Fra i pelli-rosse d’America. Curiosità etnografiche

ITALIAN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY ON THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS, ONLY ONE U.S. COPY

Turin, La Letteratura, 1888.

8vo (18 x 12 cm), 25 pp. Bound in blue publisher's wrappers. Small tear to the upper margin of cover, and clean tear not affecting printed text on two leaves. Discreet collector's stamp on cover. Generally very fresh.

First edition of this Italian ethnographic work on the Indigenous peoples of North America. The first section focuses on the funerary rites and ceremonial dances of the Choctaw, Otoe, Oconee, Esselen, and Yoki tribes. Of special interest is Grossi's meticulous account of a three-day funeral for a Yoki chief, which was attended by 200 people—including an Esselen delegation—and features descriptions of the traditional costumes worn.

The second half of the work explores oral traditions and poetry, specifically focusing on the Maidu and Muscogee peoples. This section includes rare song fragments translations covering religious, romantic, and funerary themes.

The author, Vincenzo Grossi (1860–1913), was an Italian ethnographer and adjunct lecturer at the University of Genoa. His work draws heavily on seminal contemporary sources, such as Stephen Powers' Tribes of California (1877) and H.H. Bancroft's Native Races of the Pacific States (1874–75. In his 1886 paper, "Lingue, letteratura e tradizioni popolari degli Indigeni d'America," Grossi's research demonstrated the influence of contemporary reports by the Bureau of American Ethnology and works on Indigenous American linguistics by Friederich Müller and Daniel Brinton (Giordano, p. 92).

OCLC records one U.S. copy at Rice University.

* Fedora Giordano, "The Anxiety of Discovery: The Italian Interest in Native American Studies," RSA Journal, vol. 5 (1994), pp. 81-109.