The four hills of life : Northern Arapaho knowledge and life movement /

Anderson (Colby College) provides a comprehensive, eloquent, and astute ethnography of the Northern Arapaho of the Wind River reservation of Wyoming. His research is rooted in five and a half years of fieldwork, a careful study of the ethnographic literature, and an adept and insightful use of contemporary social theory. Anderson focuses on the acquisition and distribution of knowledge as essential to Arapaho movement through personal and communal developmental stages characterized as the four hills of life. He uses history, anthropology, and linguistics to reveal the dynamics of Arapaho society, which was based in ritual age grades and today is shifting to more kinship-based associations. Anderson astutely analyzes life movement, ritual, time, the role of women, and issues of cultural change and continuity to demonstrate how the Arapaho--who are religiously conservative yet highly innovative and adaptable--continue to maintain and strengthen their society in the face of the dominant Euro-American culture's internal and external contradictions. His work both complements and updates that of Loretta Fowler (Arapahoe Politics, 1851-1978, CH, Sep'82) and provides essential material both for students of Arapaho and Plains Indian cultures and for those interested in anthropological theory. Upper-division undergraduate students and above. R. A. Bucko Creighton University