Sea Peoples Research Articles

Paradijsvogels en zeemensen - Dieren als retorisch construct in François Valentyns natuurhistorie van Amboina

François Valentyn (1666-1727) was a Dutch Calvinist clergyman and author of Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën (Old and New East Indies, 1724-1726), which was one of the most comprehensive books about Asia published in the eighteenth century. In the section on Amboina, Valentyn devotes a large part of his text to natural history. From the selection of his material it is clear that his text is aimed at a public of amateurs, while he at the same time presents himself as an amateur natural historian. This attitude resulted in special attention to topics with a problematic epistemological status, such as sea people and birds of paradise. This article examines in particular the way Valentyn justifies his stance on these topics, and analyses his position within eighteenth-century discourse on natural history.

Ramesses III: the life and times of Egypt's last hero

In the tumultuous and vivid history of New Kingdom Egypt, Ramesses III's reign was prosperous and culturally rich. He fended off attacks by the Sea Peoples and others who threatened the state, he built the great temple of Medinet Habu, and he left wonderfully complete documents describing contemporary social structure and the economy. Amazingly, we even have an account from a contemporary judicial document that describes events leading to Ramesses III's assassination. This edited collection presents a detailed and informative look at the life, career, and world of one of Egypt's most important pharaohs, providing insight both on his reign and its aftermath and on the study of the political and cultural history of ancient Egypt. This collection offers the best new scholarship on Ramesses III, with contributions from Christopher J. Eyre; Ogden Goelet, Jr.; Peter W. Haider; Carolyn R. Higginbotham; Kenneth A. Kitchen; Bojana Mojsov; Steven R. Snape; Emily Teeter; and James M. Weinstein, as well as from David O'Connor and Eric H. Cline. It will be of interest to those with an informed amateur's interest in Egyptology as well as to scholars of Egyptian and biblical archaeology.

Ethnicity and aquatic lifestyles: exploring Southeast Asia’s past and present seascapes

This study explores the profound maritime dimension in Southeast Asia’s past and present. It highlights the region’s “sea people”, giving special attention to their complex and dynamic interactions with terrestrial communities. Their cultures and aquatic lifestyles, it is argued, are relevant to understanding the wider context of various historical and contemporary issues in this region. Since the emergence of large-scale harbour polities in Sumatra, Borneo and other parts of insular Southeast Asia, nomadic maritime communities have intermittently appropriated the roles of protégés, outlaws and victims in a multilayered and multifaceted interplay of seaborne navigation, commerce and warfare. On the one hand, many of the interethnic power relations that helped shape the maritime history of Southeast Asia have remained intact to date and can help us understand a number of present-day phenomena. On the other, 19th and 20th-century developments have largely confined these communities to the margins of society, while their erstwhile “maritory” has become the battleground of competing “globalised” crime syndicates, maritime terrorists and post-independent nation states with modern navies. The seascapes of Southeast Asia are as dynamic as they are diverse.

The Swordfish Hunters: The History and Ecology of an Ancient American Sea People, Bruce Bourque. Bunker Hill Publishing, Piermont, New Hampshire, 2012, 191 p.

The Swordfish Hunters: The History and Ecology of an Ancient American Sea People, Bruce Bourque. Bunker Hill Publishing, Piermont, New Hampshire, 2012, 191 p.. Un article de la revue Recherches amérindiennes au Québec (Cosmopolitiques, territoires, autochtones des Amériques) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (review)

Reviewed by: The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean Sam Zeno Conedera David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (New York: Oxford University Press 2011) xxxi + 813 pp., ill. David Abulafia’s latest book has earned every one of the laudatory quotes on the dust jacket. The Great Sea is narrative history on steroids, a magnum opus that is sure to influence the way that scholars think about Mediterranean history for many years to come. The Great Sea is, as its subtitle indicates, a human history of the Mediterranean, meaning that it covers the entire period of human inhabitation. The book is meant to be a history of the sea rather than of the lands around it, of the people who crossed the sea and lived close by its shores in ports and on islands (xvii). Even with this limitation, Abulafia has a vast chronological and geographical span to cover. He breaks it down into five distinctive periods: First Mediterranean, 22000 bc–1000 bc; Second Mediterranean, 1000 bc–ad 600; Third Mediterranean, 600–1350; Fourth Mediterranean, 1350–1830; Fifth Mediterranean, 1830–2010. The first begins with the earliest human settlements and ends with the great migrations and cataclysms of 1200–1000 bc. The second witnesses the unification of the Great Sea under successive maritime empires and ends with the fragmentation of Roman power and the arrival of Islam. The third begins with Muslim and Jewish domination of the southern shores, witnesses the rise of the Italian communes, and ends with the Black Death. The fourth experiences the emergence of new Christian powers, like the Catalans, who are ultimately eclipsed by the Ottoman juggernaut. The overall fortunes of the Mediterranean change in this period, as the Atlantic assumes a more important role in the world, and the Great Sea becomes dominated for the first time by powers of Northern Europe. The distinct features of the fifth Mediterranean, which is still in progress, include the historical discovery of the earliest Mediterranean worlds, a hardening of previously more fluid ethnic and cultural differences, and the threat of environmental disaster. What characteristics define these distinct Mediterraneans? Abulafia sees long and slow processes of integration at work in each period, which eventually fall apart. Thus there is a broadly cyclical rise and fall, if not of empires, then at least of large-scale Mediterranean systems. Scholars will surely challenge the effort to encompass all of Mediterranean history into a conceptual and chronological schema, along with some of Abulafia’s other claims and priorities. One of his major targets is Braudel’s view that all change is slow and that man is imprisoned in a destiny in which he has little hand. The Great Sea, by contrast, emphasizes change over time and human agency (xxvi). Abulafia does not shy away from historical controversy. Regarding the cataclysms around 1200 bc and the mysterious Sea Peoples, for example, he says that the eastern Mediterranean was being plagued by fluid and unstable alliances of pirates and mercenaries, who were able occasionally to form large enough navies and armies to pillage population centers, including Troy (52). Yet Abulafia remains within the bounds of the evidence and does not pretend to have clear answers when the matter is truly murky. He also has ideological targets. With respect to “orientalism” in the nineteenth century, Abulafia says that it was not the expression of Western cultural imperialism. The masters of the eastern Mediterranean actively sought contact with the West, and saw themselves as members of a community of monarchs that embraced both the Mediterranean and Europe (545). Both Abulafia’s methodology [End Page 151] as well as his particular claims will be the subject of debate in the coming years. One of the great challenges of writing such a book is choosing what to include and what to leave out. The Great Sea offers good balance. Each period receives roughly proportionate treatment; Abulafia does not, for example, reduce the second Mediterranean to the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. His erudition is on display throughout in his command of archaeological evidence, narrative sources, and secondary work in many languages. He is also blessed with the gift of storytelling, such...

The Sea Peoples, from cuneiform tablets to carbon dating.

The 13th century BC witnessed the zenith of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean civilizations which declined at the end of the Bronze Age, ∼3200 years ago. Weakening of this ancient flourishing Mediterranean world shifted the political and economic centres of gravity away from the Levant towards Classical Greece and Rome, and led, in the long term, to the emergence of the modern western civilizations. Textual evidence from cuneiform tablets and Egyptian reliefs from the New Kingdom relate that seafaring tribes, the Sea Peoples, were the final catalyst that put the fall of cities and states in motion. However, the lack of a stratified radiocarbon-based archaeology for the Sea People event has led to a floating historical chronology derived from a variety of sources spanning dispersed areas. Here, we report a stratified radiocarbon-based archaeology with anchor points in ancient epigraphic-literary sources, Hittite-Levantine-Egyptian kings and astronomical observations to precisely date the Sea People event. By confronting historical and science-based archaeology, we establish an absolute age range of 1192–1190 BC for terminal destructions and cultural collapse in the northern Levant. This radiocarbon-based archaeology has far-reaching implications for the wider Mediterranean, where an elaborate network of international relations and commercial activities are intertwined with the history of civilizations.

Conrad’s Eastern Vision: A Vain and Floating Appearance by Agnes S. K. Yeow (review)

Reviewed by: Conrad’s Eastern Vision: A Vain and Floating Appearance by Agnes S. K. Yeow Michael John DiSanto (bio) Agnes S. K. Yeow. Conrad’s Eastern Vision: A Vain and Floating Appearance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 236 pp. ISBN: 0-230-54529-7. $69.95 (US) In this study, Agnes Yeow focuses on the conversation between art and history in examining the representations of the Malay world in Joseph Conrad’s novels. She explores how Conrad’s Eastern vision sets up a dialogue between two dominant and interacting purveyors of the ‘truth’, namely art and history. Conrad recognized that fiction and history are versions of the truth […] that fiction and history are dialogic and contesting voices which circulate inseparably. The dialogism of Conrad’s East resists any finalized meaning, just as the doubleness and dislocations within the narratives themselves work at rendering his Malay world decidedly open-ended. (5) Yeow is interested in the ways in which Conrad’s representations of the East embody a profound understanding of the changing historical, political, and social conditions that existed in the East in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. She sees Conrad’s art as in competition with, and as a supplement to, histories of the East. Yeow suggests that Conrad visited and wrote about the East in “an age where multiple versions of the East/Orient were being generated and endorsed by civil servants, painters, travel writers, scientists, anthropologists, ethnographers, historians, and novelists” and that Conrad’s works make a significant “contribution to a polyphony of narratives at a time of great historical flux” (7, 8). For the most part, Yeow’s inquiry moves back and forth between passages of information—about British and Dutch colonial endeavors, Malay social structures and hierarchies, piracy and trade, and the complex mix of races and cultures in the East—and passages of commentary on Conrad’s understanding of these things as embodied in his fiction. Overall, the book contains more history—that is, specifically events and themes rather than the writing or representation—of the East and less actual analysis of Conrad’s style and thought. While the study of language and thought is central to my thought about Conrad, it is not for Yeow. For instance, she offers considerable detail about how “politics in the [Malay] archipelago is the story of seaborne empires founded on trade” and how the western colonizers “found it advantageous to view themselves as successors and inheritors of indigenous political paradigms” (46, 47). Except for a lengthy commentary on Lord Jim in Chapter 2 and a shorter analysis of Nina (from Almayer’s Folly) in Chapter 3, the book does not offer sustained, focused arguments about single works such as Victory or An [End Page 107] Outcast of the Islands. Instead, Yeow uses passages from Conrad’s fiction when they relate to specific topics, such as the “historically significant” passage on Makassar—a notorious “smuggling Centre”—in the opening pages of Almayer’s Folly (55). Each of the chapters is subdivided into distinct yet related sections. In the first chapter, “The Collision of Indistinct Ideas,” Yeow examines Conrad’s suspicions regarding facts, such as the colonial powers’ preoccupation with “real” Malay identity, and his skepticism regarding the value and significance of that concern. She also examines the politics of the sea trade and piracy especially considering the complications arising from the British- and Dutch-imposed changes on the traditional inter-Asian relationships. For instance, she explains in detail that piracy existed simultaneously with maritime trade and that “pirates played a significant economic and political role in the history of the region” (59). When the British and Dutch attempted to disrupt piracy, they were undermining a fundamental part of the orang laut (sea people) culture. In the first part of Chapter 2, “Patusan and the Malays”, Yeow suggests that Marlow’s narrative in Lord Jim “implicitly mimics the Malay hikayat”—a “genre which melds history and fiction” and an expression of “how the Malays viewed and recorded their past, their sense of history” (69, 70). The section includes, for instance, an examination of the meaning of “Tuan” in terms of Malay politics and how Conrad’s representation...

The Philistines and Aegean migration at the end of the late Bronze Age

In this study, Assaf Yasur-Landau examines the early history of the biblical Philistines who were among the 'Sea Peoples' who migrated from the Aegean area to the Levant during the early twelfth century BC. Creating an archaeological narrative of the migration of the Philistines, he combines an innovative theoretical framework on the archaeology of migration with new data from excavations in Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel and thereby reconstructs the social history of the Aegean migration to the southern Levant. The author follows the story of the migrants from the conditions that caused the Philistines to leave their Aegean homes, to their movement eastward along the sea and land routes, to their formation of a migrant society in Philistia and their interaction with local populations in the Levant. Based on the most up-to-date evidence, this book offers a new and fresh understanding of the arrival of the Philistines in the Levant.

Transculturalism as a Model for Examining Migration to Cyprus and Philistia at the End of the Bronze Age

The ethnic identity of the Philistines and their relationship to Greece, Cyprus, Anatolia, and the Sea Peoples continues to be a very lively and interesting area of scholarly debate. This contribution reviews recent work on general categories of cultural interaction with regard to the east Mediterranean including colonisation, migration, and cultural diffusion. The relationship between these categories of interaction and the formation of cultural identity such as creolization, hybridity, assimilation, and acculturation is also considered. An argument in favor of transculturalism, multivocality, and long-term approaches to the formation of cultural identity is then proposed.

Le Traité égypto-hittite de paix et d’alliance entre les rois Ramsès II et Khattouchili III (d’après l’inscription hiéroglyphique au temple de Karnak)*

AbstractWith the conquests of Tuthmosis III in Syria, Egypt entered into the international scene of the Near Eastern world. Thereafter, the Hittites were extending their frontiers across northern Mesopotamia and Syria. This led to conflict with Egypt, since each was aspiring to control the routes of international commerce. Inevitably, the two super-powers clashed at Qadesh, and the relationship between them remained full of hostility and distrust. True peace came only upon the conclusion of a treaty between Ramesses II and Khattouchili III, through which an extreme alliance was finally agreed. The treaty was an implicit recognition by both partners of a territorial status quo. Its conclusion was probably enhanced by the rising of the Assyrians and the infiltration of the Sea Peoples. Furthermore, the Hittite king was worried about his right to rule; his seizure of the throne left him concerned about the succession to his own family line. In this situation an accommodation with Ramesses II left Khattouchili in a more secure position. The treaty in the form of a pact between two powers of equal status is the oldest known one in history. Although previously translated and commented upon, this is the first such treatment in French.

Four Notes on Taita King of Palistin with an Excursus on King Solomon's Empire

The paper adds four observations to an earlier note (Sass 2010a) in which the author suggested placing Taita, king of Palistin (Hawkins 2009), in the 10th century, probably towards its end. The paper addresses Taita and the settlement of the Sea Peoples; Taita and hieroglyphic luwian; Taita and the southern levant; and Taita and egypt. An excursus on two 10th-century levantine empires—those of the historical Taita and the biblical Solomon—is also added.

Cyprus, the Sea Peoples and the Eastern Mediterranean: Regional Perspectives of Continuity and Change (= Scripta Mediterranea 27–28 [2006–2007]), Toronto: Canadian Institute for Mediterranean Studies. Timothy P. Harrison.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsCyprus, the Sea Peoples and the Eastern Mediterranean: Regional Perspectives of Continuity and Change (= Scripta Mediterranea 27–28 [2006–2007]), Toronto: Canadian Institute for Mediterranean Studies. Timothy P. Harrison.Itzhaq ShaiItzhaq Shai Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Bulletin of the American Society of Overseas Research Volume 359August 2010 A journal of the American Schools of Oriental Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/BASOR25741834 Views: 12Total views on this site Journal History This article was published in the Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research (1921-2021), which is continued by the Bulletin of the American Schools of Overseas Research (2022-present). Copyright © 2010 American Schools of Oriental ResearchPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Foreign ceramic tradition, local clays: the Handmade Burnished Ware of Tell Kazel (Syria)

Late Bronze Age Handmade Burnished Ware (HMBW) from Tell Kazel was studied by thin-section petrography and neutron activation analysis in order to investigate its manufacturing technology and origin of production. Results show that the majority of the HMBW fabric groups point to a local area of production while a few petrographic loners might have been produced elsewhere in the Akkar Plain or imported. The manufacturing technique, in terms of clay paste recipe, forming and finishing techniques, is however new in the Tell Kazel pottery assemblage, hinting at the work of foreigners present at the site. The historical and archaeological contexts further suggest that these foreigners were some of the Sea Peoples and the stylistic and analytical data further reinforce the link between the northern Levant and the western Mediterranean.

The Role of the ‘Sea People’ in the Interaction of Ancient Mediterranean Civilization and Canaan

The Role of the ‘Sea People’ in the Interaction of Ancient Mediterranean Civilization and Canaan

Diplomacy by Design: Luxury Arts and an “International Style” in the Ancient Near East, 1400–1200 B.C.E by Marian H. Feldman

Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2006 . 278 pp. While individual studies on aspects of stylistic interchange in the Bronze Age Mediterranean routinely appear in discussions of archaeological material from the Near East, Egypt, and the Aegean World, there has not really been a synthetic compendium of this material since the pioneering work of Helene Kantor and William Stevenson Smith.1 A vast amount of new information has been recovered since Kantor and Smith's day and this volume makes an impressive first step in addressing this important, but long neglected, field of study. Kantor's study was exhaustive but narrowly focused on a few motifs, while Smith's was broader but quite idiosyncratic and scattershot. Smith was the first, however, to coin the term “International Style” in reference to the material culture of the Late Bronze Age. Marian H. Feldman defines this term as the “use of shared visual forms across multiple cultural regions” (p. 1). She goes on to cite some analogs such as Gothic design in Medieval Europe or the “International Style” of mid-century modern architecture. However, the “International Style” (or koiné, as she prefers) of the Bronze Age Mediterranean was less concerned with the architectural unit than were these examples and was instead focused on individual motifs most often found on decorative objects, often goods designed as diplomatic gifts. In this and an earlier study, the author notes that there are two basic subsets of the “International Koiné,” an indigenous Levantine one and a hybrid pan-Mediterranean (eastern Mediterranean, anyway) school.2 Because the Levantine coast, and the port of Ugarit in particular, was the principal conduit for trade goods flowing from east and west, it was a perfect crucible for the amalgamation of polyglot artistic traditions. Feldman not only brings a theoretical framework and a rigorous definition of terms to this discussion, but also adds textual evidence, often overlooked in earlier studies (see especially pp. 105–127, 161–175). Most of the objects that she discusses are small, portable, and precious objects that were diplomatic gifts similar to the exchange of presents among the royal houses of early modern Europe. The author examines in depth important aspects of these cosmopolitan products in chapters that define the style and motifs used. Two basic categories of style prevail: a dynamic style often focused on animal combat, usually associated with the Aegean; and a symmetrical style of passive images found frequently in the art of the ancient Near East. Following her examination of the two most common styles, Feldman discusses a “hybrid” style that she ascribes to the Levant that adopts and reinterprets motifs from Egypt, the Aegean, and Mesopotamia. In later chapters she tries to localize not only regionally specialized styles but also production centers. Chapters 7 and 8 address the regional sources of these objects and the mechanics of the exchange systems that spread them around the eastern Mediterranean. The author dates the end of this system of luxury exchange with the disruptions (invasion, warfare, population shift) of the “Sea Peoples,” beginning in the 13th century B.C.E. This period marks not only an end to many of the great empires of the Bronze Age, but also to the rudimentary trade patterns that were soon replaced by the large-scale export of profitable merchandise and the beginnings of modern commerce. This volume has a useful index and exhaustive bibliography and is copiously illustrated with line drawings and photographs, both black and white and color. Peter Lacovara is the Senior Curator of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern Art at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University. He has curated numerous special exhibitions and is the author of a range of works, including (with Betsy Teasley Trope and Stephen Quirke) Excavating Egypt: Great Discoveries from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, University College, London (Michael C. Carlos Museum, 2005) and The Collector's Eye: Masterpieces of Egyptian Art from the Thalassic Collection (Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, 2001)..

'Profiling' the Philistines

At the beginning of the twelfth century BC the political system of the ancient Near East then dominated by the Amarna 'Great powers club' suffered an almost entire collapse, marking the end of the Late Bronze and the beginning of the Early Iron Age. One of the events related to this turning point in history is the invasion of the so-called Sea Peoples, forming a mighty coalition to challenge the military super powers of their time. The ancient sources pertaining to that invasion are limited and mainly - even though not entirely - come from Egypt. This paper does not claim to reflect, even summarily, the entire discussion related to the topic, and will concentrate on only one tribe of Sea Peoples - the Philistines. Essentially, based on the iconographic evidence from the mortuary temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu it is intended to outline some of the major concepts and problems of interpretation of the Philistine migration, and to stress its central importance for the history of the ancient Near East and Egypt.

The People of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in Oceania – By Paul D'Arcy

The People of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in Oceania – By Paul D'Arcy

Tracking the Cooking Pot à la stéatite: Signs of Cyprus in Iron Age Syria

The cooking pot à la stéatite first appears at sites along the Syrian coast in the 12th century. Until recently, these cooking pots were considered an essentially Iron I coastal phenomenon with a few isolated appearances inland. New research indicates that these cooking pots can actually be tracked throughout Iron I and II as they penetrated inland Syria by way of the Orontes River, ultimately to become one of the dominant cooking pot forms of the later Iron Age. Both technological and stylistic elements of even the earliest variants show a strong relationship with Cypriot cooking wares; moreover, its distribution is largely consistent with the distribution of locally produced Mycenaean-style pottery in Syria. This study explores the Aegean relationships of the cooking pot à la stéatite and addresses the question of the Sea Peoples and Cypriot immigrants in Iron Age Syria.

Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures, and Self (review)

Reviewed by: Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures, and Self Hugh Laracy Beach Crossings:Voyaging across Times, Cultures, and Self. By Greg Dening. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2004. Pp. x, 376. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-812-23849-5.) This is a handsomely made book. It is a delight to hold and to behold. Sadly, however, on consideration of the text it evokes echoes of Hans Christian Andersen's fable of The Emperor's New Clothes. It has style, but substance is more notional, and subjectivity and relativity outweigh content and objectivity. The late Greg Dening (1931–2008) produced a number of distinctively reinterpretive works relating to the Pacific, most notably one on Captain William Bligh and the Bounty (Cambridge, UK, 1992), but nothing as indulgently self-referential as Beach Crossings. The primary geographical focus of Dening's scholarly expertise is the Marquesas Islands, in association with other Polynesian groups. So it is here, too, but the prevailing subject of discussion is a topographical feature invoked as a metaphor of protean application for the significant shifts of bearing that can occur amid the uncertainties and ambiguities of the human condition; that is, "the beach." This is the site at or through which a person putatively crosses from one world or from one state of being to another.The result of Dening's musings is an extended literary essay, rather than a work that fits within any other genre. [End Page 872] Dening's archetypal "beach crossers" are two European seamen and a missionary who came ashore in the Marquesas around 1800 and who adapted to life there until they returned to their own societies, profoundly influenced by their experiences. Later, he discusses Herman Melville, who had similar adventures, and the indigenous people of the islands. The Polynesians, the ethno-cultural group to which the Marquesans belong, were so labeled in 1832 by the navigator-ethnographer Dumont d'Urville. For Dening, tracing their movements from an Asian homeland, they become the "Sea People of the West" who settled on widely scattered islands in the great ocean where they also become people of the land; or, in the case of the Marquesans, as Dening styles them, "Enata Fenua."Their voyaging is presented as a series of "crossings," and one of them, Tupaia from Tahiti, who visited England with Captain James Cook, is offered admiringly as an example of an indigenous "beach crosser." The Europeans are generally less favorably represented. Indeed, despite the vast amount of existing critical research that qualifies traditional romantic stereotypes of the South Seas, Dening tends to present the islanders as noble savages, as occupants of an oceanic paradise. In addition, his avuncular storytelling style of literary escapism is jarring, especially in referring to New Zealand through the silly poetic neologism Aotearoa. Dening, an ex-Jesuit, also writes extensively, but not in sharp detail, about his own life and his intellectual and emotional engagement with the subject of his research and writing, so that the book emerges primarily as a personal memoir. He has much to say about his own "beach crossings," but skimmingly, with little depth or substance. He presents his life as an integral part of a continually unfolding historical drama, in which the author is one of the actors. All in all, then, this is a work that philosophically smacks more of Heraclitus and Berkeley than of Aristotle and Aquinas. It is a wondrously sustained exercise in literary creativity, but is deficient in scholarly gravitas. [End Page 873] Hugh Laracy University of Auckland Copyright © 2008 The Catholic University of America Press

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:Kathleen Adams. Art as Politics: Recrafting Identities, Tourism, and Power in Tana Toraja, Indonesia.Partha Chatterjee. A Princely Imposter? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal.Paul D'Arcy. The People of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in Oceania.John Gray. Domestic Mandala: Architecture of Lifeworlds in Nepal.Claudia Gross, Harriet D. Lyons and Dorothy A. Counts (eds). A Polymath Anthropologist: Essays in Honour of Ann Chowning.Nora Haenn and Richard R. Wilk (eds). The Environment in Anthropology: A Reader in Ecology, Culture and Sustainable Living.Jane Lydon. Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians.Allan Marett. Songs, Dreamings, and Ghosts: The Wangga of North Australia.Donald S. Moore. Suffering for Territory: Race, Place and Power in Zimbabwe.Raul Pertierra. Transforming Technologies, Altered Selves: Mobile Phone and Internet Use in the Philippines.Han ten Brummelhuis. King of the Waters: Homan van der Heide and the Origin of Modern Irrigation in Siam.Sem Topno. 2004. Musical Culture of the Munda Tribe.