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A Kindly Scrutiny of Human Nature is a collection of essays honouring Richard (Dick) Slobodin, one of the great anthropologists of the Canadian North.
A short biography is followed by essays describing his formative thinking about human nature and human identities, his humanizing force in his example of living a moral, intellectual life, his discernment of people’s ability to make informed choices and actions, his freedom from ideological fashions, his writings about the Mackenzie District Métis, his determination to take peoples experience seriously, not metaphorically, and his thinking about social organization and kinship.
Contributors include Sam Ajzenstat, Michael Asch, David J. Damas , Harvey A. Feig, Kenneth Little, Antonia Mills, Richard J. Preston, Mary Black Rogers, and Robert Wishar. An unpublished paper about a 1930s caribou hunt in which he participated finishes the collection, giving Dick the last word.
Richard J. Preston is nominally retired (Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, McMaster University) and hopes to continue his forty-plus-year span of sojourning and work with the people of the James Bay region, focusing on the cultural dimensions of globalization and tracing the emergence of the Cree concept of community. His publications include Cree Narrative: Expressing the Personal Meanings of Events, second edition (2002), and a great many papers.
Table of Contents for A Kindly Scrutiny of Human Nature: Essays in Honour of Richard Slobodin, edited by Richard J. Preston
Introduction | Richard J. Preston and Harvey A. Feit
Richard Slobodin’s Ethnography and Human Nature | Richard J. Preston
Dick Slobodin: The Anthropology of a Divided Self | Sam Ajzenstat
Slobodin as Example: A Note of a Dialectics of Style | Kenneth Little
Writing against the Grain of Materialist Orthodoxy: Richard Slobodin and the Teetl’it Gwich’in | Robert Wishar and Michael Asch
Histories of the Past, Histories of the Future: The Committed Anthropologies of Richard Slobodin, Frank G. Speck, and Eleanor Leacock | Harvey A. Feit
Slobodin “Among the Métis” 1938–1998: Anthropologist, Scholar, Historian, and Fieldworker par excellence | Mary Black-Rogers
Richard Slobodin and the Creation of the Amerindian Rebirth Book | Antonia Mills
Richard Slobodin as Scholar of Societies | David J. Damas
Caribou Hunt | Richard Slobodin
Richard Slobodin Bibliography
Index