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 Contents vii

What Do We Know about the Kinds of Primates

Living Today?  72
What Is Ethnoprimatology?   81
Are There Patterns in Primate Evolution?   81
How Do Paleoanthropologists Reconstruct Primate
Evolutionary History?  83
Chapter Summary  85
For Review  86
Key Terms  87
References   87

Why Is Evolution
Important
to Anthropologists? 43
What Is Evolutionary Theory?   45
What Material Evidence Is There
for Evolution?  45
Pre-Darwinian Views of the Natural World   45
What Is Natural Selection?   51
How Did Biologists Learn about Genes?   54
Genotype, Phenotype, and the Norm
of Reaction   61
What Does Evolution Mean to
What Can the Fossil
Anthropologists?  64 Record Tell Us about
Chapter Summary  65
For Review  66
Human Origins? 89
Key Terms  67 What Is Macroevolution?   90
References  67 What Is Hominin Evolution?   92
Who Were the First Hominins (6–3 mya)?   93
Who Were the Later Australopiths
(3–1.5 mya)?  99
How Can Anthropologists Explain the Human
Transition?  101
What Do We Know about Early Homo
(2.4–1.5 mya)?  102
Who Was Homo erectus (1.8–0.3 mya)?   104
Chapter Summary  109
For Review    110
Key Terms  110
References  110

What Can the Study of

Primates Tell Us about
Human Beings? 69
What Are Primates?   70
How Do Anthropologists Classify Primates?   71
viii Contents

How Did Homo sapiens What Can Evolutionary

Evolve? 112 Theory Tell Us about
How Did Homo sapiens Evolve?  113 Human Variation? 134
Who Were the Neanderthals (230,000–27,000
What Is Microevolution?   135
Years Ago)?  116
Can We Predict the Future of Human
What Do We Know about the Culture of the Middle
Evolution?  151
Paleolithic/Middle Stone Age?   118
Chapter Summary  151
What Do We Know about Anatomically
Modern Humans (300,000 Years Ago to For Review  152
Present)?  120 Key Terms  152
What Do We Know about the Upper Paleolithic/ References  153
Late Stone Age (40,000–10,000 Years
Ago)?  123
What Happened to the Neanderthals?   124
How Many Kinds of Upper Paleolithic/Late Stone
Age Cultures Were There?   125
Where Did Modern Homo sapiens Migrate in Late
Pleistocene Times?  126
Two Million Years of Human Evolution   129
Chapter Summary  130
For Review  131
Key Terms    132
References  132

How Do We Know about

the Human Past? 154
What Is Archaeology?   155
How Do Archaeologists Interpret the Past?   165
Whose Past Is It?   167
Plundering the Past   170
Contemporary Trends in Archaeology   172
Chapter Summary  179
For Review  180
Key Terms  180
References  180
 Contents ix

Why Did Humans Settle Why Do Anthropologists

Down, Build Cities, and Study Economic
Establish States? 182 Relations? 213
How Is the Human Imagination Entangled with the How Do Anthropologists Study Economic
Material World?  183 Relations?  214
Is Plant Cultivation a Form of Niche How Do Anthropologists Study Production,
Construction?  185 Distribution, and Consumption?   215
How Do Anthropologists Explain the Origins of How Are Goods Distributed and
Animal Domestication?  189 Exchanged?  216
When and Why Did Animal Domestication Does Production Drive Economic Activities?   221
Begin?  190 Why Do People Consume What They Do?   224
What Influenced the Beginnings of Domestication The Anthropology of Food    230
at Different Places around the World?    192 Chapter Summary  232
How Did Domestication, Cul­tivation, and For Review  232
Sedentism Begin in Southwestern Asia?   193
Key Terms    233
What Were the Consequences of Domestication
References  233
and Sedentism?  198
How Do Anthropologists Define Social
Complexity?  201
What Is the Archaeological Evidence for Social
Complexity?  203
How Can Anthropologists Explain the Rise of
Complex Societies?  207
Chapter Summary  209
For Review  210
Key Terms  211
References  211

What Can Anthropology

Teach Us about
Sex, Gender, and
Sexuality? 234
How Did Twentieth-Century Feminism Shape
the Anthropological Study of Sex, Gender,
and Sexuality?   235
x Contents

How Do Anthropologists Organize the Study of Chapter Summary  291

Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?   238 For Review  293
How Are Sex and Gender Affected by Other Forms Key Terms    293
of Identity?  242 References  294
How Do Ethnographers Study Gender
Performativity?  243
How Do Anthropologists Study Connections
among Sex, Gender, Sexuality, and the
Body?   245
How Do Anthropologists Study Relations ­between
Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?   247
How Does Ethnography Document Variable
Cultural Understandings Concerning Sex,
Gender, and Sexuality?    250
Chapter Summary  254
For Review  255
Key Terms  256
References  256

How Do Anthropologists
Study Political
Relations? 295
How Are Culture and Politics Related?   296
How Do Anthropologists Study Politics?   299
How Do Anthropologists Study Politics of the
Nation-State?  307
What Happens to Citizenship in a Globalized
World?  318
Global Politics in the Twenty-First Century   320
Chapter Summary  321
For Review  322
Where Do Our Relatives Key Terms  323
Come From and Why Do References  323

They Matter? 257

How Do Human Beings Organize
Interdependence?  258
What Is Kinship?   261
What Is Adoption?   271
How Flexible Can Relatedness Be?   273
What Is Marriage?   274
What Is a Family?   284
How Are Families Transformed over Time?   286
How Does International Migration Affect the
Family?  288
What Is Friendship?   290
 Contents xi

What Happens When Languages Come into

Contact with One Another?   365
What Is Linguistic Inequality?   365
What Is Lost if a Language Dies?   371
How Are Language and Truth Connected?   374
Chapter Summary  375
For Review  376
Key Terms  376
References  377

What Can Anthropology

Tell Us about
Social Groups
and Inequality? 325
What Are Naturalizing Discourses?   326
How Do Anthropologists Study Human
Rights?  341
Chapter Summary  348
For Review  349
Key Terms  350
How Do We Make
References  350 Meaning? 378
What Is Play?   379
What Is Art?   382
What Is Myth?   386
What Is Ritual?   389
How Are World View and Symbolic Practice
Related?  393
World Views in Operation   397
Maintaining and Changing a World View   399
How Are World Views Used as Instruments of
Power?  402
Why Study Anthropology?   403
Chapter Summary  404
Why Is Understanding For Review  405
Human Language Key Terms    406
References  406
Important? 351
What Makes Language Distinctively
Human?  352
Glossary  409
How Are Language and Culture Related?   355
Index  419
How Do We Communicate without
Language?  357
How Do Languages Change over Time?   359
What Does It Mean to “Learn” a Language?   360
Preface
This original US version of this book emerged out of
Robert Lavenda’s and Emily Schultz’s increasing dis-
satisfaction with all the available general anthropology
texts. The authors found that these texts either over-
whelmed beginning students with detail and the sheer
volume of material or else provided overly brief intro-
ductions that failed to convey the richness of the field.
They therefore set out to write a book that introduces
this broad field concisely yet thoroughly, providing di-
verse perspectives and examples to foster not only an
appreciation of anthropology but also a deeper engage-
ment with it—one that helps students better understand
themselves and the world around them. Anthropology
professors (and their students) needed a general an-
thropology text that struck the right balance, fit into a
15-week semester, and came with a complete package of
ancillary materials.
In preparing the Canadian edition, Cynthia Zutter
has focused on two central themes, both of which Lavenda
and Schultz strongly support. First, she has incorporated
Canadian ideas and practices in as many ways as pos-
sible. Throughout the text, she has added discussions
that focus on Canadian topics such as multiculturalism,
bilingualism, same-sex marriage, and cultural resource
management. She has also included many examples from
across Canada, covering concerns such as how Canadian
laws and policies affect people’s everyday lives, how eth-
nicity and indigeneity are recognized, how Indigenous
languages are being revitalized, and how French is being
preserved in Acadia. In addition, Zutter has incorpor-
ated a wide variety of anthropological research carried
out by Canadian anthropologists, both within Canada
and in other regions—from Madagascar to Taiwan to
Brazil. Second, like previous US editions of this text, this
Canadian edition continues to address the central issues
of the discipline, highlighting the controversies and
commitments that shape contemporary anthropology in
North America and around the world, and that make it
interesting and exciting.
Approach
This book may be concise, but we cover the field effect-
ively. We take a question-oriented approach that illumin-
ates major concepts for students and shows them the
relevance of anthropology in today’s world. Structuring
each chapter around an important question and its
subquestions, we explore what it means to be human,
incorporating answers from all four major subfields of
anthropology—biological anthropology, archaeology,
linguistic anthropology, and cultural anthropology—as
well as from applied anthropology. We have made every
effort to provide a balanced perspective, both in the level
of detail we present and in our coverage of the major
subfields.
The questioning approach not only sparks curiosity
but orients students’ reading and comprehension of each
chapter, highlighting the concepts every student should
take away from a general anthropology course. For ex-
ample, students need to know about evolutionary theory,
human variation, and the biological, social, and cultural
critique of the concept of race, since knowledge in these
areas is one of the great achievements of the discipline of
anthropology. No other discipline (and possibly no other
course) will teach about these matters the way anthropol-
ogists do, focusing on the idea of humans as biocultural
organisms. Students need to know about the fossil evi-
dence for the evolution of Homo sapiens, which they are
not likely to learn about elsewhere. Students need to know
what archaeology can tell us about the human past, as well
as what ethnography can teach us about social complexity

and inequality. They need to know that culture is more
than just cultural festivals, regional foods, and interest-
ing traditional costumes. They need to know about lan-
guage and cognition and the central role of learning and
play in human development. They need to understand
the wellsprings of human creativity and imagination. It
is valuable for them to see the many forms of human re-
latedness, and how people organize themselves. They need
to know about globalization from the bottom up and not
just the top down. They need to see how all the subfields
of anthropology together can provide important, unique
insights into all these topics, and how anthropology can
provide a vital foundation for their university education.
The world we face as anthropologists has changed
dramatically in the last quarter-century, and anthropol-
ogy has changed, too. We have always felt it necessary to
present students with a view of what contemporary an-
thropologists are doing; we therefore address the most
current issues in the field and have thoroughly updated
the text accordingly for this edition. Students will take
away from the book an appreciation of how these areas
of specialization have developed over time, and how
they contribute to our understanding of the world in the
twenty-first century.
Organization
Divided into 16 chapters with four “Focus” features
online, this book is the ideal length for a one-semester
course. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the entire field and
the concept of culture, which intersects all aspects of the
discipline of anthropology. Following this comprehen-
sive introduction, six chapters are devoted to biological
anthropology and archaeology: evolution (Chapter 3); the
Acknowledgements
My thanks goes out to all of the many people who helped
me throughout the development of this Canadian edition
of Robert Lavenda and Emily Schultz’s Anthropology:
What Does It Mean to Be Human? The editors at Oxford
University Press have been a pleasure to work with, es-
pecially Tanuja Weerasooriya, Janice Evans, Leah-Ann
Lymer, and Elizabeth Ferguson, who were patient and
provided sage advice as they guided me through this
Preface xiii
primates (Chapter 4); the fossil record and human ori-
gins (Chapters 5 and 6); human variation (Chapter 7); the
human past (Chapter 8); and the first farmers, cities, and
states (Chapter 9). Topics in linguistic and cultural anthro-
pology are covered in chapters on economics (Chapter 10);
sex, gender, and sexuality (Chapter 11); kinship and mar-
riage (Chapter 12); politics (Chapter 13); social inequality
(Chapter 14, covering gender, class, caste, race, ethnicity,
and nationalism); language and communication (Chapter
15); and symbolic practices (Chapter 16, covering play,
art, myth, ritual, and religion). Throughout, the book in-
corporates discussions of indigeneity and gender, while
paying special attention to issues of power and inequality
in Canada and the contemporary world.
In the Canadian edition, Zutter placed the chapter
on culture immediately after the introductory chapter
to highlight the important role that culture plays in all
aspects of anthropology, including biological anthropol-
ogy and archaeology. She has also included additional
emphasis on the biocultural nature of human organisms
throughout, to facilitate the integration of biological and
cultural approaches in anthropology.
In addition, the four brief “Focus” features (online)
explore key concerns, methods, and approaches within
each of the four major subfields of anthropology in
greater depth, focusing on bioarchaeology and the stor-
ies that our skeletons hold (biological anthropology);
methods for dating archaeological remains and homi-
nin fossils (archaeology); the study of language use and
the components of language (linguistic anthropology);
and ethnographic methods commonly used in fieldwork
(cultural anthropology).
—Robert H. Lavenda, Emily A. Schultz,
and Cynthia Zutter
project, and the entire production team. As well, I would
like to extend a note of gratitude to Caroline Starr,
who initiated and championed this project from its in-
itial stages. Editorial assistance was provided by Rose
Lorentzen, whose organizational skills were extremely
helpful. My students at MacEwan University guided the
project with their valuable comments and suggestions.
In addition, I’d like to extend my gratitude to Robert
xiv Preface
Lavenda and Emily Schultz for providing me with such
a wonderful opportunity to combine their exceptional
textbook with Canadian content.
Individual contributions from Canadian anthropol-
ogists form some of the key additions to this text, and I
am grateful to those who provided personal explanations
of their current research. My thanks goes out to Nicholas
Bala, Michel Bouchard, Martin Cannon, Leslie Dawson,
Carly Dokis, Parin Dossa, Linda Fedigan, Nicole
Gombay, Sarah King, Jennifer Liu, Roderick McInnes,
April Nowell, Kathryn Reese-Taylor, Tanya Romaniuk,
Christine Schreyer, Sarah Shulist, Treena Swanston,
Kisha Supernant, and Andrew Walsh. I appreciate their
generosity in sharing their work for this project.
I would also like to extend my thanks to the fol-
lowing reviewers, as well as those who wish to remain
anonymous:
Michel Bouchard, UNBC
Alexis Dolphin, Western University
Maciej Domanski, Dawson College
Nick Gabrilopoulos, Dawson College
Michael Gregg, Mount Allison University
Karoline Guelke, Camosun College
Helen R. Haines, Trent University
Brent Hammer, University of Alberta
Götz Hoeppe, University of Waterloo
David Hopwood, Vancouver Island University
Nicole Kilburn, Camosun College
Yin Lam, University of Victoria
Kathleen Lowrey, University of Alberta
Karen McGarry, McMaster University
Hugh McKenzie, MacEwan University
Lisa Mutch, MacEwan University
Brian Myhre, University of Winnipeg
Mark Prentice, Vanier College
Robbyn Seller, John Abbott College
Matthieu Sossoyan, Vanier College
Kisha Supernant, University of Alberta
Paul Thibaudeau, Carleton University
Tara Tudor, Camosun College
Jacky Vallée, Vanier College
Their insightful comments and suggestions contributed
to the outcome of this Canadian edition.
This edition is dedicated to my family, including my
siblings and my children, Kris, Troy, and Matthew. Their
support and understanding throughout this process has
been enduring. I am grateful to my husband, Mike, as well,
for sharing in my journey as a Canadian anthropologist.
—Cynthia Zutter
 Publisher’s Preface xv

Publisher’s Preface
Oxford University Press is delighted to present the a deeper understanding of the many factors shaping
second Canadian edition of Anthropology: What Does human experience. Discussing issues and examples from
It Mean to Be Human? This thought-provoking work across the globe, this comprehensive text shows Canadian
offers an informative, practical, and comprehensive students the relevance of anthropology in today’s world—
introduction to the discipline—one that not only reveals both at home and abroad.
the richness of anthropological study but also fosters

Key Features

392 Anthropology: What Does It Mean to Be Human?

relative ease into and out of play, but such is not the case
with ritual.
Finally, play usually has little effect on the social
order of ordinary life; as a result, play can safely create a
wide range of commentary on the social order. Ritual is
272 Anthropology: What Does It Mean to Be Human?
different: its role is explicitly to maintain the status quo,
Rick Madonik/Toronto Star via Getty Images

including the prescribed ritual transformations. Societies

FIGURE 16.8 A crowd of hockey fans cheers on Team Canada
during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. These
kinds of mass public events can create a feeling of com-
munitas in today’s nation-states.
through the climactic winning moments of a sports
team (Figure 16.8), attendance at large-scale rock con-
certs, participation in mass public events like Carnival
in Rio de Janeiro, Carnaval de Quebec in Quebec City,
or the Calgary Stampede.
How Are Play and Ritual
Complementary?
How does the logic of ritual differ from the logic of play?
Play and ritual are complementary forms of metacom-
munication, although play is not real and not serious
while ritual is considered important and very real. The
movement from non-play to play is based on the prem-
ise of metaphor (“Let’s make believe”); the movement to
ritual is based on the premise of literalness (“Let’s be-
lieve”). From the perspective of the everyday social order,
the result of these contrasting premises is the “inauth-
enticity” of play and the “truth” of ritual.
Because of the connection of ritual with self-evident
truth, the metacommunication of the ritual frame (“This
differ in the extent to which ritual behaviour alternates
with everyday, non-ritual behaviour. When nearly every
act of everyday life is ritualized and other forms of be-
haviour are strongly discouraged, we sometimes speak
of orthopraxy (“correct practice”). Traditionally observ-
ant Jews and Muslims, for example, lead a highly ritual-
ized daily life, attempting from the moment they awaken
until the moment they fall asleep to carry out even the
humblest of activities in a manner that is ritually correct.
In their view, ritual correctness is the result of God’s law,
and it is their duty and joy to conform their every action
to God’s will.
Margaret Drewal (1992) argues that, at least among
the Yoruba, play and ritual overlap (see EthnoProfile 16.3:
Yoruba). Yoruba rituals combine spectacle, festival, play,
sacrifice, and so on and integrate diverse media—music,
dance, poetry, theatre, sculpture (Drewal 1992, 198).
They are events that require improvisatory, spontaneous
individual moves; as a result, the mundane order is not
only inverted and reversed but may also be subverted
through power play and gender play. For example, gender
roles are rigidly structured in Yoruba society. Yoruba
rituals, however, allow some cross-dressing by both men
EthnoProfile 16.3
Yoruba NIGER
Region: Western Africa Kano
Kaduna
Nation: Nigeria
N
BENI
ascribed statuses Social positions people are assigned at
birth.
achieved statuses Social positions people may attain later in
life, often as the result of their own (or other people’s) effort.
achieved statuses, those social positions that people
may attain later in life, often as the result of their own
(or other people’s) effort, such as becoming a spouse or
college graduate. All societies have ways of incorporat-
ing outsiders into their kinship groups, however, which
they achieve by converting supposedly ascribed kinship
statuses into achieved ones, thus undermining the dis-
tinction between them. We will use the term adoption to
refer to these practices that allow people to transform re-
lationships based on nurturance into relations of kinship.
Adoption and Naming among
the Inuit of Nunavut
In some societies, such as that of ancient Rome, people
distinguish between Ego’s biological father (or genitor)
and Ego’s social father (or pater); they may also distin-
guish between Ego’s biological mother (or genetrix) and
Ego’s social mother (or mater). Social parents are those
who nurture a child, and they are often the child’s bio-
logical parents as well. Among the Inuit of Nunavut, these
distinguishing factors are not strongly acknowledged (see
EthnoProfile 12.4). Rather, the Inuit view of extended
Lake
Chad
EthnoProfile 12.4
family encompasses the concept of “custom adoption”—a
traditional form of adoption in which the adoptee main-
tains flexible relationships with her or his birth and adopt-
ive families. As Valerie Alia (2007, 35) has observed, in
Nunavut communities, “children move daily among the
homes of birth and adoptive parents . . . receiving care, food,
and companionship.” Alia further notes that this form of
adoption is generally considered to be “more welcoming
and less stigmatized than adoption among Qallunaat [i.e.,
southerners]” (36). According to Alia’s informants, “adop-
tions are a part of everyday life,” and “giving a child for
adoption is a way of making sure every amauti (or am-
autik) (the baby-carrying hood on a woman’s parka, or
amautik) carries a child” (36) (Figure 12.7). This practice
of adoption encourages the formation of families, which
contributes to a strong sense of community and provides
families with many hands to help with hunting, fishing,
preparing food, maintaining homes, and other sustenance
tasks. Moreover, as Alia notes, “[w]hen communities are
small and communication is open, adopted children grow
up well nurtured and loved” (36).
To understand the cultural significance of custom
adoption, it is important to understand the Inuit trad-
ition of naming. According to the highly intricate sauniq
naming system, Inuit parents and other relatives (usually
women, sometimes men) assign the adoptee the name
of a deceased relative. This act not only commemorates
the deceased but also forms a vital, symbolic connection
between the adoptee and her or his namesake, allowing
the namesake to “live on” in the community. To the
Inuit, the giving of a sauniq name is an act of extreme

Nig
NIGERIA
importance. As Alia (2007, 37) notes, “naming is a—
is ritual”) is associated with an additional metacom-
e r
Population: 40,000,000 Yoruba e perhaps the—central component of Inuit culture. It is
nu
munication: “All messages within this frame are true.” Environment: Coastal and Lagos
Be
Inuit (Nunavut) Ellesmere
Island
It is ritual that asserts what should be to play’s what can forest CAMEROON GREENLAND

0 300 60 Region: North American

be. The ritual frame is more rigid than the play frame. Livelihood: Farming, com- Gulf of Guinea Kilometres Arctic
Consequently, ritual is the most stable liminal domain, merce, modern professions Banks
Baffin
Nation: Canada Island
Bay

whereas play is the most flexible. Players can move with Political organization: Traditionally, kingdoms; today, part
Population: 100,000
Victoria
Island
Baf
fin
Isla
of a modern nation-state nd

Environment: Arctic
For more information: Bascom, William. 1969. The Yoruba
archipelago, tundra, shrub Nunavut
Inuit
orthopraxy “Correct practice”; the prohibition of deviation of Southwestern Nigeria. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and (Nunavut)
Lee Thomas/Alamy Stock Photo

tundra Northwest
from approved forms of behaviour. Winston. Territories
0 300 600
Livelihood: Hunting, Kilometres

fishing
Political organization: Traditionally, band societies; today,
self-governing as part of a modern nation-state
For more information: McElroy, Ann. 2008. Nunavut
Generations: Change and Continuity in Canadian Inuit
FIGURE 12.7 An Inuit mother carries her daughter in
Communities. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
her amauti on Baffin Island, Nunavut.
lav32563_ch16_378-408.indd 392 02/21/20 04:01 PM

lav32563_ch12_257-294.indd 272 02/21/20 03:47 PM

Canadian focus. An array of Canadian examples makes the text highly relevant and accessible to students in
Canada. Canadian scholarship and perspectives throughout also give readers insight into the many Canadian
contributions to the field.
xvi Publisher’s Preface

How Do Anthropologists Study Political Relations? 319 Why Did Humans Settle Down, Build Cities, and Establish States? 197

European empires. Money could be made in these set- between 9000 and 4000 years ago, with beans about 2000 in this region (Powis et al. 2008). Animal domestica-
tings, but success required Chinese merchant families years ago (Smith 1995). In eastern Canada, maize ap- tion was far less important in the Americas than it was
to cut themselves off from ties to mainland China and peared around 1500 years ago, while it appeared around in Mesopotamia as the ideal wild herd animals, such as
to reinforce bonds among family members and busi- 1000 years ago at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in goats and sheep, were not common in the Americas. The
ness partners in terms of guanxi (“relationships of social Alberta. Maize (corn) forms the cornerstone of plant Andean llama is the largest animal domesticated in the
connections built primarily upon shared identities such domesticates in the Americas and has been the focus of Americas while the turkey was also domesticated and
as native place, kinship or attending the same school” Dr Michael Blake’s (University of British Columbia) re- became a valuable food source.
[Smart 1999, 120]). search for many years. With colleagues across Canada Other notable plants were domesticated in Africa,

© Tanawat Pontchour | Dreamstime.com

The family discipline of overseas Chinese enabled
them to become wealthy and provided the resour-
ces to subvert the governmentality of the nation-state.
The orientation of these wealthy families toward na-
tional identity and citizenship, Ong explains, is
“market-driven.” In Hong Kong, for example, in the years
leading up to its return to mainland China in 1997, many
wealthy Chinese thought of citizenship not as the right to
demand full democratic representation, but as the right
to promote familial interests apart from the well-being of
society (Ong 2002, 178). None of the overseas Chinese she
knew expressed any commitment to nationalism, either
local or long distance—quite the contrary. Relying on
family discipline and loyalty and buttressed by consider-
able wealth and strong interpersonal ties, they actively
worked to evade the governmentality of nation-states.
For example, Chinese from Hong Kong who wanted to
migrate to Britain in the 1960s were able to evade racial
barriers that blocked other “coloured” immigrants be-
cause of their experience with capitalism and their repu-
tation for peaceful acquiescence to British rule. When
the British decided to award citizenship to some Hong
and the world, Blake has created an interactive website,
“Ancient Maize Map,” documenting the recent discov-
eries of maize throughout North, Central, and South
America (http://en.ancientmaize.com). As well, Blake’s
recent book (2015) Maize for the Gods outlines the inter-
sections of maize as a food for survival and one for spirit-
ual beings. Other plants, including goosefoot, marsh
FIGURE 13.8 Overseas Chinese are to be found in many elder, sunflowers, and squash, were also domesticated in
parts of the world, as here in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. They are eastern North America (Smith 1995, 189–90). In South
not always millionaire businesspeople but are shopkeepers America, maize appears between 4000 and 3000 years
and small businesspeople as well.
ago but was only one of several domesticates. In other
areas of South America, soil conditions, altitude, and cli-
market. To be sure, market discipline under globaliza- mate favoured root crops—manioc or potatoes—as well
tion was very different from the market discipline typ- as beans and quinoa (a high-altitude grain), which were
ical in the 1950s and 1960s. Making money in the context of greater importance. Cocoa and chili, which were do-
of globalization required the flexibility to take advan- mesticated around 4000 years ago, were also important
tage of economic opportunities wherever and whenever
they appeared. Ong described one family in which the
eldest son remained in Hong Kong to run part of the
family hotel chain located in the Pacific region while
his brother lived in San Francisco and managed the
hotels located in North America and Europe. Children
such as coffee, millet, okra, and sorghum, while a large
number of domesticates came from eastern Asia, includ-
ing rice, yam, tea, sugarcane, garlic, onion, apple, and
carrot (Map 9.4 and Figure 9.7).
Archaeologists are coming to agree that complex
foragers living in areas of relatively abundant resour-
ces were probably responsible for domestication wher-
ever it developed (Price and Gebauer 1995; Smith 1995).
Rich and complex archaeological and genetic evidence
from specific areas of the world downplays single-cause
explanations of domestication and stresses the need to
consider each domestication event on its own terms.
Melinda A. Zeder and Bruce D. Smith (2009) are im-
pressed by abundant and varied data from southwestern
Asia showing that during several thousand years prior
to the appearance of agriculture, “people appear to have
Goats, dogs, cattle, Dogs, millet, chickens,
wheat, sheep, barley cattle, rice, pigs

Kong residents in the 1990s, they used a point system that can be separated from their parents when they are, for
favoured applicants with education, fluency in English, example, installed in one country to be educated while
NORTH
and training in professions of value to the economy, such their parents manage businesses in other countries on AMERICA EUROPE
as accountancy and law. These attributes fitted well the different continents. Sunflower,
criteria for citizenship valued under the government of These flexible family arrangements are not without dogs
ASIA
Margaret Thatcher, while other applicants for citizenship costs: “Familial regimes of dispersal and localization . . .
Pacific
who lacked such attributes were excluded. Citizenship, or discipline family members to make do with very little Beans, gourds, maize,
cats
Ocean
at least a passport, could be purchased by those who had emotional support; disrupted parental responsibility, amaranth, squash AFRICA
Pacific
the money: “well-off families accumulated passports not strained marital relations, and abandoned children are Ocean
Oil palm, millet,
Indian
yams, sorghum
SOUTH Ocean
only from Canada, Australia, Singapore, and the United such common circumstances that they have special AMERICA
States but also from revenue-poor Fiji, the Philippines, terms” (Ong 2002, 190). At the same time, individual Atlantic
Panama, and Tonga which required in return for a pass- family members truly do seem to live comfortably as cit- Ocean AUSTRALIA
port a down payment of U.S. $200,000 and an equal izens of the world. A Chinese banker in San Francisco
amount in installments” (Ong 2002, 183) (Figure 13.8). told Ong that he could live in Asia, Canada, or Europe: Sheep, wheat, pigs,
Although wealthy overseas Chinese families had “I can live anywhere in the world, but it must be near an Llamas, cotton,
barley, goats

thus managed to evade or subvert both the governmen- airport” (190). gourds, squash, beans, alpacas,
maize, potatoes, guinea pigs
tality of Chinese kinship and that of nation-states, they Ong concludes that, for these elite Chinese, the con-
remained vulnerable to the discipline of the capitalist cept of nationalism has lost its meaning. Instead, she MAP 9.4 A map of probable locations where various plants and animals were domesticated.

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Global approach. Providing a broad context for analysis, the text features examples from around the world and
highlights how globalization and the spread of capitalism has drastically shaped how people everywhere live their lives.

What Can Anthropology Teach Us about Sex, Gender, and Sexuality? 241 What Can Anthropology Teach Us about Sex, Gender, and Sexuality? 245

the manner Guto enacted) and perhaps elsewhere in the

In Their Own Words
The Consequences of Being a Woman
Bonnie L. Hewlett is an anthropologist who has spent many years working with women in the Central African
Republic, women who told her they wanted to tell her their stories. One of these women she calls Blondine.
Blondine tells of her marriage.
After Issa [her first husband] left, my second husband,
Levi, saw me and wanted to marry me. He spoke so
much he had no saliva in his mouth! I loved my second
husband Levi. It was a good marriage, but over a long
time I came to lose respect for my husband. The most
important feeling in a marriage is respect. If you love
your husband, you show him respect. But after some
time of marriage, if he drank a lot of embacko [moon-
shine], he hit me. One time my friend heard the fighting
work,” then sometimes it is good to have two wives.
The second wife becomes like a sister and respects
the first wife. If they both have a good heart, they work
together in the fields and help each other with the work
in the house and it is good. But if the second wife is not
obedient and respectful, then there is war.
After much hitting and fighting, we tried to reconcile
and for a while we lived together, but when the second
wife came, our husband said, “You two wives! Do not
world (Figure 11.6).
Lancaster uses the term transvestics to encompass
everything from these everyday forms of gender mim-
icry to fully fledged performances that cite not only gen-
dered speech but also gendered forms of dress and bodily
movement. All transvestic performers are not equally
skilled, of course, but how their performances are judged
varies, depending on context. Lancaster points out that in
the context of North American drag balls, the performer
may sometimes be evaluated positively by convincingly
portraying another gender role, but in other contexts the
drag performance fails unless it demonstrates an ironic
parody of that other gender role.
Lancaster concluded that Guto’s performance in-
volved the portrayal of a stock Carnival figure in a manner
that was both hostile and affectionate, and that this per- Thornton Cohen / Alamy Stock Photo

and she came and said, “Why are you hitting your wife?
Stop this!” After a few years in the marriage, Levi would
drink and he’d talk and talk and yell and start fights.
Sometimes I’d yell back, but most times I kept quiet
until he fell asleep. Levi also neglected me, but not like
the first husband, Issa. Levi searched for another wife.
He did not ask me. I thought, “This can’t be, not yet.” If
he had asked me before, if he had said, “My wife, can I
search for another wife?” and explained to me, I would
have said yes. But he married another woman and neg-
lected me. He did not give me money or food and spent
most of his nights with his other wife. I was so mad be-
cause he did not ask. I hit him. When Levi brought in
the second wife, I hit her too. One time a man will look
for another wife. Maybe because the other woman is
beautiful and he says to himself, “I will marry her.” If he
tells the first wife, “Is it okay? She can help you with your
man whom Wentzell calls Johnny considered himself to
have been both economically and sexually successful,
working as a chef in the United States and engaging in
penetrative sex with many women other than his wife.
When Wentzell met him, however, he was in the hospi-
tal, facing the surgical removal of his cancerous penis.
Prior to the surgery, Johnny was despondent, convinced
that his manhood would disappear when his penis was
removed. After the surgery, however, his mood was much
more positive.
Johnny’s loss of his penis was extreme. But many
other older men Wentzell met, experiencing aging,
illness, and increasing erectile difficulty, had similar
fight!!” When she’d come we worked together and pre-
pared food for the family and we’d eat together. But then
Levi began to neglect me. He slept too much with the
second wife and bought her clothes and shoes and not
me. I grabbed him by the neck and said, “My husband!
Why do you not sleep with me? Tonight it is my turn!”
When he came into the second wife’s bedroom one night
I grabbed his neck and said, “No! You sleep with me, not
her!” If the husband organizes it good, it works so well!
But if he does not, if he sleeps three nights with one and
two nights with the other it does not work! Even so, when
I heard them speak on the bed at night to each other, I
listened and it made me so angry! I was jealous. I suffered
and because of his neglect I divorced him. After Levi left,
life was so difficult. I was alone with two children.
Source: Hewlett 2013, 163–4.
worries about losing their manhood. In their cases, one
possible solution might have been drugs like Viagra,
Cialis, or Levitra, which, at the time of Wentzell’s re-
search, were being heavily marketed in Mexico as medi-
cation to treat what was coming to be called “erectile
dysfunction,” or ED. Wentzell initially thought that
such drugs would have been seized upon by older men
for whom sexual potency was central to their composite
masculinities. However, many older men were not inter-
ested in taking the drugs. Their reasons varied but often
included a revised composite masculinity in which the
reckless virile behaviour of a young man was replaced by
“responsible” forms of “mature masculinity,” involving
formance involved “play acting” (1994). Indeed, cochones
are much admired for their transvestic performances, but
not all the men who cross-dress in Carnival are cochones,
and telling them apart is not easy. As a festival, Carnival
involves turning the world upside down, and this involves
upending a range of stereotypes about gender, sexuality,
race, class, and ethnicity. As our previous discussion of
intersectionality suggests, we agree with Lancaster that we
humans “play our games freely, but we are not free to play
them just any way we choose” (1994, 568). He suggests that
play of this kind needs to be understood “as both a human
universal and as a base condition of culture,” which aligns
with our discussion of play in Chapter 16.
How Do Anthropologists
Study Connections among
Sex, Gender, Sexuality,
and the Body?
An important trend in sociocultural anthropology in
recent decades has been attention to “the body,” an
object of study that is of obvious relevance to discus-
sions of sex, gender, and sexuality. To understand the
growth of interest in the body, remember that, for most
of the twentieth century, sociocultural anthropology
consistently downplayed human individuals (and their
individual bodies) and instead highlighted patterns
that characterized the social groups to which individual
humans belonged. In recent years, anthropologists have
turned to the work of Michel Foucault (Figure 11.7),
FIGURE 11.6 A Nicaraguan cowboy poses with a cross-dressing
male during Carnival in Nicaragua.
whose writings highlight the way social power, particu-
larly in modern Western societies, acts on individual
bodies. Social institutions such as schools and armies
regulate the actions of individual bodies in order to
render them more efficient in the performance of par-
ticular skills or practices. At the same time, modern
states depend on statistical information about their
populations in order to devise ways of regulating those
populations, engaging in what Foucault calls biopolitics
(see Chapter 13). For example, campaigns to improve the
well-being of citizens via medical interventions such as
inoculations have allowed state institutions to increase
the numbers of healthy individuals ready for the labour
force, or the numbers of healthy recruits eligible to be
drafted into the armed forces. Finally, Foucault argues,
societies have devised ways of persuading individuals
to bring their own bodily activities into conformity
with social expectations, a phenomenon he calls “the
care of the self.” Foucault’s theoretical framework
has informed work in many areas of anthropological
research but has mainly focused on documenting

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Coverage of gender and feminist anthropology. The authors tightly weave the topics of gender and sexuality
into the fabric of the text. Discussion of issues such as gender identity, gender inequality, feminist archeology, and
varieties of human sexual practice offers students insight into important areas of study within anthropology.

342 Anthropology: What Does It Mean to Be Human?
attentive to the spread of this discourse and the issues it
raises, some of which we explore here.
Are Human Rights Universal?
Globalization has stimulated discussions about human
rights: powers, privileges, or material resources to which
people everywhere, by virtue of being human, are justly
entitled. Rapidly circulating capital, images, people, things,
and ideologies juxtapose different understandings about
what it means to be human or what kinds of rights people
may be entitled to. The context within which human
rights discourse becomes relevant is often described as
multiculturalism: living permanently in settings sur-
rounded by people with cultural backgrounds different
from your own and struggling to define with them the
degree to which the wider society should accord respect and
recognition to the cultural beliefs and practices of differ-
ent groups. It is precisely in multicultural settings—found
everywhere in today’s globalized world—that questions of
rights become salient and different cultural understandings
of what it means to be human, and what rights humans are
entitled to, become the focus of contention.
Human Rights Discourse as the Global
Language of Social Justice
Discourses about human rights have proliferated in
recent decades, stimulated by the original UN Universal
Declaration on Human Rights in 1948 and followed by
numerous subsequent declarations. For example, in 1992,
the Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination
against Women (CEDAW) declared that violence against
women was a form of gender discrimination that violated
the human rights of women. This declaration was adopted
by the UN General Assembly in 1993 and became part
of the rights platform at the Fourth World Conference
on Women in Beijing, China, in 1995 (Figure 14.6).
Anthropologist Sally Merry (2001) observes that this
declaration “dramatically demonstrates the creation of
new rights—rights which depend on the state’s failure to
human rights Powers, privileges, or material resources to
which people everywhere, by virtue of being human, are justly
entitled.
multiculturalism Living permanently in settings surrounded
by people with cultural backgrounds different from one’s own
and struggling to define with them the degree to which the
cultural beliefs and practices of different groups should or
should not be accorded respect and recognition by the wider
society.
lav32563_ch14_325-350.indd 342
Current anthropological approaches to power and inequality. In-depth treatment of issues such as nationalism,
racism, class, caste, and human rights helps students understand how power is manifested, deployed, resisted,
and transformed.
A questions-oriented approach.
Structuring each chapter around
an important question and its sub-
questions, the authors illuminate major
concepts, incorporating answers from
the main subfields of anthropology—
biological anthropology, archaeology,
linguistic anthropology, and cultural
anthropology—as well as applied
anthropology. This engaging approach
sparks students’ curiosity while
focusing their learning around key
topics in the field.
Publisher’s Preface xvii
What Can Anthropology Tell Us about Social Groups and Inequality? 327
protect women rather than its active violation of rights”
and that “the emergence of violence against women as
a distinct human rights violation depends on redefining
the family so that it is no longer shielded from legal scru-
tiny” (36–7).
Although CEDAW has proven particularly conten-
tious, other human rights documents have been signed
without controversy by many national governments.
Signing a human rights declaration supposedly binds
governments to take official action to implement changes Gopalpur
Guider
in local practices that might be seen to violate the rights
asserted in the declaration. Human rights discourses are
common currency in all societies, at all levels.
Because of the wide adoption of human rights dis-
courses throughout the world, some people have come to
speak of an emerging “culture of human rights,” which
has now become “the preeminent global language of
social justice” (Merry 2001, 38). Important to this dia-
logue is the inclusion of Indigenous peoples’ rights in the
UN declaration of 1989. As Jane Cowan, Marie-Bénédicte MAP 14.1 Location of societies whose EthnoProfiles appear in Chapter 14.
Dembour, and Richard Wilson (2001) write, it is “no use
imagining a ‘primitive’ tribe which has not yet heard of
human rights . . . what it means to be ‘indigenous’ is itself members of lower ranked classes have much more lim- society, the classes defined by these unequal roles in the
transformed through interaction with human-rights dis- ited access to wealth (Figure 14.1). division of labour will also persist. The French Revolution
courses and institutions” (5). These developments mean The concept of class has a double heritage in modern had triggered the displacement of aristocrats and peas-
that anthropologists must take note of the important in- anthropology, one stemming from Europe and the other ants, who had played the key roles in European feudal-
fluence of this human rights discourse as it shapes the from North America. European social scientists lived in ism. They were replaced by new key classes—industrial
community-focused research that they do. states with a long history of social class divisions reach- entrepreneurs and the industrial working class—who
What counts as “human rights” has changed over ing back to the Middle Ages and, in some cases, to even were linked together within the capitalist mode of
time, not only because of the action of international earlier times. In their experience, social classes were production. In time, Marx predicted, these industrial
bodies like the UN but also because of the efforts of an well-entrenched and relatively closed groups. In the late
increasing number of NGOs that have become involved 1700s, both the Industrial Revolution and the French
in various countries of the world, many of them deeply Revolution promised to end the oppressive privileges
committed to projects designed to improve people’s lives of the ruling class and to equalize everyone’s access to
and protect their rights (Figure 14.7). As Merry (2001) wealth. However, class divisions did not wither away in
says, these developments “have created a new legal order” Europe during the nineteenth century; they just changed
(35) that has given birth to new possibilities throughout their contours. Followers of Karl Marx judged that, at
the world for the elaboration and discussion of what best, an old ruling class had been displaced by a new
human rights are all about. one: feudal aristocrats had been replaced by bourgeois
In addition, because the “culture of human rights” capitalists. The lowest level in European societies—rural
is increasingly regarded, in one way or another, as the peasants—were partially displaced as well, with the ap-
iStockphoto/Cesar Okada
“culture of globalization,” it would seem to be a topic pearance of the urban working class. But the barriers
separating those at the top of the class hierarchy from
well-suited to anthropological analysis in itself. This is
those at the bottom seemed just as rigid as ever.
because, as we shall see, human rights discourse is not
as straightforward as it seems. On the face of things, de- As we described in Chapter 10, Marx defines classes
fending human rights for all people would seem unprob- in terms of their members’ different relations to the FIGURE 14.1 Members of different social classes often live
lematic. Few people who are aware of the devastation means of production. This means that as long as a par- within easy sight of one another. Here, luxury apartments and
wrought by colonial exploitation, for example, would ticular set of unequal productive relations flourishes in a squatter settlements rub shoulders in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
02/21/20 03:53 PM lav32563_ch14_325-350.indd 327 02/21/20 03:53 PM
▲ The evolution of human ancestry, visible through changes in anatomy, is displayed at the National Museum of Natural
Sciences in Kiev, Ukraine. Photo: Andrii Zastrozhnov/Shutterstock
Why Is Evolution Important
to Anthropologists?
Chapter Outline
• What Is Evolutionary Theory? • What Does Evolution Mean to Anthropologists?
• What Material Evidence Is There for Evolution? • Chapter Summary
• Pre-Darwinian Views of the Natural World • For Review
• What Is Natural Selection? • Key Terms
• How Did Biologists Learn about Genes? • References
• Genotype, Phenotype, and the Norm of Reaction
lav32563_ch03_043-068.indd 43 02/21/20 03:15 PM
xviii Publisher’s Preface
194 CHAPTER 6: HOW DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE HUMAN PAST?
FIGURE 6.16 Historical archaeologists, shown here excavating in the Roman Forum, supplement written documents with records
of settlement patterns, structures, and artifacts, which reveal valuable information about the past that was never written down.
In 1980, Spector and her team began to dig at a
site near Jordan, Minnesota, known by the Dakota as
Inyan Ceayak Atonwan, or “Village at the Rapids.” She
examined historical documents that referred to the site
for clues about what tasks were carried on by men and
women at the site, as a guide to what kinds of mate-
rial remains to look for. After several seasons, concerned
that her work might be meaningless or offensive to the
Dakota, Spector met a Dakota man who was a descen-
dant of a man named Mazomani, one of the original
inhabitants of the Village at the Rapids. Eventually,
other descendants of Mazomani visited the site. By the
1985–1986 season, Dakota and non-Dakota were col-
laborating in teaching Dakota language, oral history,
ethnobotany, ecology, and history at the site while dig-
ging continued. A Dakota elder conducted a pipe cer-
emony at the site shortly before the field season began,
which symbolized for Spector the Dakota people’s per-
mission to work there.
Since the early 1980s, collaborative archaeological
research of this kind has become increasingly common.
Renfrew and Bahn (2008), for example, report on a
lav40686_ch06_168-199.indd 194
Online “Focus on Four Fields” features. Engaging modules introduce students to the methods and approaches
anthropologists use to conduct research within their various subfields.
Cross-chapter references. Marginal notes help
readers make connections between topics, issues,
and subfields of anthropology.
What Are the Critical Issues in Contemporary Archaeology?
respectful. They insisted that one member of the com-
munity supervise the project, primarily “to protect the
diggers from doing something that could bring practi-
cal or ritual danger: the totemic geography of a region
contains some ‘dangerous places,’ into which archae-
ologists might stray through ignorance” (Renfrew and
Bahn 2008, 521). The archaeologists also had to agree
to complete work at one site before moving on to an-
other and to return all disturbed areas to the condition
in which they had been prior to the excavation. But Ab-
original involvement in the project did not stop there.
“Senior Aborigine men representing the relevant groups
accompanied the team on field trips and carefully mon-
itored the excavations, while trainee Aboriginal rang-
ers helped in the laboratory, and were instructed in
archaeological procedures” (Renfrew and Bahn 2008,
522). When the project was completed, the research-
ers did indeed find evidence that verified Chaloupka’s
hypothesis, but two other findings were perhaps even
more exciting. The first was the discovery of plant re-
mains as much as 6,000 years old, preserved thanks to
the unusual microclimate present in one rockshelter.
The second came from a second rockshelter and con-
sisted of pieces of red ochre, a pigment used by ancient
human populations in many parts of the world. These
pieces were 53,000 years old, had been worked by hand,
and might have been the sources of pigment for some of
the rock art. Renfrew and Bahn (2008) judge this proj-
ect “very successful” (528), and one measure of its suc-
cess was the way it provided a model—as did Spector’s
multidisciplinary research project inside Kakadu National work—of finding a way to do archaeology while work-
Park in the Northern Territory of Australia that began ing together with an indigenous community that had its
in 1981. Archaeologists wanted to learn more about own stake in the way the project was carried out, as well
the earliest occupation of tropical Australia, which as in the outcome.
began more than 23,000 years ago, and Kakadu
National Park was an ideal place to look: the park con-
tains a number of rockshelters filled with rich material
Cosmopolitan Archaeologies
traces of ancient human occupation, including rock A variety of far-reaching changes have swept the world
paintings as old as those found in European caves such since the end of the Cold War in 1989. As we will see
as Lascaux. Archaeologists wanted to build on previ- in later chapters, these changes have affected the way
ous work and to test the proposal made by an earlier all anthropologists do research, and archaeologists
researcher, George Chaloupka, who argued that the are no exception. Collaborative projects between local
rock art in the region reflected changes in the environ- communities and archaeologists have become increas-
ment triggered by rising sea levels (Renfrew and Bahn ingly common in recent years, but these collaborations
2008, 521). themselves have been affected by a number of broader
But Rhys Jones, the team leader from the Australian changes. For example, global tourism has mushroomed,
National University, knew that the site was legally owned and huge numbers of tourists from all over the world
by the local Aborigine community, whose permission now want to visit archaeological sites such as Machu
would be needed before any excavation could begin. Picchu or Kakaku National Park, both of which have
The Aborigine community was willing to give permis- been named UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
sion for the project, but they wanted to ensure that the As we saw in the case of Machu Picchu, a lot of
dig was carried out in a way that was responsible and money can be made managing flows of wealthy tourists
09/08/17 07:48 AM lav40686_ch06_168-199.indd 195
what makes them different from or similar to other ani-
mals. Early interest in these matters was a by-product of
centuries of exploration and colonial expansion. Western
Europeans found tremendous variation in the physical ap-
pearance of peoples around the world and tried to make
sense of these differences. Some researchers developed a
series of elaborate techniques to measure different observ-
able features of human populations, including skin colour,
hair type, and skull shape, hoping to find scientific evi-
dence that would allow them to classify all the peoples of
the world into a set of unambiguous categories based on
distinct sets of biological attributes. Such categories were
called races, and many scientists were convinced that
clear-cut criteria for racial classification would be dis-
covered if careful measurements were made on enough
people from a range of different populations.
European scientists first applied racial categories
to the peoples of Europe itself, but their classifications
soon included non-European peoples, who were coming
under increasing political and economic domination
through colonial expansion by European and European
American capitalist societies. These peoples differed
from “white” Europeans not only because of their skin
colour but also because of their unfamiliar languages
and customs. In most cases, their technologies were also
no match for the potent armaments of the West. In the
early eighteenth century, using terms that are no longer
in use today, the European biologist Carolus Linnaeus
(Carl von Linné, 1707–1778) classified known human
populations into four races (Amerindian, Caucasian,
Asian, and Negro) based on skin colour (reddish, white,
yellow, and black, respectively).
In the nineteenth century, influential natural scien-
tists such as Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), Samuel George
Morton (1799–1851), Francis Galton (1822–1911), and
Paul Broca (1824–1880) built on this idea of race, rank-
ing different populations of the world in terms of skull
size; they found the brains of “white” Europeans and
North Americans to be larger and saw the other “races”
as representing varying grades of inferiority, with the
two lowest grades being represented by Amerindians
(i.e., Indigenous) and Africans (Gould 1996). These find-
ings were used to validate the social practice of racism:
the systematic oppression of members of one or more
socially defined “race” by members of another socially
defined “race” that is justified in terms of the supposed
inherent biological superiority of the rulers and the sup-
posed inherent biological inferiority of those they rule.
For example, despite the fact that millions of Indigenous
lav32563_ch01_001-022.indd 7 02/21/20 03:08 PM
195
to well-known cultural heritage sites (see Figure 6.10).
When tourist traffic threatens to destroy such sites, there-
fore, it is not merely the ruins themselves that are at
stake; so are the livelihoods of local people and govern-
ments. Moreover, powerless minorities with traditional
connections to these sites frequently find themselves
shoved aside as national and international institu-
tions step in and take over. In the past, most archae-
ologists tried to do their research while avoiding local
legal and political involvements, hoping to achieve “a
‘do no harm’ model of coexistence” (Meskell 2009, 5).
Today, many archaeologists have adopted the view that
their first obligation should be to those local (and often
marginalized) people with traditional connections to
the archaeological sites where they work. But more and
more archaeologists are finding that this kind of single-
minded commitment is increasingly problematic be-
cause they and their local allies must find a way to deal
with a range of other local and global stakeholders who
have their own, often conflicting, ideas about how cul-
tural heritage should be managed.
Like many contemporary cultural anthropologists
(see Chapter 8), some archaeologists have been moved
by these struggles to question a view of the world that
divides it up into a patchwork quilt of distinct, neatly
bounded “cultures,” each of which embodies a unique
heritage that must be protected from change at all
costs. Again, like many of their cultural anthropolo-
gist colleagues, these archaeologists have concluded
that the only way forward is to cultivate a “cosmopoli-
tan” point of view. For many cultural anthropologists,
cosmopolitanism means being able to move with ease
from one cultural setting to another. Cultural anthro-
pologists regularly develop cosmopolitan skills and
awareness as they move in and out of fieldwork situ-
ations. Moreover, people everywhere—tourists, immi-
grants, or refugees, for example—have crafted a variety
of different kinds of cosmopolitan skills to cope suc-
cessfully with movement from one cultural setting to
another. As you will see later, these movements have
become the focus of new “multisited” forms of ethno-
graphic research.
For archaeologists, adopting a cosmopolitan ori-
entation means giving up universalistic assumptions
about the meaning of the past. It means acknowledging,
for example, that preservation of material artifacts may
in fact sometimes go against the wishes of local groups
with close connections to those artifacts. Dealing with
cosmopolitanism Being able to move with ease from one cultural set-
ting to another.
09/08/17 07:48 AM
What Is Anthropology? 7
people were living and thriving in the Americas for
thousands of years, racism and racist ideals supported
the nineteenth-century colonial perspective that the
land was nobody’s (terra nullius) and open to be settled.
Consequently, thousands of Indigenous people were en-
slaved, removed from their land, and died as their land
was settled by European colonizers.
In the recent past, the treatment of Indigenous peoples
in Canada exemplifies clear racist practices. By far one of
the most devastating of these was the establishment of the
residential school program in Canada. Indigenous chil-
dren from across the country were taken from their fam-
ilies in an attempt to take the “Indian out of the Indian”
and assimilate them into the Euro-Christian culture. As
a result, these children were forced to live in boarding
schools, subjected to horrendous living conditions, and
not allowed to speak their Indigenous language; essen-
tially, they had their Indigenous culture stripped away.
These schools were in existence for over 100 years, im-
pacting over 100,000 children, who essentially grew up
without a connection to
their culture. To redress
For further discussion of the
the legacy of residential
Truth and Reconciliation
schools and this devas- Commission (TRC), see Chapter 13,
p. 305, and Chapter 15, p. 366.
tating loss of Indigenous
culture, the Canadian
government created a
Truth and Reconciliation For expanded discussion
of the methods anthropol-
Commission (TRC). The
ogists use to study human varia-
TRC was created to hear tion without using the term race,
the stories of the sur- see Chapter 7, pp. 137–9. For a
discussion of present-day racism
vivors of the residential and associated social issues in
school system and to lay Canada, see Chapter 14, pp. 332–3.
the foundation for recon-
ciliation. Ten principles of reconciliation and 94 Calls to
Action were put forward to guide the process of repairing
the broken relationship between Indigenous and non-In-
digenous peoples in Canada. The Calls to Action are to be
used to change all levels of government, including sectors
that deal with child welfare, health, justice, and education
(TRC 2015).
races Social groupings that allegedly reflect biological
differences.
racism The systematic oppression of members of one or
more socially defined “race” by members of another socially
defined “race” that is justified in terms of the supposed in-
herent biological superiority of the rulers and the supposed
inherent biological inferiority of those they rule.

▲ Mehndi (temporary skin decoration drawn in dye derived from the henna plant) applied to the hands and feet is a wedding
tradition in India and many other South Asian countries. Photo: gooddesign10/iStockphoto
How Do We Make Meaning?
Chapter Outline
• What Is Play?
• What Is Art?
• What Is Myth?
• What Is Ritual?
• How Are World View and Symbolic Practice Related?
• World Views in Operation
• Maintaining and Changing a World View
lav32563_ch16_378-408.indd 378
Vibrant four-colour design. A wide array of photos, maps, tables, and illustrations helps bring anthropology to life!
care. According to anthropologist Merrill Singer (1998,
195), critical medical anthropology “is committed to
the ‘making social’ and the ‘making political’ of health
and medicine.” Thus, critical medical anthropologists
pay attention to the way social divisions based on class,
“race,” gender, and ethnicity can block access to medical
attention or make people more vulnerable to disease
and suffering. They draw attention to the way Western
biomedicine “encourages people to fight disease rather
than to make the changes necessary to prevent it,” for
example, by linking low birth weight in newborn babies
to poor nutrition, but failing to note that poor nutri-
tion “may be a major health factor among impoverished
social classes and oppressed ethnic groups in developed
countries despite an abundance of food in society gen-
erally” (Singer 1998, 106, 109).
The Uses of Anthropology
Why take a course in anthropology? An immediate
answer might be that human fossils or broken bits of
ancient pots or the customs of faraway peoples inspire
a fascination that is its own reward. But the experience
of being dazzled by seemingly exotic places and peoples
carries with it a risk. As you become increasingly aware
of the range of anthropological data, including the many
options that exist for living a satisfying human life, you
may find yourself wondering about the life you are living.
Contact with the unfamiliar can be liberating, but it can
Chapter Summary
1. Anthropology aims to describe in the broadest
sense what it means to be human. The anthropo-
logical perspective is holistic, comparative, and
evolutionary and has relied on the concept of
culture to explain the diversity of human ways of life.
Human beings depend on cultural learning for suc-
cessful biological survival and reproduction, which
is why anthropologists consider human beings to
be biocultural organisms. Anthropology is also a
field-based discipline. In North America today,
anthropology is considered to have four major
subfields: biological anthropology, archaeology,
cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology;
lav32563_ch01_001-022.indd 19
Engaging learning tools. Chapter outlines, marginal definitions of key terms, chapter summaries, questions for review,
a glossary, and additional online content help students synthesize concepts and offer avenues for further exploration.
• How Are World Views Used as Instruments
of Power?
• Why Study Anthropology?
• Chapter Summary
• For Review
• Key Terms
• References
02/21/20 04:01 PM
What Is Anthropology?
also be threatening if it undermines your confidence in
the absolute truth and universal rightness of your previ-
ous understanding of the way the world works.
The contemporary world is increasingly inter-
connected. As people from different cultural back-
grounds come into contact with one another, learning
to cope with cultural differences becomes crucial.
Anthropologists experience both the rewards and the
risks of getting to know how other people live, and their
work has helped to dispel many harmful stereotypes
that sometimes make cross-cultural contact dangerous
or impossible. Studying anthropology may help prepare
you for some of the shocks you will encounter in deal-
ing with people who look different from you, speak a
different language, or do not agree that the world works
exactly the way you think it does.
Anthropology involves learning about the kinds of
living organisms we human beings are, the various ways
we live our lives, and how we make sense of our experi-
ences. Studying anthropology can equip you to deal with
people with different cultural backgrounds in a less threat-
ened, more tolerant manner. You may never be called on
to eat termite paste. Still, you may one day encounter a
situation in which none of the old rules seem to apply. As
you struggle to make sense of what is happening, what you
learned in anthropology class may help you relax and dare
to try something totally new to you. If you do so, perhaps
you too will discover the rewards of an encounter with the
unfamiliar that is at the same time unaccountably famil-
iar. We hope you will savour the experience.
many people also consider applied anthropology
to be a fifth major subfield.
2. Biological anthropology began as an attempt
to classify all the world’s populations into dif-
ferent races. By the early twentieth century,
however, most anthropologists had rejected
racial classifications as scientifically unjustifiable
and objected to the ways in which racial classi-
fications were used to justify the social prac-
tice of racism. Contemporary anthropologists
who are interested in human biology include
biological anthropologists, primatologists, and
paleoanthropologists.
02/21/20 03:08 PM
270 Anthropology: What Does It Mean to Be Human?
matrilineage belonging to either the Raven or the Eagle
k’waalaa (clan). Strong feelings of reciprocity and social
responsibility exist between the Ravens and the Eagles, and
membership in a particular matrilineage and its k’waalaa
shapes individuals’ identities as well as social relationships
(Krmpotich 2010). The Haida use matrilineal identity to
navigate such matters as their participation in potlatches,
their use of property, whom they should marry, their social
status, and whom they can ask for economic support.
A Haida matrilineage can be thought of as a broad
network of families linked through ancestry, property,
and common social responsibilities. The most closely re-
lated members of a matrilineage tend to share the strongest
bonds, which are based on love, friendship, history, obli-
gations, shared work, and commitment. Indeed, matrilin-
eal kin form the basis of each person’s sense of family, and
they play integral roles in major life events—for example,
by leading rites of passage; by preparing feasts, potlatches,
weddings, and other celebrations; and by mourning the
deceased (Krmpotich 2010, 162). At the same time, indi-
viduals are generally encouraged to marry outside of their
k’waalaa, a practice that facilitates non-matrilineal kin-
ship bonds (e.g., between children and fathers).
Haida often wear crests to represent the matrilin-
eage to which they belong. The designs of these crests
are owned and inherited by members of the k’waalaa
to which they correspond, and they can be painted or
embroidered onto garments and even tattooed onto
a person (Figure 12.5). These material expressions
Photo by Ann Johansson/Corbis via Getty Images
FIGURE 12.5 Haida use crests to physically represent the
matrilineages to which they belong. Here, canoe paddles
painted with family crests are stored in a longhouse on
Graham Island, part of the Queen Charlotte Islands, in British
Columbia.
lav32563_ch12_257-294.indd 270
19 132 Anthropology: What Does It Mean to Be Human?
5. Choose and defend one of the proposed
explanations for the extinction of Neanderthals.
Explain why you chose this hypothesis. Refer to April
Nowell’s hypothesis regarding play in your answer.
6. How do archaeology and biological anthropology
contribute to our understanding of the evolution of
a modern human capacity for culture?
Key Terms
African hybridization and blades 123
replacement model 115 composite tools 123
anatomically modern human Denisovans 122
beings 120 Late Stone Age (LSA) 123
archaic Homo sapiens 113 Middle Stone Age (MSA) 119
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Publisher’s Preface xix
perpetuate a sense of be-
See Chapter 16, pp. 390–1,
longing and continuity for a discussion of rites of
of family and lineages. passage.
A significant factor in
Haida kinship is the relationships between the living
and the dead. Ancestors are often considered as guides
for the living, providing opportunities and compan-
ionship. The recently deceased often accompany a rela-
tive for days or months after their death. Thus, kinship
relationships are not only part of the living world; they
transcend into the past, solidifying the matrilineal ties
among the Haida (Krmpotich 2010, 163).
Kinship Terminologies
People everywhere use special terms to refer to people
they recognize as related to them. Despite the variety of
kinship systems in the world, anthropologists have iden-
tified six major patterns of kinship terminology based
on how people categorize their cousins. The six patterns
reflect common solutions to structural problems faced
by societies organized in terms of kinship. Kinship ter-
minologies suggest both the external boundaries and the
internal divisions of kinship groups, and they outline the
structure of rights and obligations assigned to different
members of the society. They also provide clues about
how the vast and undifferentiated world of potential re-
lations may be divided.
What Criteria Are Used for Making
Kinship Distinctions?
Anthropologists have identified several criteria that
people use to indicate how people are related to one an-
other. See Table 12.1 for a list of the most common to the
least common criteria.
By the early 1950s, kinship specialists in anthropol-
ogy had identified six major patterns of kinship termin-
ology, based on how cousins were classified. In recent
years, however, anthropologists have become quite
skeptical of the value of these idealized models, in large
measure because they are highly formalized, neglect all
kin categories except cousins, and fail to consider the
full range of people’s actual kinship practices. Perhaps
the main value to come from formal kinship studies is
the fact that they took seriously the ways other people
classified their relatives and were able to display the logic
that informed such classifications.
02/21/20 03:47 PM
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logical anthropologists, and others use to iden-
tify when the first people arrived in the Americas
and who these people were. Are there any con-
tradictions between different sets of data?
Explain.
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Neanderthals 116
regional continuity model 115
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Vandermeersch. 1993. “Cannibals among the Neanderthals?”
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Udo Stenzel, Martin Kircher, Nick Patterson, et al. 2010. “A Draft
Sequence of the Neandertal Genome.” Science 328 (5979): 710–22.
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Milton, J. Zilhão, J.J. Alcolea-González, et al. 2018. “U-Th Dating of
Carbonate Crusts Reveals Neandertal Origin of Iberian Cave Art.”
Science 359 (6378): 912–15. doi:10.1126/science.aap7778
Hublin, Jean-Jacques, Fred Spoor, Marc Braun, Frans Zonneveld,
and Silvana Condemi. 1996. “A Late Neanderthal Associated with
Upper Palaeolithic Artifacts.” Nature 381: 224–6.
Hublin, Jean-Jacques, Abdelouahed Ben-Ncer, Shara E. Bailey, Sarah
E. Freidline, Simon Neubauer, Matthew M. Skinner, et al. 2017. “New
Fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the Pan-African Origin
of Homo sapiens.” Nature 546: 289–92. |
Klein, Richard G. 2009. The Human Career: Human Biological and
Cultural Origins. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Krings, Matthias, Anne Stone, Ralf W. Schmitz, Heike Krainitzki, and
Mark Stoneking. 1997. “Neandertal DNA Sequences and the Origin
of Modern Humans.” Cell 90: 19–30.
Krings, Matthias, Helga Geisart, Ralf W. Schmitz, Heike Krainitzki,
and Svante Pääbo. 1999. “ DNA Sequence of the Mitochondrial
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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 95: 5581–5.
02/21/20 03:21 PM
xx Publisher’s Preface

A Full Complement of Ancillaries

This text is supported by an array of supplementary resources, for both students and instructors,
designed to enrich the learning experience. The companion websites for the second edition of
Anthropology can be found at www.oup.com/he/Lavenda2Ce

For the Student

• Student study guide. An extensive package of review material—including chapter outlines, key
points, and multiple choice, true/false, and essay questions, as well as lists of relevant readings,
websites, films, and video links—is designed to reinforce and enhance student learning.

For the Instructor

• Instructor’s manual. This comprehensive resource features chapter summaries, questions for dis-
cussion and debate, suggested activities and assignments, and lists of suggested readings, web
links, and films.
• PowerPoint slides. Dynamic lecture slides summarize key points from each chapter and incorpor-
ate figures and tables from the text.
• Image bank. This expansive resource contains a wealth of full-colour figures, photographs, and
tables that will make classroom lectures engaging and relevant for students.
• Test generator. A comprehensive bank of test questions provides hundreds of multiple-choice,
true/false, and short-answer questions.

Boxes
“Anthropology in Everyday Life” Boxes
Language Revitalization: What Can We Learn from
Conlang Communities? 13
Anthropology and Indigenous Rights 37
Orangutan Conservation in Borneo 77
Why Do Female Humans Experience Menopause? 80
Examining the Remains of Richard III 150
Archaeogaming: Video Games and Archaeology 164
Archaeology as a Tool of Civic Engagement 177
Resistance in the Face of Assimilation 304
“Anthropology in Everyday Life” boxes. A range of fascinating examples and cases help students see the many ways
in which anthropology is relevant today.
“In Their Own Words” Boxes
Anthropology as a Vocation 6
Birth Places, Embodied Spaces: Tlicho Pregnancy
Stories across Generations 17
The Nature/Culture of Genetic Facts 27
The Paradox of Ethnocentrism 32
Culture: The Silent Language Geneticists
Must Learn 58
Science, Democracy, and Taiwanese Stem Cells 62
Finding Fossils 98
Growing Up Fast: Young Neanderthals Had No Time
for Imaginary “What If?” Games 117
Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį (“Long Ago Person Found”):
Disease and Lineage 160
GIS and Métis Settlement 162
The Food Revolution 202
Treating Your Food Good: Changing Natures and
Economies in the Northwest Territories 223
Making a Living: Place, Food, and Economy in an Inuit
Community 225
Fake Masks and Faux Modernity 229
The Consequences of Being a Woman 241
“In Their Own Words” boxes. Short commentaries capture diverse voices—including those of anthropologists, non-
anthropologists, and Indigenous peoples—providing students with fresh perspectives on interesting topics related to
chapter content.
Publisher’s Preface xxi
Human Terrain Teams and Anthropological
Ethics 320
Diverse Experiences with Intimate Relationships
and Dating among South Asian Youth in the
Greater Toronto Area 341
Indigenous Language Revitalization 368
Language Preservation in Baie Sainte-Marie:
Acadajonne ou Français? 374
Archaeology of Childhood 380
Survival and a Surrogate Family 260
Mayan Queens: Rulers and Warriors 266
Two Cheers for Gay Marriage 277
Marriage in Canada: The Evolution of a Fundamental
Social Institution 279
Law, Custom, and Crimes against Women 283
Idle No More: Giving a Voice to the Voiceless 306
Caste and Class in Contemporary India 331
Racism, Colonialism, and Indigeneity in Canada 332
Racialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds: Storied Lives of
Immigrant Muslim Women 336
The Politics of Ethnicity 338
The “Clinton Cackle”: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s
Laughter in News Interviews 359
Borrowed Words, Mock Language, and Nationalism in
Canada 370
Revitalizing Indigenous Languages in the Urban
Amazon 372
The Importance of Context in Mi’kmaq
World Views 400
Custom and Confrontation 402
xxii Publisher’s Preface

EthnoProfile Boxes

2.1 Tswana 29 12.2 Nuer 267 14.2 Guider 337

8.1 Champagne and Aishihik 12.3 Haida 269 15.1 Java 361
First Nations (CAFN) 159 12.4 Inuit (Nunavut) 272 16.1 Margi 383
10.1 Ju/’hoansi (!Kung) 215 12.5 Nyinba 281 16.2 Trobriand Islanders 388
10.2 Nootka (Nuu-chah-nulth) 12.6 Mende 286 16.3 Yoruba 392
219 12.7 Inuit (Alaska) 287 16.4 Dinka 393
10.3 Dene 222 12.8 Los Pinos 289 16.5 Huichol 395
11.1 Mount Hagen 237 13.1 “Sedaka” Village 301 16.6 Azande 397
11.2 Haiti 242 13.2 Fiji 308 16.7 Mi’kmaq 399
11.3 Mombasa Swahilis 250 13.3 Rione Monti (Rome) 314 16.8 Kwaio 401
12.1 Tiv 267 14.1 Gopalpur 329

EthnoProfiles. Brief overviews of geographic, linguistic, demographic, and organizational information offer students
context regarding various societies discussed in the text.
▲ Anthropologists study artifacts to learn about the human past. This ceramic shard found at an early nineteenth-­century
site in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada, can help paint a picture of the local economy in the region at that time.
Photo by Brittney Richardson

What Is Anthropology?

Chapter Outline
• What Is Anthropology? • Applied Anthropology
• What Is the Concept of Culture? • Medical Anthropology
• What Makes Anthropology a Cross-Disciplinary • The Uses of Anthropology
Discipline? • Chapter Summary
• Biological Anthropology • For Review
• Cultural Anthropology • Key Terms
• Linguistic Anthropology • References
• Archaeology
2 Anthropology: What Does It Mean to Be Human?
T his chapter introduces the field of anthropology. We look at what anthropology is and
­explore its four main subfields: biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, linguistic
anthropology, and archaeology. We touch on anthropology’s key concept—culture—as well as
its key research method—fieldwork. We conclude with a discussion of the ways anthropological
insights are relevant in everyday life.
In early 1976, two of the authors of this book (Robert H.
Lavenda and Emily A. Schultz) travelled to northern
Cameroon, in western Africa, to study social relations
in the town of Guider, where they rented a small house.
In the first weeks they lived there, Lavenda and Schultz
enjoyed spending the warm evenings of the dry season
reading and writing in the glow of the house’s brightest
electric fixture, which illuminated a large, unscreened
veranda. After a short time, however, the rains began,
and with them appeared swarms of winged termites.
These slow-moving insects with fat, two-inch abdomens
were attracted to the light on the veranda, and the an-
thropologists soon found themselves spending more
time swatting at the insects than reading or writing. One
evening, in a fit of desperation, they rolled up old copies
of the international edition of Newsweek and began an
all-out assault, determined to rid the veranda of every
single termite.
The rent Lavenda and Schultz paid for this house
included the services of a night watchman. As they
launched their attack on the termites, the night watch-
man suddenly appeared beside the veranda carrying an
empty powdered milk tin. When he asked if he could
have the insects they had been killing, Lavenda and
Schultz were a bit taken aback but warmly invited him
to help himself. He moved onto the veranda, quickly
­collected the corpses of fallen insects, and then joined
the anthropologists in going after those termites that
were still a­irborne. Although Lavenda and Schultz
became skilled at thwacking the insects with their
rolled-up magazines, their skills paled beside those of
the night watchman, who simply snatched the termites
out of the air with his hand, squeezed them gently, and
dropped them into his rapidly filling tin can. The three
individuals managed to clear the air of insects—and
fill the night watchman’s tin—in about 10 minutes. The
night watchman thanked Lavenda and Schultz and re-
turned to his post, and the anthropologists returned to
their books.
The following evening, soon after Lavenda and
Schultz took up their usual places on the veranda, the
watchman appeared at the steps bearing a tray with two
covered dishes. He explained that his wife had prepared
the food for them in exchange for their help in collecting
termites. The anthropologists accepted the food and care-
fully lifted the lids. One dish contained nyiri, a stiff paste
made of red sorghum, a staple of the local diet. The other
dish contained another pasty substance with a speckled,
salt-and-pepper appearance, which Lavenda and Schultz
realized was termite paste prepared from the insects they
and the watchman had killed the previous night.
The night watchman waited at the foot of the ver-
anda steps, an expectant smile on his face. Clearly, he
did not intend to leave until the others tasted the food
his wife had prepared. Lavenda and Schultz looked at
each other. They had never eaten insects before, nor had
they considered them edible in the North American,
­middle-class diet they were used to. To be sure, “deli-
cacies” like c­hocolate-covered ants existed, but such
items were considered by most North Americans to be
food fit only for eccentrics. However, the anthropolo-
gists understood the importance of not insulting the
night watchman and his wife, who were being so gen-
erous. They knew that insects were a favoured food in
many human societies and that eating them brought no
ill effects (Figure 1.1). So, they reached into the dish of
nyiri, pulling off a small amount. They then used the
ball of nyiri to scoop up a small portion of termite paste,
brought the mixture to their mouths, ate, chewed, and
swallowed. The watchman beamed, bid them good night,
and returned to his post.
Lavenda and Schultz looked at each other in wonder.
The sorghum paste had a grainy tang that was rather
pleasant. The termite paste tasted mild, like chicken,
not unpleasant at all. The anthropologists later wrote to
their families about this experience. When their families
wrote back, they described how they had told friends
about Lavenda and Schultz’s experience. Most of their
Another random document with
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 CHAPTER TWENTY
“THAT CAT AIN’T HUMAN!”
Monty rode rather anxiously into Johnnywater Cañon, determined
to take whatever means he found necessary to persuade Gary to
return to Los Angeles and “make it up with his girl.” With three
weeks’ wages in his pocket Monty felt sufficiently affluent to buy the
pigs and chickens if Gary used them for a point in his argument
against going.
Monty had spent a lot of time during those three weeks in mulling
over in his mind the peculiar chain of circumstances that had
dragged Gary to Johnnywater. What bond it was that held him there,
Monty would have given much to know. He was sure that Gary
disliked the place, and that he hated to stay there alone. It seemed
unreasonable that any normal young man would punish himself like
that from sheer stubbornness; yet Gary would have had Monty
believe that he was staying to spite Patricia.
Monty did not believe it. Gary had shown himself to be too
intelligent, too level-headed and safely humorous in his viewpoints to
harbor that peculiar form of egotism. Monty was shrewd enough to
recognize the fact that “cutting off the nose to spite the face” is a
sport indulged in only by weak natures who own an exaggerated
ego. Wherefore, Gary failed to convince him that he was of that type
of individual.
At the same time, he could think of no other reason that could
possibly hold a man like Gary Marshall at Johnnywater. Monty had a
good memory for details. Certain trivial incidents he remembered
vividly: Gary’s stealthy approach around the corner of the cabin with
the upraised pitchfork in his hands; Gary’s forced gayety afterwards,
and the strained look in his eyes—the lines beside the mouth; Gary’s
reluctance to speak of the uncanny, nameless something that clung
to Johnnywater Cañon; the incomprehensible behavior of the spotted
cat. And always Monty brought up short with a question which he
asked himself but could not answer.
Why had Gary Marshall described Steven Carson—who had
dropped from sight of mortal eyes five years and more ago?—why
had Gary described Steve Carson and asked if that description fitted
Waddell?
“Gary never saw Steve Carson—not when he was alive, anyway.
He says the Indians never told him how Steve looked. I reckon he
really thought Waddell was that kind uh lookin’ man. But how in
thunder did he get the idea?” Monty frequently found himself
mentally asking that question, but he never attempted to put an
answer into words. He couldn’t. He didn’t know the answer.
So here he was, peering anxiously at the cabin squatted between
the two great piñon trees in the grove and hoping that Gary was still
all right. He had consciously put aside an incipient dread of James
Blaine Hawkins and his possible vengefulness toward Gary. Monty
told himself that there was no use in crossing that bridge until he
came to it. He had come over for the express purpose of offering to
take the Walking X cattle on shares and look after them with his own.
He would manage somehow to take charge of the pigs and chickens
as well. He decided that he could kill the pigs and pack the meat
over on his horse. And he could carry the chickens on a pack horse
in a couple of crates. There would be nothing then to give Gary any
excuse for staying.
Remembering how he had startled Gary before with calling, Monty
did not dismount at the cabin. Instead, he rode close to the front
window, leaned and peered in like an Indian; and finding the cabin
empty, he went on through the grove to the corral. Jazz was there,
standing hip-shot in a shady corner next the creek, his head nodding
jerkily while he dozed. Monty’s horse whinnied a greeting and Jazz
awoke with a start and came trotting across the corral to slide his
nose over the top rail nearest them.
Monty rode on past the potato patch and the alfalfa meadow
where a second crop was already growing apace. There was no sign
of Gary, and Monty rode on to the very head of the cañon and back
to the cabin.
 A vague uneasiness seized Monty in spite of his efforts to throw it
off. Gary should be somewhere in the cañon, since he would not
leave it afoot, not while he had a horse doing nothing in the corral. Of
course, if anything were wrong with Jazz——Monty turned and rode
back to the corral, where he dismounted by the gate. He went in and
walked up to Jazz, and examined him with the practiced palms of the
expert horseman. He slapped Jazz on the rump and shooed him
around the corral at a lope.
“There ain’t a thing in the world the matter with you,” he told the
horse, after a watchful minute or two. Then he rolled a cigarette,
lighted and smoked it while he waited and meditated upon the
probable whereabouts of Gary.
He went out into the open and studied the steep bluff sides, foot
by foot. The entire width of the cañon was no more than a long rifle-
shot. If Gary were climbing anywhere along its sides, Monty would
be able to see him. But there was no sign of movement anywhere,
though he took half an hour for the examination.
He returned to the cabin, leaving his horse in the corral with
saddle and bridle off and a forkful of hay under his eager nose. He
shouted Gary’s name.
“Hey, Gary! Oh-h-h, Gary!” he called, over and over, careful to
enunciate the words.
From high up on the bluff somewhere the Voice answered him
mockingly, shouting again and again a monotonous, eerie call. There
was no other sound for a time, and Monty went into the cabin to see
if he could find there some clue to Gary’s absence.
Little things bear a message plain as print to those dwellers of the
wilderness who depend much upon their eyes and their ears. The
cabin told Monty with absolute certainty that Gary had not planned
an absence of more than a few hours at most. Nor had he left in any
great haste. He had been gone, Monty judged, since breakfast. Of
the cooked food set away in the cupboard, two pancakes lay on top
of a plate containing three slices of fried bacon. To Monty that meant
breakfast cleared away and no later meal prepared. He looked at his
watch. He had taken an early start from Kawich, and it was now two
o’clock.
 He lifted the lid of the stove and reached in, feeling the ashes.
There had been no fire since morning; he was sure of that. He stood
in the middle of the room and studied the whole interior
questioningly. Gary’s good clothes—which were not nearly so good
as they had been when Monty first saw him—hung against the wall
farthest from the stove, the coat neatly spread over a makeshift
hanger. Gary’s good hat was in the cupboard nailed to the wall. A
corner of his suit case protruded from under the bunk. Gary was in
the rough clothes he had gleaned from Waddell’s leavings.
Monty could not find any canteen, but that told him nothing at all.
He could not remember whether Waddell had canteens or not. The
vague uneasiness which he had at first smothered under his natural
optimism grew to a definite anxiety. He knew the ways of the desert.
And he could think of no plausible reason why Gary should have left
the cañon afoot.
He went out and began looking for tracks. The dry soil still held
the imprint of automobile tires, but it was impossible to tell just how
long ago they had been made. Several days, at least, he judged
after a careful inspection. He heard a noise in the bushes across the
little creek and turned that way expectantly.
The spotted cat came out of the brush, jumped the tiny stream
and approached him, meowing dolefully. Monty stood stock still,
watching her advance. She came directly toward him, her tail
drooping and waving nervously from side to side. She looked straight
up into his face and yowled four or five times without stopping.
“Get out, damn yuh!” cried Monty and motioned threateningly with
his foot. “Yuh can’t stand there and yowl at me—I got enough on my
mind right now.”
The mottled cat ducked and started back to the creek, stopping
now and then to look over her shoulder and yowl at Monty. Monty
picked up a pebble and shied it after her. The cat gave a final squall
and ran into a clump of bushes a few yards up-stream from where
Monty had first seen her.
“That damned cat ain’t human!” Monty ejaculated uncomfortably.
“That’s the way she yowled around when Steve Carson——” He
lifted his shoulders impatiently at the thought.
 After a minute or two spent in resisting the impulse, Monty yielded
and started out to see where the cat had gone. Beyond the clump of
bushes lay an open space along the bank of the creek. On the
farther side he saw the mottled cat picking her way through weeds
and small bushes, still going up the creek and yowling mournfully as
she went. Monty walked slowly after her. He noticed, while he was
crossing the open space, a man’s footprints going that way and
another set coming back. The soil was too loose to hold a clear
imprint, so that Monty could not tell whose tracks they were; though
he believed them to have been made by Gary.
The cat looked back and yowled at Monty, then went on. At a
point nearly opposite the potato patch the cat stopped near a bushy
little juniper tree that stood by itself where the creek bank rounded
up to a tiny knoll. As Monty neared the spot the cat leaped behind
the juniper and disappeared.
Monty went closer, stopped with a jerk and stood staring. He felt
his knees quiver with a distinct tendency to buckle under him. The
blood seeped slowly away from his face, leaving it sallow under the
tan.
Monty was standing at the very edge of a narrow mound of earth
that still bore the marks of a shovel where the mound had been
smoothed and patted into symmetrical form. A grave, the length of a
man.
Here again were the blurred footprints in the loose soil. Who had
made them, what lay buried beneath that narrow ridge of heaped
sand, Monty shrank from conjecturing.
With an involuntary movement, of which Monty was wholly
unconscious, his right hand went up to his hat brim. He stood there
for a space without moving. Then he turned and almost ran to the
corral. It was not until he reached to open the gate that Monty
discovered his hat in his hand.
He was thinking swiftly now, holding his thoughts rigidly to the
details of what he must do. The name Hawkins obtruded itself
frequently upon his mind, but he pushed the thought of Hawkins from
him. Beyond the details of his own part, which he knew he must play
unfalteringly from now on, he would not think—he could not bear to
think. He saddled Jazz, mounted and led his own horse down to the
cabin. Working swiftly, he packed a few blankets, food for three days
and his own refilled canteens upon the led horse.
Then with a last shrinking glance around the cañon walls, he
mounted Jazz. He remembered then something that he must do,
something that Gary would wish to have him do. He rode back to the
stone pen and opened the gate so that the pigs could run free and
look after themselves.
He remounted, then half-turned in the saddle and took up the
slack in the lead rope, got the led horse straightened out behind him
and kicked Jazz into a trot. In his mental stress he loped the horses
all the way down to the cañon’s mouth. And then, striking into the
dim trail, he went racking away over the small ridges and into the
hollows, heading straight for the road most likely to be traveled in
this big, empty land; the road that stretched its long, long miles
between Goldfield and Las Vegas.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
GARY FOLLOWS THE PINTO CAT
Gary had prospected pretty thoroughly the whole cañon, following
the theory that some one—he felt that it was probably Steve Carson
—had carried that rich, gold-bearing rock down to the cabin. Waddell
had left neither chemicals nor appliances by which he could test any
of the mineralized rock he found; but Gary was looking for one
particular kind, the porphyry that carried free gold.
Greater than the loneliness, stronger than his dread of the cañon
and the cabin, was his desire to find more of that gold-bearing rock.
It would not take much of it to make Pat’s investment in Johnnywater
more than profitable. He even climbed to the top of the butte—a
heart-breaking effort accomplished at the risk of his neck on the
sheer wall of the rim rock. There was no means of knowing just
where that porphyry had come from. In some prehistoric eruption it
might have been thrown for miles, though Gary did not believe that it
had been. The top of the bluff gave no clue whatever. Malapi
bowlders strewed much of the surface with outcroppings of country
rock. Certainly there was no sign of mineral up there. He tramped
the butte for miles, however, and spent two days in doing it. Then,
satisfied that the porphyry must be somewhere in the cañon, he
renewed his search on the slope.
Prospecting here was quite as difficult, because so much of the
upper slopes was covered with an overburden of the malapi that
formed the rim rock. Portions of the rim would break and slide when
the storms beat upon it. Considerable areas of loose rock had
formed during the centuries of wear and tear, and if there had been
mineral outcroppings they were as effectually hidden as if they had
never come to the surface at all. But a strain of persistence which
Gary had inherited from pioneering forebears held him somewhat
doggedly to the search.
 He reasoned that he had more time than he knew what to do with,
and if a fortune were hidden away in this cañon, it would be
inexcusable for him to mope through the days without making any
systematic effort to find it. Patricia deserved the best fortune the
world had to bestow. To find one for her would, he told himself
whimsically, wipe out the stain of owning a profile and a natural
marcel wave over his temples. Pat might possibly forgive even his
painted eyebrows and painted lashes and painted lips, if he found
her a gold mine.
So he tramped and scrambled and climbed from one end of the
cañon walls to the other, and would not hint to Monty Girard what it
was that held him in Johnnywater Cañon. He would not even put his
hopes on paper in the long, lonely evenings when he wrote to
Patricia. After the jibing letter concerning the millions she might have
if she owned a mine as rich as the rock he had found behind the
cabin, Gary had not put his search into words even when he talked
to Faith.
He found himself thinking more and more about Steve Carson.
The weak-souled Waddell he had come practically to ignore.
Waddell had left no impress upon the cañon, at least, so far as Gary
was concerned. And that in spite of the fact that he was walking
about in Waddell’s boots and trousers, wearing Waddell’s hat,
tending Waddell’s pigs. Walking in Waddell’s boots, Gary wondered
about Steve Carson, speculated upon his life and his hopes and the
things he had put away in his past when he came to Johnnywater to
live alone, wholly apart from his fellows. Steve Carson’s hands had
built the cabin between the two piñons. Steve Carson—Gary did not
attempt any explanation of why he knew it was so—had brought the
gold-bearing rock to the cabin. A prospector of sorts, he must have
been, to have found gold-bearing rock in that cañon.
It was during the forenoon after Gary had returned from Kawich
that he obeyed a sudden, inexplicable impulse to follow Faith, the
mottled cat.
Ever since Gary had come to Johnnywater he had seen Faith go
off across the creek after breakfast. Usually she returned in the
course of three or four hours, and frequently she brought some small
rodent or a bird home with her. Gary had been faintly amused by the
pinto cat’s regular hours and settled habits of living. He used to
compliment her upon her decorous behavior, stroking her back while
she purred on his knee, her paws tucked snugly close to her body.
On this morning Gary rose abruptly from the doorstep, and,
bareheaded, he followed Faith across the creek and up the bluff. It
was hot climbing, but Gary did not think about the heat. Indeed, he
was not consciously thinking of anything much. He was simply
following Faith up the bluff, because he had got up from the doorstep
to follow Faith.
Faith climbed up and up quite as if she knew exactly where she
was going. Gary, stopping once on a bowlder to breathe for a minute
after an unusually stiff bit of climbing, saw the cat look up in the
queer way she had of doing. In a minute she went on and Gary
followed.
It began to look as if Faith meant to climb to the top of the butte.
She made her way around the lower edge of a slide, went out of
sight into a narrow gulch which Gary, with all his prospecting had
never noticed before—or at least had never entered—and
reappeared farther up, just under the rim rock where many slides
had evidently had their birth. For the first time since he had left the
cabin, the cat looked back at Gary, gave an amiable mew and waited
a minute before she started on.
Gary hesitated. He was thirsty, and the rapid climb was beginning
to tell on him. He looked back down the bluff to the cool green of the
grove, and for the first time wondered why he had been such a fool
as to follow a cat away up here on a hunting trip in which he could
not possibly take any active interest or part. He told himself what a
fool he was and said he must be getting goofy himself. But when he
moved it was upward, after the cat.
He brought up at the foot of a high ledge seamed and cracked as
one would never suspect, looking up from below. It was up here
somewhere that the Voice always seemed to be located. He stopped
and listened, but the whole cañon lay in a somnolent calm under the
mounting sun. It looked as if nothing could disturb it; as if there never
could be a Voice other than the everyday voices of men. While he
stood there wiping his forehead and panting with the heat and the
labor of climbing, the red rooster down in the grove began to crow
lustily. The sound came faintly up to Gary, linking him lightly to
commonplace affairs.
A little distance away the cat had curled herself down in a tiny
hollow at the edge of the slide. Gary made his way over to her. She
opened one eye and regarded him sleepily, gave a lazy purr or two
and settled herself again more comfortably. Gary saw, from certain
small scratchings in the gravel, that the pinto cat had made this little
nest for herself. She had not been hunting at all. She had come to a
spot with which she was very familiar.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE PAT CONNOLLY MINE
Gary decided offhand that he had been neatly sold. He sat down
on the loose rubble near Faith and made himself a smoke. The
grove and the cabin were hidden from him by the narrow little ridge
that looked perfectly smooth from the cañon bottom. But the rest of
the cañon—the corral, the potato patch, the alfalfa—lay blocked out
in miniature far below him. He stared down upon the peaceful picture
it made and wondered why he had climbed all the way up here just
following the pinto cat. For the matter of that, his following the cat
was not half so purposeless as the cat’s coming had been.
He looked down at her curled asleep in her little hollow. It struck
him that this must have been her destination each time she crossed
the creek and started up the bluff. But why should the cat come
away up here every day? Gary did not attempt to explain the
vagaries of a cat so eccentric as Faith had proved herself to be. He
wondered idly if he were becoming eccentric also, just from constant
association with Faith.
He laughed a little to himself and picked up a piece of malapi rock;
balanced it in his hand while he thought of other things, and tossed it
down the slide. It landed ten feet below him and began rolling farther,
carrying with it a small avalanche of loose rocks. Gary watched the
slide with languid interest. Even so small a thing could make a tiny
ripple in the dead calm of the cañon that day.
The slide started by that one rock spread farther. Other rocks
loosened and went rolling down the bluff, and Gary’s eyes followed
them and went higher, watching to see where next a rock would slip
away from the mass and go rolling down. It seemed to him that the
whole slide might be easily set in motion with no more than a kick or
two at the top. He got up and began to experiment, kicking a rock
loose here and there. There was no danger to himself, since he
stood at the top of the slide. As for Faith, she had sprung up in a
furry arch at the first slithering clatter and was now viewing the scene
with extreme disfavor from the secure vantage point of a shelf on the
ledge above Gary.
In a very few minutes Gary had set the whole surface of the slide
in motion. The noise it made pleased him immensely. It served to
break that waiting silence in the cañon. When the rocks ceased
rolling, he started others. Finally he found himself standing upon firm
ground again, with an outcropping of gray quartz just below him. His
eyes fixed themselves upon the quartz in a steady stare before he
dug heels into the slope and edged down to it.
With a malapi rock bigger than his two fists he hammered off a
piece of quartz and held it in the shade of his body while he
examined it closely. He turned it this way and that, fearful of
deceiving himself by the very strength of his desire. But all the while
he knew what were those little yellow specks that gleamed in the
shade.
He knelt and pounded off other pieces of the quartz and
compared them anxiously with the first. They were all identical in
character: steel gray, with here and there the specks of gold in the
gray, and the chocolate brown streaks and splotches of hematite—
the “red oxide” iron which runs as high as seventy per cent. iron.
Hematite and free gold in gray quartz——
“A prettier combination for free gold I couldn’t have made to
order!” he whispered, almost as if he were praying. “It’s good enough
for my girl’s ‘million-dollar mine’—though they do get rich off a piece
of gold float in the movies!” He began to laugh nervously. A weaker-
souled man would probably have wept instead.
With the side of his foot he tore away the rubble from the quartz
outcropping. There, just where he had been kneeling, he discovered
a narrow vein of the bird’s-eye porphyry such as he had found at the
cabin. Here, then, lay the object of all his tiresome prospecting. So
far as he could judge, with only his hands and feet for digging, the
vein averaged about eight inches in width. Whether the porphyry
formed a wall for the quartz he could not tell at the surface; but he
hoped fervently that it did. With hematite, gray quartz and bird’s-eye
porphyry he would have the ideal combination for a rich, permanent
gold mine. And Pat, he reflected breathlessly, might really have her
millions after all.
He picked up what he believed to be average samples of the vein
and started back down the bluff, his imagination building air castles,
mostly for Patricia. If he dramatized the event and cast himself for
the leading man playing opposite Patricia, who was the star, surely
he had earned the right to paint rose tints across the veil that hid his
future and hers.
He had forgotten all about the cat; but when he reached the cabin,
there she was at his heels looking extremely self-satisfied and
waving her tail with a gentle air of importance. Gary laid his ore
samples on the table and stood with his hands on his hips, looking
down at Faith with a peculiar expression in his eyes. Suddenly he
smiled endearingly at the cat, stooped and picked her up, holding
her by his two hands so that he could look into her eyes.
“Doggone you, Faith, I wish to heck you could talk! I wouldn’t put it
past you to think like humans. I’ll bet you’ve been trying all along to
show me that outcropping. And I thought you were hunting mice and
birds and gophers just like a plain, ordinary cat! You can’t tell me—
you knew all about that gold! I’ll bet you’ve got a name all picked out
for the mine, too. But it won’t go, I’ll tell a meddlesome world. That is,
unless you’ve decided it ought to be called ‘The Pat Connolly.’
Because that’s the way it’s going on record, if Handsome Gary has
anything to say about it—and I rather think he has!”
Faith blinked at him and mewed understandingly. Gary wooled her
a bit and put her down, considerately smoothing down the fur he had
roughed. Faith was a forgiving cat, and she immediately began
purring under his fingers. After that she tagged him indefatigably
while he got mortar, pestle and pan, and carried them down to a
shady spot beside the creek.
Gary’s glance strayed often to the bluff while he broke bits off
each sample of quartz and dropped them into the iron mortar. Then,
with the mortar held firmly between his knees, Gary picked up the
eight-inch length of iron with the round knob on the end and began to
pulverize the ore. For a full quarter of an hour the quiet air of the
grove throbbed to the steady pung, pung, pung, of the iron pestle
striking upon rock particles in the deep iron bowl.
 About twice in every minute, Gary would stop, dip thumb and
finger into the mortar, and bring up a pinch of pulverized rock at
which he would squint with the wholly unconscious eagerness of a
small boy. Naturally, since he was not flattening a nugget of solid
gold in the mortar, he failed to see anything except once when he
caught an unmistakable yellow gleam from a speck of gold almost
half the size of a small pinhead.
He gloated over that speck for a full minute before he shook it
carefully back into the mortar. And then you should have heard him
pound!
He was all aquiver with hope and eager expectancy when at last
he poured the pulverized quartz into the gold pan and went digging
his heels down the bank to the water. Faith came forward and stood
upon a dry rock, mewing and purring by turns, and waving her tail
encouragingly while she watched him.
Those who plod along the beaten trail toward commercial success
can scarcely apprehend the thrill of winning from nature herself the
symbol that promises fulfillment of hope and dreams coming true.
The ardency of Gary’s desire was measurable only by the depth of
his love for Patricia. For himself he had a man’s normal hunger for
achievement. To discover a gold mine here in Johnnywater Cañon,
to develop it in secret to the point where he could command what
capital he needed for the making of a real mine, that in itself seemed
to Gary a goal worth striving for. To fill Patricia’s hands with virgin
gold which he had found for her, there spoke the primitive desire of
man since the world was young; to bring the spoils of war or the
chase and lay them, proud offering of love, at the feet of his Woman.
Gary turned and tilted the pan, tenderly as a young mother
cradles her first-born. He dipped and rocked and spilled the water
carefully over the rim; dipped and rocked and tilted again. The three
deep creases stood between his straight, dark eyebrows, but now
they betokened eager concentration upon his work. At last, he
poured clear water from the pan carefully, almost drop by drop. He
tilted the pan slowly in the sunlight and bent his head, peering
sharply into the pan. His heart seemed to be beating in his throat
when he saw the trail of tiny yellow particles following sluggishly the
spoonful of black sand when he tilted the pan.
 “I’ve got it, Steve,” he exclaimed, looking up over his shoulder. He
caught his breath in the sudden realization that he was looking into
the empty sunlight. Absorbed as he had been in the gold, the felt
presence of Steve Carson looking over his shoulder had seemed
perfectly natural and altogether real.
The momentary shock sobered him. But the old dread of that felt
presence no longer assailed him as something he must combat by
feigning unconsciousness. The unreasoning impression that Steve
Carson—the mind of him—was there just behind his shoulder,
watching and sharing in his delight, persisted nevertheless. Gary
caught himself wondering if the thing was really only a prank of his
imagination. Feeling a bit foolish, but choosing to indulge the
whimsy, he stood up and turned deliberately, the pan held out before
him.
“Steve Carson, if dead people go on living and thinking, and if you
really are hanging around just out of sight but watching the game,
I’m here to say that I hope you’re glad I found this vein. And I want to
tell you right now that if there’s any money to be made out of it, it’s
going to the finest, squarest little girl in the world. So if there is such
a thing as a spirit, just take it from me everything’s going to be on the
square.”
He carried the pan up to the cabin and carefully rinsed the gold
down into a jelly glass. He made no apology to himself for the little
speech to a man dead and gone these five years. Having made
himself as clear on the subject as was diplomatic—supposing Steve
Carson’s spirit had been present and could hear—he felt a certain
relief and could lay the subject aside and devote himself to the
fascination of hunting the gold out of the hills where it had lain buried
for ages.
It occurred to him that he might find some particularly rich
specimens, mortar them by hand and pan them for Patricia. A
wedding ring made from the first gold taken and panned by hand—
the hand of Gary Marshall—from “The Pat Connolly” mine, appealed
to him irresistibly. Before he had mortared a lump of porphyry the
size of a pigeon’s egg, Gary had resolved to pan enough gold for
that very purpose. He pictured himself pulling the ring from his vest
pocket while the minister waited. He experienced a prophetic thrill of
ecstasy when he slipped the ring upon Patricia’s finger. The
dreamed sentence, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” intoned by
an imaginary minister, thrilled him to the soul.
Pung, pung, pung! It wouldn’t take so very long, if he mortared
rock evenings, say, instead of killing time minute by minute playing
solitaire with the deck of cards Waddell had thumbed before him.
Pung, pung, pung! He could mortar the quartz in the evenings and
pan it in the morning before he went to work. Pung, pung, pung,
pung! He would hunt up a cow’s horn and fix it as he had seen old
prospectors do, so that he could blow the sand from the panned gold
and carry it unmixed to the jeweler. Pung, pung! The porphyry
sample was fine as corn meal under the miniature stamp-mill of
Gary’s pounding.
He was mighty careful of that handful of pulp. He even dipped the
mortar half full of water and sloshed it round and round, pouring it
afterward into the pan to rinse out what gold may have stuck to the
iron. His finger tips stirred the wet mass caressingly in the pan,
muddying the water with the waste matter and pouring that out
before he squatted on his heels at the edge of the stream.
The result was gratifying in the extreme. Granting that the values
were inclined to “jump” from quartz to porphyry and back again to the
quartz, he would still lose none of the gold. He tried to be very
conservative in estimating the probable value of the vein. He knew
that, granting quartz and porphyry were in place from the surface
downward, the values should increase with depth. It would take
some digging, however, to determine that point. He was glad that
Patricia knew nothing at all about it. If there were to be
disappointment later on, he wanted to bear it alone. The joys of
success he was perfectly willing to share; but not the sickening
certitude of failure. He judged that the outcropping would run several
hundred dollars to the ton, provided his panned samples had run a
fair average of the vein.
Material for air castles aplenty, that! Gary was afraid to believe it.
He kept warning himself headily that the world would be peopled
entirely with multimillionaires if every man’s dream of wealth came
true and every man’s hopes were realized.
 “Ninety-nine per cent. of all mineral prospects are failures, Faith,”
he told the spotted cat admonishingly. “We may get the raspberry yet
on this proposition. I’m just waiting to see whether you’re a mascot
or a jinx. I wish to heck you were a dog—I’d make you get busy and
help dig!”
 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
GARY FINDS THE VOICE—AND SOMETHING
ELSE
“Here’s where Handsome Gary raises a crop of callouses big as
birds’ eggs in his mad pursuit of the fickle jade, Fortune. Come on,
Faith, doggone you; I want you handy in case this gold thing is a
fluke.”
Gary had remembered that eating is considered necessary to the
preservation of life and had delayed his further investigation of the
outcropping until he had scrambled together some sort of a meal. He
had bolted food as if he must hurry to catch a train that was already
whistling a warning. Now he took down a canteen from behind the
door, shouldered an old pick and shovel he had found in the shed,
and started back up the bluff, stopping just long enough to fill the
canteen at the creek as he passed.
Loaded with canteen and tools, the climb was a heart-breaking
one. The spotted cat led the way, going as straight as possible
toward the tiny ridge behind which lay the outcropping. At the top,
Gary decided that hereafter he would bring a lunch and spend the
day up there, thus saving a valuable hour or two and a good deal of
energy. Energy, he realized, would be needed in unlimited quantities
if he did much development work alone.
By hard labor he managed to clear away the rubble of the slide
and uncover the vein for a distance of several feet before dusk
began to fill the cañon. He carried down with him the richest pieces
of rock that he could find, and that night he worked with mortar and
pestle until his arms ached with the unaccustomed exercise.
Several times that evening he was pulled away from his air
castles by the peculiar sensation of some one standing very close to
him. It was not the first time he had experienced the sensation, but
never before had the impression brought him a comforting sense of
friendly companionship. It struck him suddenly that he must be
growing used to the idea, and that Johnnywater Cañon was not at all
likely to “get” him as it had got Waddell. He had not heard the Voice
all day, but he believed that he could now listen to it with perfect
equanimity.
He had just one worry that evening; rather, he had one difficult
problem to solve. In order to work in that quartz, dynamite was
absolutely necessary. Unless he could find some on the place, it
began to look very much as if he would not be able to do much
unless he could get some brought out to him from town.
The result of his cogitations that evening was a belief that Steve
Carson must have had dynamite, caps and fuse on hand. Men living
out in a country known to produce minerals of one sort and another
usually were supplied with explosives. Even if they never did any
mining, they might want to blow a bowlder out of the way now and
then. He had never seen any powder about the place; but on the
other hand, he had not looked for any.
The next morning he panned the pulped rock immediately after
breakfast and was overjoyed at the amount of gold he gleaned from
the pint or so of pulp. At that rate, he told himself gleefully, the
wedding ring would not need to wait very long. After that he went
hunting dynamite in the storehouse and shed. He was lucky enough
to find a couple of dozen sticks of powder and some caps and fuse
wrapped in a gunny sack and hung from the ridgepole of the shed.
The dynamite did not look so very old, and he guessed that it had
been brought there by Waddell. This seemed to him an amazing bit
of good luck, and he shouldered the stuff and went off up the bluff
with an extra canteen and his lunch, whistling in an exuberance of
good humor with the world. Faith, of course, went with him and
curled herself in her little hollow just under the frowning malapi
ledge.
Gary worked for three days, following the quartz and porphyry
down at an incline of forty-five degrees. The vein held true to form,
and the samples he panned each morning never failed to show a
drag of gold after the concentrate. It was killing work for a man
unused to pick and shovel. In the afternoon of the third day even
Gary’s driving energy began to slow down. He had learned how to
drill and shoot in rock, but the steady swing of the four-pound
hammer (miners call them single-jacks) lamed his right arm so that
he could not strike a forceful blow. Moreover, he discovered that
twisting a drill in rock is not soothing to broken blisters. So, much as
he wanted to make Patricia rich in the shortest possible time,
protesting flesh prevailed upon him to knock off work for the time
being.
He was sitting on the edge of what would one day be an incline
shaft—when he had dug it deep enough—inspecting his blistered
hands. After several days of quiet the wind began to blow in gusts
from off the butte. Somewhere behind Gary and above him there
came a bellowing halloo that made him jump and slide into the open
cut. Again and again came the bellow above him—and after his first
astonishment Gary’s mouth relaxed into a slow grin.
“I’ll bet right there’s the makings of that spook Voice!” he said
aloud. “Up there in the rim rock somewhere.”
He climbed out of the cut and stood facing the cliff, listening. At
close quarters the call became a bellow with only a faint
resemblance to a Voice shouting hello. He remembered now that on
that first morning when he had searched for the elusive “man” on the
bluff, the wind had died before he had climbed very high. After that
he had not heard the Voice again that day.
He made his way laboriously up to the rim rock, listening always
to locate the exact source of the sound. The bluff was almost
perpendicular just under the rim, and huge bowlders lay where they
had fallen in some forgotten time from the top. Gary scrambled over
the first of these and confronted a narrow aperture which seemed to
lead back into the cliff. The opening was perhaps three feet wide at
the bottom, drawing in to a pointed roof a few feet above his head.
The Voice did not seem to come from this opening, but Gary’s
curiosity was roused. He went into the cave. Fifteen feet, as he
paced the distance, brought him to the rear wall—and to a small
recess where a couple of boxes sat side by side with a three-pound
coffee can on top and a bundle wrapped in canvas. Gary forgot the
Voice for the time being and began to investigate the cache.
It was perfectly simple; perfectly amazing also. The boxes had
been opened, probably in order to carry the contents more easily up
the bluff; the most ambitious man would scarcely want to make that