The talks presented here were given exclusively for the benefit of the monks at Wat Pa Baan Taad. They usually took place in the cool of the evening, with lamps lit and the sounds of insects and cicadas reverberating in the surrounding jungle. Ajaan Mahā Boowa’s only preparation was a few moments of stillness before speaking. As the theme developed naturally, the pace of his voice quickened and those listening increasingly felt its strength and depth.

Smell is a social phenomenon, given particular meanings and values by different cultures. Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies, and political odours. They can enforce social structures or transgress them, unite people or divide them, empower or disempower. The authors argue that the sociology of smell is repressed in the modern West, and its social history ignored. This book breaks the "olfactory silence" of modernity. It offers the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural role of odours in Western history - from antiquity to the present. It also covers a wide variey of non-Western societies. Its topics range from the medieval concept of the "odour of sanctity", to the aromatherapies of South America, and from olfactory stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in the modern West to the role of smell in postmodernity. Its subject matter will fascinate anyone who likes to nose around in the inner workings of culture.

This special issue of the International Review of Education includes contri butions on indigenous knowledge, the cultural context of learning and on the interplay between the so-called "traditional" and "modern" ways of educa tion. It starts from the assumption that cultures are not static, that they are shifting and mutating, and that the Western need to encapsulate "other cultures", which found its most extreme form in their being frozen in time and boxed behind glass in museums of ethnology, has distorted our under standing of the way in which different cultures create, recreate and repro duce knowledge. The basic premise of this position is that there is no such thing as a pure culture, and that all cultures borrow, lend, adapt, and distort distinct elements from other cultures. All cultures, moreover, provide their members with ways of learning about that culture, which include elements such as language, forms of social organisation, and ritual spaces for the trans mission of specialised knowledge. Meaning may be shifted over time, but that in itself is a product of the passage of knowledge through history. Indeed, much meaning is cyclical and reinterpretive so that cultures may look back to a mythological past which they assumed gave them their essential identity but which may be part fact, part fantasy, and part fiction. This is then rein terpreted in the light of changed and changing historical circumstances.

Changing Tropical Forests begins with an overview of the history of deforestation in tropical America and the tasks facing Latin American environmental historians. Based on proceedings of a 1991 conference sponsored by the Forest History Society and IUFRO Forest History Group in Costa Rica, the contributors offer detailed accounts of the enivornmental history of specific forest conditions, grasslands, and changing ecosystems of Costa Rica, Mexico, Surinam, and Brazil. the role of human intervention in this process of change is also discussed. Contributors. William Balée, James R. Barborak, Peter Boomgaard, Larissa V. Brown, Gerardo Budowski, John Dargavel, Warren Dean, Silvia del Amo R., Elizabeth Graham, J. Régis Guillaumon, Rhena Hoffmann, Sally P. Horn, Sebastião Kengen, Herman W. Konrad, Mary Pamela Lehmann, Robert D. Leier, Murdo J. MacLeod, M. Patricia Marchak, Elinor G. K. Melville, David M. Pendergast, Susan M. Pierce, Leslie E. Sponsel, Richard P. Tucker, Terry West

Applying data from over 150 tribal societies to scales developed to measure power and dominance, Sanday offers answers to basic questions regarding male and female power. The view that emerges conforms to no particular theoretical perspective.

An in-depth, meticulously documented exploration of the ecological wisdom of Native Peoples from around the world Arranged thematically, Wisdom of the Elders contains sacred stories and traditions on the interrelationships between humans and the environment as well as perspectives from modern science, which more often than not validate the sacred, ancient Wisdom of the Elders. Native peoples and environments discussed range from the Inuit Arctic and the Native Americans of the Northwest coast, the Sioux of the Plains, and the Pueblo, Hopi, and Navajo of the Southwest to the Australian Outback, to the rich, fecund tropics of Africa, Malaysia, and the Amazon. “Our technological civilization is speeding toward a violent collision with nature, and we are threatening the ability of the Earth—our home—to support life as we know it. Suzuki and Knudtson’s extraordinary work powerfully reminds us that we are indeed one with the Earth. We are truly indebted to them for charting for us the course toward a healthy and sustaining relationship with our planet.”—Vice President Al Gore

Whether flowers are your fancy, hats your madness, or paper your passion, you can open a store selling the things you love. Victoria introduces a group of women entrepreneurs who, with perseverance and big dreams, created a rewarding niche in the retail market. Their triumphs and failures, practical advice, and insider secrets provide invaluable lessons for fledgling shop owners. Here’s just the right advice to take you from establishing credit to choosing a space to developing a solid partnership with vendors. Find creative and inviting ideas for displaying your wares so customers will linger longer, and smart ways to get the biggest bang out of your advertising dollars. The profiles of shop owners will offer inspiration and provide invaluable role models.

The use of psychedelic drugs plants is rising, and with it the number of reports narrating encounters with otherworldly visionary beings. Approaches to these experiences have often been literal, archetypal or dismissive. Evolutionary psychology and the cognitive science of religion suggest innate and non-imagistic mental foundations for these phenomena arising from easily-triggered evolutionary functions during emotive periods of high cognitive demand. Such functions include agent detection, social intelligence faculties and metacognition. This wide-ranging book explores how our deepest mental processes predispose us as humans to believe in supernatural agents, and presents a new hypothesis of how these same cognitions facilitate the emergence of those agents to become present when psychedelic drugs and plants are ingested. Bruce concludes that visionary beings shimmer within as awe-inspiring products of the mind, an experience which rests at the heart of what it is to be human.