Bruce Grant

Leather Braiding has stood for more than forty years as the definitive book in its field. Grant's clearly written guide to the art of leather braiding contains detailed illustrations, step-by-step instructions, and a wealth of incidental, fascinating information. It makes accessible, to even the novice, serviceable and recreational uses of leather, from the simple but clever braided button to the elaborate results of thong appliqué. The book includes a historical perspective of leather and its function in society, a chapter on leather braiding tools, and a glossary of terms.

Leather Braiding

At the outset of the twentieth century, the Nivkhi of Sakhalin Island were a small population of fishermen under Russian dominion and an Asian cultural sway. The turbulence of the decades that followed would transform them dramatically. While Russian missionaries hounded them for their pagan ways, Lenin praised them; while Stalin routed them in purges, Khrushchev gave them respite; and while Brezhnev organized complex resettlement campaigns, Gorbachev pronounced that they were free to resume a traditional life. But what is tradition after seven decades of building a Soviet world? Based on years of research in the former Soviet Union, Bruce Grant's book draws upon Nivkh interviews, newly opened archives, and rarely translated Soviet ethnographic texts to examine the effects of this remarkable state venture in the construction of identity. With a keen sensitivity, Grant explores the often paradoxical participation by Nivkhi in these shifting waves of Sovietization and poses questions about how cultural identity is constituted and reconstituted, restructured and dismantled. Part chronicle of modernization, part saga of memory and forgetting, In the Soviet House of Culture is an interpretive ethnography of one people's attempts to recapture the past as they look toward the future. This is a book that will appeal to anthropologists and historians alike, as well as to anyone who is interested in the people and politics of the former Soviet Union.

A Century of Perestroikas

In the Soviet House of Culture

Gareth J. Evans

Australia's Foreign Relations is a rigorous, lively and comprehensive insider account of how Australian foreign policy works. It runs the full gamut of issues fundamental to Australia's place in, and relationships with, the world. It is aimed at researchers, policy makers and students of international relations, international economics, politics and history.

In the World of the 1990s

Australia's Foreign Relations

The Caucasus region of Eurasia, wedged in between the Black and Caspian Seas, encompasses the modern territories of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, as well as the troubled republic of Chechnya in southern Russia. A site of invasion, conquest, and resistance since the onset of historical record, it has earned a reputation for fearsome violence and isolated mountain redoubts closed to outsiders. Over extended efforts to control the Caucasus area, Russians have long mythologized stories of their countrymen taken captive by bands of mountain brigands. In The Captive and the Gift, the anthropologist Bruce Grant explores the long relationship between Russia and the Caucasus and the means by which sovereignty has been exercised in this contested area. Taking his lead from Aleksandr Pushkin's 1822 poem "Prisoner of the Caucasus," Grant explores the extraordinary resonances of the themes of violence, captivity, and empire in the Caucasus through mythology, poetry, short stories, ballet, opera, and film. Grant argues that while the recurring Russian captivity narrative reflected a wide range of political positions, it most often and compellingly suggested a vision of Caucasus peoples as thankless, lawless subjects of empire who were unwilling to acknowledge and accept the gifts of civilization and protection extended by Russian leaders. Drawing on years of field and archival research, Grant moves beyond myth and mass culture to suggest how real-life Caucasus practices of exchange, by contrast, aimed to control and diminish rather than unleash and increase violence. The result is a historical anthropology of sovereign forms that underscores how enduring popular narratives and close readings of ritual practices can shed light on the management of pluralism in long-fraught world areas.

Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus

The Captive and the Gift

The Encyclopedia of Rawhide and Leather Braiding is the definitive work on the subject and results from the late Bruce Grants many years of interest and experience as a braider and writer on the subject. It combines most of the material published in Leather Braiding and How to Make Cowboy Horse Gear with a mass of completely new material. The books more than 350 illustrations are arranged so that the step-by-step instructions face the picture being described, making it very easy to follow. While the book is primarily for those interested in leathercraft, in nearly all cases the methods of braiding are applicable to many other materials, such as silk, cotton, plastic, catgut, or horsehair. Braidwork takes many forms, and its applications are practical as well as decorative. The combination of beauty and utility lends itself to an array of itemspersonal gear or clothing, working or show gear for a horse, decoration of plain, carved, or tooled leather work. Truly a book to be used as well as read, Encyclopedia of Rawhide and Leather Braiding provides all the information needed for this satisfying pastime.

Encyclopedia of Rawhide and Leather Braiding

Adele Marie Barker

An account of the day-to-day scramble to make ends meet after the end of the Soviet Union, letters recording ordinary Russians' reactions to the Revolution as events unfolded in 1917, and excerpts from a sixteenth-century manual instructing elite Muscovites on proper household management--The Russia Readerbrings these and many other selections together in this introduction to the history, culture, and politics of the world's largest country, from the earliest written accounts of the Russian people to today. Conveying the texture of everyday life alongside experiences of epic historical events, the reader is filled with the voices of men and women, rulers and revolutionaries, peasants, soldiers, literary figures, émigrés, journalists, and scholars. Most of the selections are by Russians; thirty are translated into English for the first time. The collection is illustrated with maps, paintings, photographs, posters, and cartoons; fifteen images appear in colour. The volume's editors introduce each of the thematic sections and all of the written selections.The Russia Readerincorporates song lyrics, jokes, anecdotes, and folktales as well as poems, essays, and fiction by writers including Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi, and Akhmatova. Transcripts from the show trials of major Party figures and an account of how staff at the Lenin Library in Moscow were instructed to interact with foreigners are among the many selections based on personal memoirs and archival materials only recently made available to the public. From a tenth-century emissary describing his encounters in Kyivan Rus', to a scientist recalling her life in a new research city built from scratch in Siberia during the 1950s, to a novelist depicting the decadence of the "New Russians" in the 2000s,The Russia Readeris an extraordinary introduction to a vast and varied land.

Bruce Grant

About

Books

Join the club