El Folklore de Oaxaca

iv+294 pages. Royal octavo (9 3/4" x 7") bound in half green cloth with marbled boards. Introduction by Aurelio M Espinosa. From the library of George M Foster. First edition.

Paul Radin (1883-1959) is a widely read American cultural anthropologist and folklorist of the early twentieth century. Born the son of a rabbi in the cosmopolitan Polish city of Lodz, he became a student of Franz Boas at Columbia, where he counted Edward Sapir and Robert Lowie among his classmates. He engaged in years of productive fieldwork among the Winnebago (Hoc¹k) Indians, primarily from 1908-1912, culminating in 1923 with the publication of his magnum opus, The Winnebago Tribe. In 1929, as a result of his fieldwork, he was able to publish a grammar of the nearly extinct language of the Wappo people of the San Francisco Bay area. Late in his career he edited several anthologies of folk tales from different continents. His most enduring publication to date is The Trickster (1956), which includes essays by the pioneering scholar of Greek mythology, Karl Kerényi, and the prominent psychoanalyst C. G. Jung. Radin taught at a number of colleges and universities, never staying at any one more than a few years. At various times he held appointments at University of California, Berkeley; Mills College, Fisk University, Black Mountain College, Kenyon College, and the University of Chicago. He concluded his career at Brandeis, where he was chairman of the Department of Anthropology.

George McClelland Foster, Jr born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on October 9, 1913, died on May 18, 2006, at his home in the hills above the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as a professor from 1953 to his retirement in 1979, when he became professor emeritus. His contributions to anthropological theory and practice still challenge us; in more than 300 publications, his writings encompass a wide diversity of topics, including acculturation, long-term fieldwork, peasant economies, pottery making, public health, social structure, symbolic systems, technological change, theories of illness and wellness, humoral medicine in Latin America, and worldview. The quantity, quality, and long-term value of his scholarly work led to his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1976. Virtually all of his major publications have been reprinted and/or translated. Provenance from the executor of Foster's library laid in.

Condition:

Foster's stamp to title, corners gently bumped else a very good copy.