Anthropology Books

"Ethnic Studies . . . has drawn higher education, usually kicking and screaming, into the borderlands of scholarship, pedagogy, faculty collegiality, and institutional development," Johnnella E. Butler writes in her Introduction to this collection of...

Introduction to the Primates is a comprehensive but compact guide to the long evolutionary history of the world’s prosimians, monkeys, and apes, and to the much shorter history of humankind’s interactions with them, from our earliest recorded...

Baskets made of baleen, the fibrous substance found in the mouths of plankton-eating whales—a malleable and durable material that once had commercial uses equivalent to those of plastics today—were first created by Alaska Natives in the early...

Melanesia has been the research focus of some of anthropology’s legendary names. In the best tradition of Melanesian scholarship, Jane Goodale writes here of the Kaulong who live in the deep forests of New Britain, an island in the vast territory...

Uses a feudal model to analyze contemporary American society, comparing its essential characteristics to those of medieval European societies.Do Americans live in a liberal capitalist society, where evenhanded competition rules the day, or a society in...

This book argues that Russia has struggled under autocratic power and that this continues to affect economic development today. A 'cult of power' has underpinned legal nihilism, distrust, secrecy and aversion to transparency and accountability. Informal...

How does a multi-ethnic society resolve the contentious issue of shares and resource allocation without damaging the state? Arguing that ethnic divides in underdeveloped states are much more evident than in developed countries, this study examines...

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans invented 'Indians' and populated the world with them. The global history of the term 'Indian' remains largely unwritten and this volume, taking its cue from Shakespeare, asks us to consider the...

This dynamic volume explores the differences that separate man from other forms of life. Building on the increased attention paid in recent criticism to both plant and animal life in the Renaissance, as well as the instability of categories such as...

Skin is a multifarious image in medieval culture: the material basis for forming a sense of self and relation to the world, as well as a powerful literary and visual image. Treating key medieval English texts and traditions, from romance and exemplum to...

Criticism of the work of David Foster Wallace has tended to be atomistic, focusing on a single aspect of individual works. A Companion to the Work of David Foster Wallace is designed as a professional study of all of Wallace's creative work. With essays...

This original study analyses the relationships among the socio-historical contexts, generic forms, and rhetorical strategies of British West Indian slave narratives (all of which are dictated, rather than self-written texts). Grounded by the syncretic...

Memory in Cultureis an introduction to one of the most exciting new interdisciplinary fields of research: cultural memory studies. Who was Maurice Halbwachs, and what are the "social frameworks of memory"? What can Aby Warburg's work tell us about the...

Why do people enter total institutions - places that confine and control them around the clock - and how does the experience change them? This book updates Goffman's classic model by introducing the Reinventive Institution, where members voluntarily...

Based on fieldwork among undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, Illegal Traveller offers a narrative of the polysemic nature of borders, border politics, and rituals and performances of border-crossing. Interjecting personal experiences into...

Why do mantelpieces matter? As everyday 'focal points', they offer a unique way into understanding how what matters relates to who matters. Wide-ranging, original, innovative research assembles Mass Observation Archive material with historiographies of...

The first fully comparative empirical analysis of the relationship between education and social cohesion, this book develops a new "distributional theory" of the effects of educational inequality on social solidarity. Based on extensive analysis of data...

In a broad sweep from Central Europe to Ireland and from the Sixteenth to the early Nineteenth-century, this work puts the Jewish community and its rabbinic and 'lay' leaders at the centre of Jewish history. Of surpassing value is Kochan's treatment of...

The first comparative study of how the French Popular Front and its right-wing opponents transformed the masses into the people, whether in demonstrations and festivals, or theatre and film. Seven chapters examine the representation of the crowd,...

Freak Shows and the Modern American Imagination examines the artistic use of freak shows between 1900 and 1950. During this period, the freak show shifted from a highly popular and profitable form of entertainment to a reviled one. But why? And how does...

"Recent historical scholarship has shown the way towards a geographically capacious conception of the early modern world. Featuring essays by nine leading scholars of early modern Asia and Europe, Comparative Early Modernities casts aside the legacies...

Studies in the Medieval Atlantic is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that answers the question: what did the Atlantic Ocean mean to medieval north Europeans? Contributors analyze the Atlantic Ocean of the seventh to sixteenth centuries through...

A Poetics of Relation: Caribbean Women Writing at the Millennium fosters a dialogue across islands and languages between established and lesser-known authors, bringing together archipelagic and diasporic voices from the Francophone and Hispanic Antilles...

The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory is the first scholarly book from the humanities on the subject of the Grenada Revolution and the US intervention. It is simultaneously a critique, tribute, and memorial. It argues...

Political assassinations are always shocking and traumatic; sometimes however they lead to a cultural trauma, that is, a broad public debate about the foundations of collective identity. The theory of cultural trauma is applied in this book to six...

Noted critic Martha Banta draws on essays in Vanity Fair written by esteemed journalists, literary figures, and cultural critics between The Great War and The Crash. These major writers recognized the potency of vocabularies to affect politics, the arts,...

This book carefully examines representative texts and events that reflect the Irish presence in American culture from the Famine to the present. A noted scholar in the field of Irish-American literature and history, Jack Morgan sets forth and analyzes a...

This book traces the contours of the ways in which Western literature (in both the broad and narrow sense) was introduced and received in China from the 1840s to the present. It is an attempt to navigate and unpack the complex dynamics, or fault zones,...

In the early twentieth century, missionary expositions were a central event in the religious life of many Americans. They also converged with the research agenda of anthropology, which was then defined by museum work. This thoughtfully researched book...

This book relates the dramatic story of the struggle that took place between the Indian press and the British government for control of the Indian public sphere between 1870 and 1910. The contest gave the Indian reading publics their first taste of a...

This book cuts across important debates in cultural studies, literary criticism, politics, sociology, and anthropology.  Meyda Yegenoglu brings together different theoretical strands in the debates regarding immigration, from Jacques Lacan's...

One of the few available books of criticism on the topic, Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary provides an extended analysis of Ellis's works to argue that his fiction, through the technique of underwriting, offers a new politics of...

An ethnographic study of the transnational and multicultural expansion of Vietnam's Mother Goddess Religion and its spirit possession ritual, this book is the product of collaborative research by an American anthropologist and a Vietnamese folklorist...

Physical Infrastructure Development addresses the key challenges of balancing economic growth, poverty alleviation, and environmental protection in the development of major physical infrastructure, ranging from transport to energy. The contributions,...

Global Perspectives on Orhan Pamuk is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explores Pamuk's multifaceted approach to ordinary Turkish life. The contributors of this volume come from an array of international perspectives that place the reading...

Modern societies are consumer societies, but rigorous research into this dimension has only begun fairly recently. The knowledge that historians and social scientists have produced is impressive, but also bewilderingly diverse and sometimes conflicting...

Describing the second stage of Karl G. Heider's exploration of emotion as understood by the Minangkabau - a matrilineal, Moslem society of West Sumatra, Indonesia - this book uses semi-structured interviews with focus groups and individuals to allow...

The study of how life can be controlled, supported, and manipulated has become the most urgent scientific and political task of our society. Each discipline approaches this biopolitical dimension with its tools and agenda; however they ignore how labor...

This creative study explores how Mohandas Gandhi's celebrated concept of satyagraha (non-violence) was eclipsed by the xenophobic Hindu nationalist movement that has organized ferocious episodes of ethnic cleansing against minority communities in...