Culture Through Time

"Flowers That Kill is an impressive, wide-ranging feat of scholarship that illuminates a fascinating topic: the capacity of flowers to shift imperceptibly from benevolent symbols to harbingers of death and destruction. The deft but nuanced way in which Ohnuki-Tierney handles this sensitive material makes the book of crucial importance to academics and non-academics alike—really, to anyone still troubled by the horrors of World War II or by the human calamities of our times."—Peter Geschiere, University of Amsterdam, author of Perils of Belonging "Provides one of the best 'conjunctions' of history and anthropology we have."—Journal of Social History "Few contemporary anthropologists write with the emotional depth and complexity of thought as Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney. In Flowers That Kill Ohnuki-Tierney takes on a most difficult task, asking how symbolic meaning changes—how symbols that carry core values become politically opaque, often subverting their moral content in ways that also subvert human action. Flowers That Kill not only shows the power of what we take for granted, but offers a compassionate acceptance of perhaps the greatest challenge to our humanness."—A. David Napier, University College London

• 1. Introduction: the historicization of anthropology Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney 2. The political economy of Grandeur in Hawaii from 1810 to 1830 Marshall Sahlins 3. Patterns of history: cultural schemas in the foundings of sherpa religious institutions Sherry B. Ortner 4. Enclosures: boundary maintenance and its representations over time in Asturian mountain villages (Spain) James W. Fernandez 5. The monkey as self in Japanese culture Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney 6. Constitutive history: genealogy and narrative in the legitimation of Hawaiian kingship Valerio Valeri 7. Shaping time: the choice of the national emblem of Israel Don Handelman and Lea Shamgar-Handelman 8. Aryan invasions over four millennia Edmund Leach 9. Form and meaning in recent Indonesian history: some reflections in light of H. G. Gadamer's philosophy of history James L. Peacock 10. Historians, anthropologists, and symbols Peter Burke Index.