A Time Before Deception: Truth in Communication, Culture, and Ethics - Softcover

Cooper, Thomas W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0940666898 ISBN 13: 9780940666894

Publisher: Clear Light Pub, 1998

Synopsis

Attempts to show the rules, rituals and ethics of authentic indigenous communication before the arrival of white men in America

About this title

About the Author

Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, National Humanities Medal Winner for the year 2000, spent her childhood on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation and still lives in South Dakota. She is the mother of three children. Among her much-admired books is The Chichi Hoohoo Bogeyman, also reprinted as a Bison Book. Illustrator Oren Lyons is a chief of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation and a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

From Publishers Weekly

Rejecting the assumption that literate cultures are superior to preliterate ones, Cooper explores how native peoples?Amerindian, Australian, Hawaiian, African, etc.?utilize a multitude of precise, stylized, disciplined communication forms ranging from chant, song, dance and memorized myths to sign language, facial and body painting and silent communion. In many native societies, the primary form of communication, he maintains, is with the Great Spirit, intermediary to a universe commingling animals, plants, spirits, weather patterns and humans in an organic whole. Cooper, a communication professor at Emerson College in Boston, incorporates his anthropological fieldwork with the peaceful, egalitarian Shushwap people of British Columbia and with the enduring, prayerful Dine Navajo of northeastern Arizona. He finds that among indigenous peoples generally, customs and ethical practices regulate social interactions, and further, that a universal set of shared moral teachings cuts across tribes and continents. A self-described WASP from Tennessee, Cooper has penetrated deeply into native modes of communication and ethics, bringing back compelling moral perspectives.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Clear Light Pub
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0940666898
• ISBN 13: 9780940666894
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256