Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Dustcover is a mess but the actual book is great. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Because their world is represented today by only a few small remnants of dwindling human groups there is a need for an intensive study of the early hunters of the Stone Age their life and ideas their way of thinking and their art. Hunters who still live today as they were living 10000 years ago are now to be found only in the northernmost regions of the earth: these are the well-known Eskimos. A few other groups have been preserved in Southern Africa Australia and South America and there are a few infinitesimal remnants in South-East Asia. When we recall that all great civilizations including our own are based on agri culture it at once becomes clear that the hunters represent an earlier stage of human culture the one preceding agriculture. Thus the groups that still exist present the only opportunity for studying a highly interesting stage of cultural development dating from the earliest times. The central figure among hunters is the shaman the magician-priest medicine man doctor who even today is still to be found almost everywhere among the extant groups. This interesting figure is by no means merely a conjurer or charlatan. The interest of the general public in the now-vanished world of the early hunters their way of thinking and the phenomenon of shamanism was first aroused by Ras mussen with his book Thulefahrt in 1926. Without himself advancing detailed theories or explanations of shamanism he allows his Eskimo informants to speak. The simple and impressive language of these men retains its vivid quality through all translations.