Book
Dancing with a ghost: exploring Indian reality
Octopus Books : Distributed by Butterworths • Markham, Ont. • Published In 1992 • Pages:
By: Ross, Rupert.
AbstractBrief abstract written by HRAF anthropologists who have done the subject indexing for the document
This is one of the best accounts of hunter-gatherer mentality, and an anthropologist did not write it! Rupert Ross is a Crown Attorney who practices criminal law in northwestern Ontario. Before going to law school, Ross spent eleven summers working as a fishing guide north of Kenora, where he associated with Native people. This book grew out of a series of articles Ross published about his confusion over the way Natives behaved in the court system. Their silence when they should be giving testimony, or their unsolicited self-incriminating confessions, when they should be silent, baffled Ross. With help from Native informants, he began to understand their ethical system, in which individuals were not penalized or stigmatized for bad behavior. Instead, they were counseled by elders and subjected to ritual healing in order to bring them back into the family. Ross convincingly relates these practices to other aspects of hunter-gathering life: the threat of starvation, ethics of noninterference, mandatory egalitarianism, experiential knowledge, the extended family, and belief in supernatural spirits.
- SubjectsDocument-level OCM identifiers given by the anthropology subject indexers at HRAF
- Drives and emotions
- Acculturation and culture contact
- Ethics
- Trial procedure
- Magical and mental therapy
- Ethnopsychology
- cultureCulture name from the Outline of World Cultures (OWC)
- Ojibwa
- HRAF PubDateThe date HRAF published the document
- 2000
- RegionThe area the document pertains to
- North America
- Sub RegionThe more specific area the document pertains to, which is located within the Region
- Arctic and Subarctic
- Document TypeMay include journal articles, essays, collections of essays, monographs, or chapters/parts of monographs
- Book
- Evaluation
- Creator TypeThe type of person writing the document, e.g. Ethnographer, Missionary, Archaeologist, Folklorist, Linguist, Indigenous Person, and so on.
- Judicial Personnel
- Document Rating A ranking done by HRAF anthropologists based on the strength of the source material on a scale of 1 to 5, as follows: 1 - poor; 2 - fair; 3 - good, useful data, but not uniformly excellent; 4 - excellent secondary data; 5 - excellent primary data.
- 4: Excellent Secondary Data
- 5: Excellent Primary Data
- AnalystThe HRAF anthropologist who subject indexed the document and prepared other materials for the eHRAF culture/tradition collection
- Ian Skoggard ;1998
- Field DateThe date the researcher conducted the fieldwork or archival research that produced the document
- 1968-1991
- Coverage DateThe date or dates that the information in the document pertains to
- 1968-1991
- Coverage PlaceLocation of the research culture or tradition (often a smaller unit such as a band, community, or archaeological site)
- Contemporary Region, Kenora region, Ontario, Canada
- NotesAdditional notes
- Rupert Ross
- Includes indexes
- LCCNLibrary of Congress Control Number
- 92194570
- LCSHLibrary of Congress Subject Headings
- Ojibwa Indians