunter-gatherer culture and survival.Peter Jordan's book explores the complex symbolism of Siberian Khanty ritual landscapes and material culture. It offers fresh insights into the ways in which small-scale hunting and gathering communities inhabit what we might otherwise assume to be unaltered natural terrain. The ethnography presented in this book should inspire fresh considerations about the past and invite a welcome change from the bleak abstraction that can make the interpretation of much of earlier prehistory so dull. This book deserves to have considerable influence, and we must be grateful to the author for writing it.The book is a superb achivement, and should become essential reading for students of mind and culture alike.The first detailed and authoritative study of Khanty material culture to appear in English... photos of Khanty people, objects, and locations enhance the clearly written and well-organized text, helping to make this book a useful resource for both the ethnologically curious and the professional anthropologist or historian.Peter Jordan significantly enriches the enthnographic literature on the Khanty of Western Siberia in this ambitious monograph.This study, based on the author's doctoral thesis, is an ambitious attempt to bring together the burgeoning literature on space and place with recent studies of landscape archaeology and material culture in order to analyze the historical and contemporary 'landscape enculturation' of Siberian Khanty hunter-gatherers....this book represents a significant contribution to Khanty ethnography, hunter-gatherer studies, and the anthropology of landscape, space, and place.Material Cultural and Sacred Landscape has gală‰