Anthropology

Hans-Otto Steiff, 75, retired president of Margarete Steiff G.m.b.H., makers of teddy bears and other animal toys, died Dec. 31 in his hometown of Giengen, Germany, after several strokes. The family-owned business started out making toy elephants and pin cushions from cloth for friends in the late 1870s. Teddy bears gained huge popularity -- and their names -- in the time of Teddy Roosevelt, and by 1907 Steiff shipped a million of them to America alone. Once childhood staples, and now collectors' items, one Steiff bear fetched a record $171,000 at a Christie's auction in London in December.

ANTONIO CARLOS PEIXOTO DE MAGALHAES, 79 Brazilian politician Sen. Antonio Carlos Peixoto de Magalhaes, one of Brazil's most influential politicians who held onto power as the country came under a military dictatorship and returned to democracy, died Friday of multiple organ failure after being hospitalized last week, the Sao Paulo Heart Institute said. Mr. Magalhaes had a devoted following in his home state of Bahia, where he served three terms as governor and represented the state for three terms in the Senate.

The Zuni Enigma: A Native American People's Possible Japanese Connection, by Nancy Yaw Davis (Norton, 318 pages, $16.95 paperback). The Zunis, a distinct tribe that live in northern New Mexico, are among the most studied groups in the world of anthropology -- mainly because they are utterly unlike any other native Americans in a number of ways,including language, physical size and shape, blood chemistry, family structure and religious practices....

Mark P. Leone likes to look below the surface in Annapolis. Best known around the city as the man who heads the University of Maryland's digs under old houses, Leone recently published a comprehensive book that covers several centuries and classes of society in the state capital. In The Archaeology of Liberty in an American Capital: Excavations in Annapolis, Leone hopes to stir debate about how to read the signs of the capital city's past. For him, it comes down to a constant struggle for more liberty for those who were largely or legally invisible - slaves, free blacks, women, the working classes.

Henry Margenau, 96, a retired professor of physics and natural science who became an expert on microwave theory, died on Feb. 8 in Hamden, Conn. A member of the Yale University faculty for 41 years, his theories on the properties of light as it passed through a prism were used to analyze fireballs created in hydrogen bomb tests. In World War II, his work on microwave theory helped lead to technology used in transmitting and receiving radar signals.Conrad M. Arensberg, 86, a pioneering scholar who helped shift the focus of anthropology from the study of exotic primitive peoples to the examination of complex modern societies, died on Monday at a nursing home in Hazlet, N.J. He had been professor of anthropology at Columbia University from 1953 until his retirement in 1980.

Martin Diskin,62, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology anthropology professor who worked for social reform in the Latin American nations he studied, died Sunday of leukemia in Cambridge, Mass.Paul W. Williams,94, who served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and as special assistant attorney general of New York, died Monday in North Palm Beach, Fla.Joan Erikson,95, who helped refine the prevailing psychological view of human development through a six-decade collaboration with her husband, Erik Erikson, died Sunday in Harwich, Mass.

NO MORE FINGER FOODS At The History of Eating Utensils at www.calacademy.org / research / anthropology / utensil / index.html. The anthropology department at the California Academy of Sciences has one of the largest collections of utensils, with more than 1,700 items. Chopsticks, one of the earliest eating utensils, were first used more than 5,000 years ago. Discover the many uses of knives and how they've changed from straight, pointed instruments to modern dinner knives. Last, check out the portable silverware used by nomads, from pocket forks to modern nesting cutlery sets.

ANTONIO CARLOS PEIXOTO DE MAGALHAES, 79 Brazilian politician Sen. Antonio Carlos Peixoto de Magalhaes, one of Brazil's most influential politicians who held onto power as the country came under a military dictatorship and returned to democracy, died Friday of multiple organ failure after being hospitalized last week, the Sao Paulo Heart Institute said. Mr. Magalhaes had a devoted following in his home state of Bahia, where he served three terms as governor and represented the state for three terms in the Senate.

Fiction embraces anthropology, opening a path into unfamiliar cultures. It discovers how history has transformed societies and peoples. At times, novels live at the level of anthropology: exposing the minutiae of manners and morals. At its best, fiction interprets, illuminates and weighs the value and the cost of how people choose to live. Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui (Pocket books, 263 pages, $24) straddles the boundary between novel and anthropological document. Banned in China, a best seller in Tokyo, it reveals a Shanghai of drug-taking, black-clad hipsters whose noisy club life would shake Chairman Mao in his tomb.

NEW YORK - Petra, that Jordanian "rose-red city half as old as time," is a spectacular place where a narrow, dark ravine suddenly opens into a vista of massive temples with Hellenic columns and pediments carved into red sandstone cliffs. It was the capital of the Nabateans, whose sophisticated trading culture flourished from the first century B.C. to the third century A.D., then vanished. "It's truly awe-inspiring," said Craig Morris, co-curator of a major exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, Petra: Lost City of Stone, which is to opened recently.

NEW YORK - Petra, that Jordanian "rose-red city half as old as time," is a spectacular place where a narrow, dark ravine suddenly opens into a vista of massive temples with Hellenic columns and pediments carved into red sandstone cliffs. It was the capital of the Nabateans, whose sophisticated trading culture flourished from the first century B.C. to the third century A.D., then vanished. "It's truly awe-inspiring," said Craig Morris, co-curator of a major exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, Petra: Lost City of Stone, which is to opened recently.

The Zuni Enigma: A Native American People's Possible Japanese Connection, by Nancy Yaw Davis (Norton, 318 pages, $16.95 paperback). The Zunis, a distinct tribe that live in northern New Mexico, are among the most studied groups in the world of anthropology -- mainly because they are utterly unlike any other native Americans in a number of ways,including language, physical size and shape, blood chemistry, family structure and religious practices....

There must be times, plenty of them, when Jim Chatters deeply rues the day he ever took Floyd Johnson's phone call. But then, neither man had any way of anticipating the firestorm of controversy, contumely and outright chicanery it would ignite. At issue was the very foundation of modern understanding of how, and by whom, the North American continent was first populated -- and, behind the scenes, some less-than-savory aspects of U.S. government defense policy. Chatters is a forensic anthropologist, with a small practice in Kennewick, one of three small cities straddling the Columbia River in the southern midsection of Washington state.

Fiction embraces anthropology, opening a path into unfamiliar cultures. It discovers how history has transformed societies and peoples. At times, novels live at the level of anthropology: exposing the minutiae of manners and morals. At its best, fiction interprets, illuminates and weighs the value and the cost of how people choose to live. Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui (Pocket books, 263 pages, $24) straddles the boundary between novel and anthropological document. Banned in China, a best seller in Tokyo, it reveals a Shanghai of drug-taking, black-clad hipsters whose noisy club life would shake Chairman Mao in his tomb.

NEW YORK - Standing on a hot stretch of sand and debris on Staten Island's western shore, Anne-Marie Cantwell fantasized how the bleak landscape of rotting piers and oil tanks might have looked to the Paleo-Indians who camped here 11,000 years ago. "It must have been gorgeous," she exclaimed. "The Arthur Kill was only a stream, and the rest was a lush coastal plain, full of elk and caribou. "These were the first people to set eyes on this place, after the glaciers retreated," she said, and she paused to summon up a blurry image of these earliest of New Yorkers.

NO MORE FINGER FOODS At The History of Eating Utensils at www.calacademy.org / research / anthropology / utensil / index.html. The anthropology department at the California Academy of Sciences has one of the largest collections of utensils, with more than 1,700 items. Chopsticks, one of the earliest eating utensils, were first used more than 5,000 years ago. Discover the many uses of knives and how they've changed from straight, pointed instruments to modern dinner knives. Last, check out the portable silverware used by nomads, from pocket forks to modern nesting cutlery sets.

In the exuberant 1890s, the United States celebrated the first voyage of Columbus with a giant world's fair in Chicago. For six months in 1893 (a year late), that brash, young Midwestern metropolis was the host for the Columbian Exhibition, a commemoration that drew 27 million admissions into a splendid White City built in neo-classical designs and a midway that boasted exotic anthropological displays from around the world.Skeptics from New York and from Europe were impressed, even convinced of the message: Columbus had planted European civilization in the Americas, and now the United States, and within it, Chicago, was leading the world into a bright new era of production, consumption and social order.

NEW YORK - Standing on a hot stretch of sand and debris on Staten Island's western shore, Anne-Marie Cantwell fantasized how the bleak landscape of rotting piers and oil tanks might have looked to the Paleo-Indians who camped here 11,000 years ago. "It must have been gorgeous," she exclaimed. "The Arthur Kill was only a stream, and the rest was a lush coastal plain, full of elk and caribou. "These were the first people to set eyes on this place, after the glaciers retreated," she said, and she paused to summon up a blurry image of these earliest of New Yorkers.

RICHARDTON, N.D. -- For this, they pay him?Tom Fricke, long blond hair clipped back in a ponytail, is hanging out.He's hanging out with farmers, with a high school principal, with a manufacturing executive. He orders the 13-ounce prime rib when they do. He matches them, scoop for scoop, at the ice cream counter. He zips about town in his mini-sport-utility vehicle, gabbing with folks every chance he gets.And yes -- although even his parents don't believe it -- all this hanging out is work.

Her mind dwells on the landscapes of the North, the flat tundra that rolls off to the pack ice, the turbid Yukon down which she plunged on a skiff toward the sea. That was 60 years ago. She wrote down the stories of the Indian peoples all along the way.Before that she raided ancient Eskimo burial sites in Greenland, pulled bones from the permafrost in the long shadows as the polar winter advanced. She learned to kayak and came to know, suddenly one morning in her tent, how her life would be lived and what her work would be. As always, she wrote it all down.