Anthropology Books

Consumption and the Literary Cookbook offers readers the first book-length study of literary cookbooks. Imagining the genre more broadly to include narratives laden with recipes, cookbooks based on cultural productions including films, plays, and...

Cosmopolitical Ecologies Across Asia offers a unique insight into the non-human and spiritual dimensions of environmental management in a changing world. This volume presents a comparative, place-based exploration of landscapes across Asia and the...

This book is an ethnographic case study of Sufi ritual practice and embodied experience amongst female members of the Naqshbandi community. Drawing on fieldwork in Cape Town, South Africa, and Lefke, Cyprus (2013/2014), the author examines women's...

Originally published in 1991, The New Evolutionary Paradigm provides an innovative and cross disciplinary look at evolution. While Darwin's theory of evolution was originally restricted to the life sciences, in recent years the same principles have been...

Critical Theories and the Budapest School brings together new perspectives on the Budapest School in the context of contemporary developments in critical theory. Engaging with the work of the prominent group of figures associated with Georg Lukács, this...

Originally published in 1957, The Uniqueness of the Individual is a collection of 9 essays published from the ten years preceding publication. The essays deal with some of the central problems of biology. These are among the questions put and answered...

Originally published in 1928, Studies in Hereditary Ability studies the genealogy of great families of Britain and America and examines how their ancestors influenced their genetics and who they subsequently ended up becoming. The book examines the...

Originally published in 1915, Government by Natural Selection looks at the historical advancement of government through the lens of the Darwinian theory of natural selection. The book examines the history of government and its formation, right up until...

Originally published in 1933 Functional Affinities of Man, Monkeys and Apes gives a taxonomic and phylogenetic survey and the findings of diverse experimental investigations of lemurs, monkeys, and apes. The book discusses the inter-relationships of...

Originally published in 1985, The Semantic Theory of Evolution addresses the notion that life is not shaped by the single law of natural selection, but instead by a plurality of laws that resemble grammatical rules in language. This remarkable work...

This book provides a glimpse into the different emergent borderland prototypes in East and Southeast Asia, with illustrative cases and discussions. Asia has contained a number of reactivated border zones since the end of the Cold War, borders which have...

A recurring theme of the public discourse on immigration in Europe today is that migrants are primarily young people, of working age. Against this short-sighted view, the main contribution of this book is to propose that processes of ageing and dying...

Although economic, cultural and demographic changes are part and parcel of the modern world, changes in a number of areas have accelerated in the last quarter-century - a period sometimes spoken of as the global information society, a world of...

Originally published in 1972, The Purchase of Paradise is an account of medieval philanthropy and looks at the late medieval aristocracy as a social, rather than political group. The book analyses their voluntary behaviour, their gift giving and the...

Based on multi-sited anthropological fieldwork, this book describes how various governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental actors engage with colonial and post-colonial built heritage found in Eritrea, Tanzania, Niger and the Republic of the...

In Archaeology Under Water (1966: 19), pioneer nautical archaeologist George Bass pointed out how much easier it is to train someone who is already an archaeologist to become a diver than to take trained divers and teach them...

Sociopolitical Ecology introduces the concept of `ecological field' to replace that of `ecosystem' and extends the boundaries of self-referential systems to a new, more complex level of analysis. Ecological field refers to an...

Women in postwar Japan have never felt completely free from the traditional concept of the housewife. Drawing on a unique ethnographic inquiry, Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni explores the complexities of the relationship between socially and culturally...

Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction explores a form of racial passing that has gone largely unnoticed. Duvall makes visible the means by which southern novelists repeatedly imagined their white characters as fundamentally black in some sense...

In Chinese American literature, countries such as China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore are experienced as well as imagined - experienced because some authors were born in Asia and have first-hand acquaintance with life in their birth-country,

This book examines the iconography of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a force for social justice and feminist emancipation within Chicana cultural productions from 1975 to 2010. In these productions the Virgin serves as a paradigm to unlock the histories of...

This interdisciplinary anthology highlights exiled/alienated women in literature, history, and cinema in order to problematize and shed light on the state of alienhood that stems from gendered otherness. Contributors investigate when and how women from...

What's Left of Blackness analyzes the political transformations in black women's community work in England from the late 1960s until the 2000s. Alongside a shift in the discourse and deployment of blackness as a political imaginary through which to...

Iranian films are kept at a distance, as 'other,' different and exotic. While interest in this cinema is growing, it is rarely engaged theoretically. This book takes such films as Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, Meshkini's The Day I Became a Woman, and...

This book is a collection of grounded accounts by feminist popular educators reflecting critically on processes of collective learning and self- and social transformation in various geopolitical settings. Engaging contemporary feminist political issues...

Spectral Shakespeares is an illuminating exploration of recent, experimental adaptations of Shakespeare on film, TV, and the web. Drawing on adaptation studies and media theory as well as Jacques Derrida's work, this book argues that these adaptations...

This book analyzes literary representations of the American experience in selected works from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Marek Paryz reveals the ambivalence underneath the cultural and political development of the United...

In an interdisciplinary approach that combines interpretive theory with the sociology and psychology of games, Faulkner's Gambit examines the chess structures, motifs, and imagery in William Faulkner's only novella, situating this critically neglected...

Among the first critical works on Alice Munro's writing, this study of her short fiction is informed by the disciplines of narratology and literary linguistics. Through an examination of Munro's narrative art, Isla Duncan demonstrates a rich...

Is it possible to be a citizen of the world? Cosmopolitan thought has been at the center of recent debates surrounding human rights, legal obligations, international relations and political responsibility. Most of these debates trace their origins to the...

Using a cognitive approach to literature, Self-Consciousness in Modern British Fiction uncovers representations of self-consciousness in selected modern British novels, exposing it as complicating character development. This innovative study offers new...

Reading Vietnam amid the War on Terror argues that the examination of contemporary American war narratives can lead to newfound understandings of American literature, history, and national purpose. The book contends that these narratives trouble not only...

Based on archival sources and oral history, this book reconstructs a border-building process in Namibia that spanned more than sixty years. The process commenced with the establishment of a temporary veterinary defence line against rinderpest by the...

This book reads the work of Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, Juan Larrea, Gerardo Diego, Rafael Alberti, Concha Méndez, and Federico García Lorca in analogical relation with Cubism and the revolutionary discoveries of modern physics. Candelas Gala advances...

Dreams seem the most private territory of experience. Yet Dreaming Culture argues they are a space in which we practice, consider, question, and adapt cultural models of the self, gender, sexuality, relationships, and agency. Through an innovative "dream...

Drawing from an eclectic mix of scholars from the US, UK, and Australia, Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture examines the persistence of medieval themes, characters, and situations in a variety of media from reality television to Virginia Woolf,...

Drawing on cultural anthropology and cultural studies, this book sheds new light on the everyday politics of heritage and memory by illuminating local, everyday engagements with Germanness through heritage fetishism, claims to hometown belonging, and the...

What can an anthropological study of Israeli cross-border egg donation contribute to the important debate of the global ethics of human egg traffic? What happens to nationalism and citizenship in an era of globalised egg trade? How are women's bodies in...

Across the world, there has been a polite uprising to the perceived meaninglessness and stress of our accelerated and consumer driven lifestyles. Described simply as the slow phenomenon, this new brand of living entails not simply slowing down, but an...

From which evaluative foundation should we develop public policies designed to promote wellbeing among different cultural groups in different circumstances? This book seeks to advance an objective, universal theory of cultural evaluation grounded in a...

Although 'multiple childhoods' recognizes children's lives as heterogeneous and culturally inscribed, the figure of the 'victimized' child continues to test the limits of this framework. Inhabiting 'Childhood' ambitiously redresses these limits by...

At a time of significant change in the precarious world of female individualization, this collection explores such phenomena by critically incorporating the parameters of popular media culture into the overarching paradigm of gender relations, economics...

Most early approaches to encouraging social development focused on economic and technical issues. This volume begins from the premise that economic and technical patterns are embedded in cultural patterns. These patterns of custom and belief are...