Adventure is currently enjoying enormous interest in public culture. The image of Tarzan provides a rewarding lens through which to explore this phenomenon. In their day, Edgar Rice Burrough’s novels enjoyed great popularity because Tarzan represented the consummate colonial-era adventurer: a white man whose noble civility enabled him to communicate with and control savage peoples and animals. The contemporary Tarzan of movies and cartoons is in many ways just as popular, but carries different connotations. Tarzan is now the consummate “eco-tourist:” a cosmopolitan striving to live in harmony with nature, using appropriate technology, and helpful to the natives who cannot seem to solve their own problems. Tarzan is still an icon of adventure, because like all adventurers, his actions have universal qualities: doing something previously untried, revealing the previously undiscovered, and experiencing the unadulterated. Prominent anthropologists have come together in this volume to reflect on various aspects of this phenomenon and to discuss contemporary forms of adventure.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1. Introduction
Robert J. Gordon
PART I: THE ADVENTUROUS WORLDS OF SIMMEL AND TARZAN
Chapter 2. Simmel and Frazer: The Adventure and the Adventurer
Aram A. Yengoyan
Chapter 3. Adventure in the Zeitgeist, Adventures in Reality: Simmel, Tarzan, and Beyond
Daniel Bradburd
Chapter 4. Tarzan and the Lost Races: Anthropology and Early Science Fiction
Alan Barnard
Chapter 5. Avant-garde or Savant-garde: The Eco-Tourist as Tarzan
A. David Napier
PART II: EXHIBITIONARY ADVENTURES
Chapter 6. They Sold Adventure: Martin and Osa Johnson in the New Hebrides
Lamont Lindstrom
Chapter 7. Jacaré: Cold War Warrior from the Jungles of the Amazon
Neil L. Whitehead
Chapter 8. The Work of Environmentalism in an Age of Televisual Adventures
Luis A. Vivanco
PART III: HIGH ADVENTURES
Chapter 9. Five Miles Out: Communion and Commodification among the Mountaineers
David L.R. Houston
Chapter 10. Crampons and Cook Pots: The Democratization and Feminizations of Adventure on Aconcagua
Joy Logan
Chapter 11. The Toughest Job You’ll Ever Love: The Peace Corps as Adventure
Michael J. Sheridan and Jason J. Price
Chapter 12. Doing Africa: Travelers, Adventurers, and American Conquest of Africa
Kathryn Mathers and Laura Hubbard
PART IV: CROSS-CULTURAL ADVENTURES
Chapter 13. “Oh Shucks, Here Comes UNTAG!”: Peacekeeping as Adventure in Namibia
Robert J. Gordon
Chapter 14. A Head for Adventure
Steven Rubenstein
PART V: BRINGING ADVENTURE HOME
Chapter 15. Riding Herd on the New World Order: Spectacular Adventuring and U.S. Imperialism
Keally Mc Bride
Chapter 16. Adventure and Regulation in Contemporary Anthropological Fieldwork
David Stoll
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Robert J. Gordon is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vermont. He is author of numerous books and articles, including The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass and Picturing Bushmen: The Denver African Expedition of 1925.
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