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Being And Place Among The Tlingit - by Thomas Thornton

Being And Place Among The Tlingit
Paperback
$24.00
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In Tlingit, it is difficult even to introduce oneself without referencing places in Lingít Aaní (Tlingit Country). Geographic references are embedded in personal names, clan names, house names, and, most obviously, in kwáan names, which define regions of dwelling. To say one is Sheet‘ká Kwáan defines one as a member of the Tlingit community that inhabits Sheet‘ká (Sitka). In Being and Place among the Tlingit, anthropologist Thomas F. Thornton Thornton explains that place signifies not only a specific geographical location, but also reveals the ways in which individuals and social groups define themselves.

The notion of place consists of three dimensions—space, time, and experience—which are culturally and environmentally structured. Thornton examines each in detail to show how individual and collective Tlingit notions of place, being, and identity are formed. As he observes, despite cultural and environmental changes over time, particularly in the post-contact era since the late eighteenth century, Tlingits continue to bind themselves and their culture to places and landscapes in distinctive ways.

Being and Place among the Tlingit makes a substantive contribution to the literature on the Tlingit, the Northwest Coast cultural area, Native American and indigenous.

Published by the University of Washington Press in association with Sealaska Heritage Institute, 2008.