Vanishing Peoples of the Earth

Washington: National Geographic Society, 1968. — 208 p. — SBN 87044-067-5.Television antennas rise from rooftops on Hopi mesas; New Guinea's Asmat, headhunters not long ago, abandon cannibal rituals and send their children to school; Lapp suitors ride snowmobiles instead of reindeer-drawn sleds to go courting. These examples of change - and many others in this book — vividly reveal how new influences affect cherished traditions in once-remote areas.
In Vanishing Peoples of the Earth you dwell among tribes, clans, and families as they strive to reconcile conflicts between the past and the present. Distinguished anthropologists survey cultures now irrevocably altered by the impact of the 20th century.
Across barren hills and mountains, you follow a family of Lapps, rugged people who herd reindeer on seasonal migrations but rely increasingly on snow scooters to round up strays. From Lapland you journey to Africa's Kalahari region where peaceful, nomadic Bushmen wrest subsistence from a cruel semidesert.
You stroll on a cool plateau in the Nilgiri Hills of southern India, where four groups of people have created a unique, close-knit interdependence. Each has reacted differently to the influx of outsiders and foreign values. You sense the despair of Japan's enigmatic "sky people" — the Ainu — who have lived on the island of Hokkaido for at least 7,000 years and now face complete absorption by the Japanese.
Then you travel to Australia, where for centuries Aborigines lived as nomadic hunters and food gatherers. In the Arctic, on an ice-flecked polar sea, you join a walrus hunt and later see how education and the airplane have opened new vistas for the Eskimos.
You meet Brazilian Indians, exploited by fortune hunters, miners, and planters, who left epidemics that almost destroyed the tribes. Some 5,000 Hopi Indians await you on their Arizona reservation. Oil leases and mining concessions bring them new wealth, and many young people, after attending school off the reservation, leave to work in cities.
Finally you go into dense New Guinea jungles that until recently hid the grisly rites of once-fierce Asmat headhunters who have swiftly emerged from the Stone Age into the modern world.
This volume, perceptively written, and illustrated with 187 intimate photographs, provides an insight into the richness and complexity of human behavior and presents an enduring portrait of man.Vanishing cultures mirror the yesterdays of man.
Lapps in a modern world face timeless realities.
Bushmen: Gentle Nomads of Africa's harsh Kalahari.
Nilgiri peoples of India: An end to old ties.
Mysterious "Sky People": Japan's dwindling Ainu.
Australian Aborgines: Blending past and present.
Indomitable Eskimo: Master of a frozen world.
Indians of Central Brazil: Struggle to survive.
Hopis: "Peaceful Ones" confront the 20th Century.
New Guinea's fierce Asmat: Heritage of headhunting.