New Book Available
"Upside Down: Seasons Among the Nunamiut"
By: Margaret B. Blackman
University of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803213352
For further information and to order the book, please go to:
http://unp.unl.edu/bookinfo/4483.html
ABOUT THE BOOK
In the roadless Brooks Range Mountains of northern Alaska sits Anaktuvuk
Pass, a small, tightly knit Nunamiut Eskimo village. Formerly nomadic
hunters of caribou, the Nunamiut of Anaktuvuk now find their destiny
tied to that of Alaska's oil-rich North Slope, their lives suddenly
subject to a century's worth of innovations, from electricity and bush
planes to snow machines and the Internet. Anthropologist Margaret B.
Blackman has been doing summer fieldwork among the Nunamiut over a span
of almost twenty years, an experience richly and movingly recounted in
this book.
A vivid description of the people and the life of Anaktuvuk Pass, the
essays in "Upside Down" are also an absorbing meditation on the changes
that Blackman herself underwent during her time there, most wrenchingly
the illness of her husband, a fellow anthropologist, and the breakup of
their marriage. Throughout, Blackman reflects in unexpected and
enlightening ways on the work of anthropology and the perspective of an
anthropologist evermore invested in the lives of her subjects. Whether
commenting on the effect of this place and its people on her personal
life or describing the impact of "progress" on the Nunamiut - the CB
radio, weekend nomadism, tourism, the Information Superhighway - her
essays offer a unique and deeply evocative picture of an at once
disappearing and evolving world.
Margaret B. Blackman is a professor of anthropology at the State
University of New York College at Brockport.
For further information and to order the book, please go to:
http://unp.unl.edu/bookinfo/4483.html