The Lakota Ritual of the Sweat Lodge: History and Contemporary Practice (Studies in the Anthropology of North Ame)
"With an extended description of such an experience, Raymond A. Bucko begins his comprehensive study of the sweat-lodge rituals practised by the Lakota people on the big Pine Ridge reservation of South Dakota. If you delve beneath the surface , you find that Bucko's position has some interesting complexities about it. He points out that fieldworkers and anthropologists tend to create an orthodoxy where none has previously existed. Though he searches for authentic illustrations of the sweating practice, he rightly wonders what can be considered "authentic" in a time when Lakotas are increasingly influenced by Hollywood movies and New Age nostrums... Bucko stands in the debate as a champion of variation." - TLS, May 7, 1999