Anthropology Books

Since 1990, direct sales have attracted over two million recruits in Mexico and are characterized by a belief in the power of positive thinking. Through an ethnographic portrait, Cahn demonstrates that the quasi-religious commission of...

In contrast to Thomas Jefferson's yeoman myth, Sarson's groundbreaking analysis of the early national Upper South, Thomas Jefferson's own home region, uncovers extensive inequality, landlessness, and poverty, and often antagonistic relationships

Theorist Clifford Geertz's influence extends far beyond anthropology. Indeed the case could be made that he has been abandoned by anthropology and that his legacy has been transferred to a more diffuse community of scholars interested in interpretation...

The exchange of ideas, goods, and people between Pakistan and the far-flung reaches of the world shape the experience of Pakistani Muslims beyond geographical and cultural continuity with reference to global political representations. Based on empirical...

Drawing on Louis Althusser's concept of internal distantiation, Reconstituting Americans reads post-1960s U.S. literature to reveal the representational paradoxes of liberal multicultural subjecthood. This engaging study uses historicist and formalist...

Shamans attract controversy and fascination well beyond their numbers. Personal experiences with them are based here on extensive fieldwork in several areas of Siberia and the Far East, including Khanty, Sakha, Tuvan, and Buriat regions. Balzer outlines...

This unique edited collection brings together biologists, geneticists, and social and biological anthropologists to examine the connections between genetics, identity, and health in South America. It addresses a wide range of theoretical issues raised by...

This book examines the global issue of health inequality through an in-depth look at a remote Australian Aboriginal community characterized by a degree of premature morbidity and mortality similar to that in other disadvantaged populations. Its synthesis...

In contrast to much of the Muslim world, a majority of Turks consider Islam to be primarily a matter of personal choice and private belief. How did such an arrangement come about? Moreover, most observant Muslims in Turkey do not see such a conception...

A critical inquiry into postmodern anxiety, fear, indifference, obsessive attention seeking, and the disappearance of privacy and of public space, the book offers penetrating insights into what its author terms the troubled identity, and also into the...

Part ode, part academic treatise, this book traces the transformation of Cairo's historic downtown from its spectacular beginning as a French inspired Belle Époque marvel to a site of contest and, more recently, to its role as a neo-bohemian public...

Travel, Humanitarianism, and Becoming American in Africa uses observations of American travelers to southern Africa to ask: why is Africa so important to Americans? These travel stories show how encounters with Africans lead to a problematic desire to...

If directing dramatic productions interests you, this book is a basic guide to show you know to apply the principles of directing to any dramatic medium--stage, television, or film. The authors, who have worked in all three media, illustrated how the...

This book paints a vivid picture of Zambia's experience riding the copper price rollercoaster. It brings together the best of recent research on Zambia's mining industry from eminent scholars in history, geography, anthropology, politics, sociology and...

The book is a comparative analysis of all the major social science/political science grand theories. It focuses on developmentalism, dependency theory, the world systems approach, Marxism, institutionalism, rational choice, psychoanalysis, political...

This book examines the impact of improving EU-Turkey relations on Turkish political culture since Turkey became a candidate for EU membership in 1999. While a multi-party political system was introduced in Turkey in 1946, political liberalism was the...

The third volume in the groundbreaking new series "Theory in the World", Neighborhood and Boulevard combines memoir, history, anthropology, and theory to offer an innovative reflection on the materiality of culture. Through its style and content, the...

Shoppers can express their values as they search for value. Political consumerism is turning the market into a site for politics and ethics, as consumer choices reflect personal attitudes and purchases are informed by ethical or political assessment of...

Twenty years have passed since the 1989 U.S. invasion that toppled Panama's military regime and initiated a period of democratization. This book represents the most comprehensive and empirically grounded analysis of the institutional and attitudinal facto

This book examines the influences of various cultural factors on economic analyses that could be misrepresented by existing economic theories. The book's most significant contribution is the measuring of cultural diversity and bilateral similarity...

The study of race has been an important feature in British universities for over a hundred years. During this time, academic understanding of what race describes and means has changed and developed as has the purpose of racial study. Once considered the...

In a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the relationship between sociology and cultural studies, Gregor McLennan lucidly guides us from central philosophical questions in the social sciences to new interpretations of such urgent contemporary...

This wide-ranging, historically informed study examines the career of the culture concept and related notions of context in comparative and international politics, tracing connections through the disciplines of anthropology and history as well as through...

This groundbreaking collection reframes how popular culture in Ireland and Ireland in popular culture can be understood. The essays examine in unique ways, local and global Irishness, focusing on current versions of traditional culture and new modes of...

The dream of a cosmopolitical utopia has been around for thousands of years. Yet the promise of being locally situated while globally connected and mobile has never seemed more possible than today. Through a classical sociological approach, this book...

South Africa is the richest and most developed country on the African continent, yet it has failed to arrest the dramatic progression of its domestic AIDS epidemic. This book analyzes successive governments' management (and mismanagement) of the AIDS...

The growth of GDP remains the principal focus of attention when it comes to judging the progress of the 'wealth of nations', however other attempts have been made, most of them since the 1990's, to enlarge such a narrow vision. New indicators of...

The names given to the variety of man-like fossils known to scientists should reflect no more than scientific views of the nature of human evolution. However, often in the past these names have also reflected confusion regarding the basic principles of...

August Strindberg is one of the founders of the modern theater. George Bernard Shaw considered him "the only genuinely Shakespearian modern dramatist," Sean O'Casey called him "the greatest of them all." And to Eugene O'Neill he was "the greatest...

Archeology shares with other anthropological sciences the goal of explaining differences and similarities among cultural systems

Basic text for the sophomore/junior level course in Human Variation or Human Diversity taught anthropology or biology departments.This classic introduction to human variation, has been thoroughly updated to include the issues and controversies facing the...

For courses in Social Organization, Kinship, and Cultural Ecology.Kinship has made a come-back in Anthropology.  Not only is there a line of noted, general, introductory works and readers in the topic, but theoretical discussions have been...

This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on contemporary biomedicine as a cultural practice. It brings together leading scholars from cultural anthropology, sociology, history, and science studies to conduct a critical dialogue on the culture(s)...

This book reveals how wonder works as an index of challenges to the known, the moral, the true and the real. The case studies show how probing wonder can bring us closer to understanding the union of social institutions. This book was originally...

Although underwater archaeology has assumed its rightful place as an important subdiscipline in the field, the published literature has not kept pace with the rapid increase in the number of both prehistoric and historic...

Victims of political persecution since 2000, Zimbabwe's whites have never overcome the problem of belonging. In North America and Australia, Europeans became the majority and "normal" partially through the genocide of native peoples. Settlers to...

Public Policy and Ethnicity is a response to the growing concern in many democracies that ethnicity has become institutionalized as a political category. The book draws on a number of international studies, including New Zealand, to show that this...

This volume provides an inter-disciplinary encounter with the question of "cosmopolitics"--the notion of a global community and the concomitant problems which the notion carries--contributing to a debate that crosses a number of borders and disciplines.

This volume describes Bedouins, a tribal pastoral people in eastern Saudia Arabia. This volume documents changes in their way of life, beginning in the 1930s and continuing to the 1960s, when this book originally appeared. The Empty Quarter described...