Anthropology Books

Conceptualised in 1920s Japan by Yanagi Sôetsu, the Mingei movement has spread world wide since the 1950s, creating phenomena as diverse as Mingei museums, Mingei connoisseurs and collectors, Mingei shops and Mingei restaurants. The theory, at its core...

The development of the European Union has been one of the most profound advances in European politics and society this century. Yet the institutions of Europe and the 'Eurocrats' who work in them have constantly attracted negative publicity, culminating...

This book provides a unique ethnographic account of women living with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) in India. It examines how contaminated environments and political-economic changes render urban middle-class women in India vulnerable to PCOS, a...

This book examines the growing trend for housing models that shrink private living space and seeks to understand the implications of these shrinking domestic worlds. Small spaces have become big business. Reducing the size of our homes, and the amount of...

Though not a systematic theologian, Thomas Merton spent a lifetime writing in an immensely appealing way about the monastic tradition and mystical theology. One of the fundamental questions he examined was that of the self; for Merton the recovery of the...

Egypt's January 2011 uprising spurred millions to action with a cacophony of demands-including the call to address Egypt's education crisis and adult literacy rates. Read in the Name of Your Lord traces the push for universal literacy as a project caught...

How does emigration affect those left behind? The fall of Yugoslavia in the 1990s led citizens to look for a better, more stable life elsewhere. For the older generations, however, this wasn't an option. In this powerful and moving work, Ivana...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore,...

In an ethnically stratified work force, Japanese, South Sea Islander, Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal divers brought up from the sea floor the shell that produced mother-of-pearl, and sometimes pearls. Many men died at this dangerous work.This was...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore,...

In this study, E. Frances King explores how people first learn to relate to the images and artefacts of religious belief within their domestic environments. As a sense of religious belonging is instilled on a daily basis in the home, it also becomes...

In this delicious book, noted food scholar Carole M. Counihan presents a compelling and artfully told narrative about family and food in late 20th-century Florence. Based on solid research, Counihan examines how family, and especially gender have...

From Prague to Tennessee to Brazil, it's hard to find a consensus on what constitutes an average family. In today's world, the nuclear family is rarely the standard family structure, if it ever was. Families of a New World brings together an...

Rich with the voices and stories of participants, these touching, firsthand accounts examine how women of diverse racial, ethnic, class and religious backgrounds perceive prenatal testing, the most prevalent and routinized of the new reproducing...

A significant work by one of anthropology's most important scholars, this book provides an introduction to the Chiapas Mayan community of Mexico, better known for their role in the Zapatista Rebellion.

Tense Past provides a much needed appraisal and contextualization of the upsurge of interest in questions of memory and trauma evident in multiple personality and post-traumatic stress disorders, child abuse, and commemoration of the Holocaust...

First published in 1986. By the middle of the nineteenth century Japan had been a closed country for more than two hundred years. Then a period of constant communication between Japan and the outside world suddenly began. The Fifteen Years' War was in...

Written in 1924, this has been called the best novel ever written abo Penned in 1924, this has been called the best novel ever written about Japan, and its charm remains undiminished. The French author, a pilot during World War I, was sent to Japan as a...

Knowing Differently provides a comprehensive account of the worldviews nurtured and sustained by indigenous communities across the world through their distinctive understanding - of space and time, joy and pain, life and death, the epistemological clash...

This book examines the processes and challenges of tribal communities in the high-growth economy of Gujarat. Through a comprehensive and varied account of tribal development in the state, it aims to understand the reasons that prevent economic prosperity...

Hailed as the beneficiary, driving force and result of globalisation, India's middle-class is puzzling in its diversity, as a multitude of traditions, social formations and political constellations manifest contribute to this project. This book looks at...

For more than a quarter of a century there has been significant international migration of skilled health workers, but in the last decades, with critical changes in both sending and receiving countries, few parts of the world are now unaffected by the...

No other crisis in Africa has received as much attention in the West during the past 10 years as the war in Darfur, yet the underlying complexities of the war and the background to the crisis remains poorly understood by scholars, activists and aid...

In Working Images, prominent visual anthropologists and artists explore how old and new visual media can be integrated into contemporary forms of research and representation.

From its origins as a distinct set of ritualised practices in the sixteenth century to its international expansion in the twentieth, tea culture has had a major impact on artistic production, connoisseurship, etiquette, food, design and more recently, on...

This fascinating study explores how our prehistoric ancestors developed rituals from everyday life and domestic activities. Richard Bradley contends that for much of the prehistoric period, ritual was not a distinct sphere of activity. Rather it was the...

This book provides theoretical and empirical discussion of migration, identity and Europeanisation. With contributions from leading international scholars, it provides both an overview of theoretical perspectives and a comprehensive set of case studies,...

This book examines the contexts of identity and ethnicity, through a detailed study of a little-known group in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, with an intriguing history.

Yongding County in southeast China is famous for its large, multistory communal vernacular buildings known as tulou, translated "rammed earth building." These structures were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008. Living in Heritage introduces...

Staging Tianxia explores the ancient Chinese vision of world order known as tianxia (all under heaven) by focusing on the historical, performative, and rhetorical processes of expressive arts and cultural heritages that inform a vision of China as a...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore,...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore,...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore,...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore,...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore,...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore,...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore,...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore,...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore,...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore,...

Since the inception of their discipline, anthropologists have studied virtually every conceivable aspect of other peoples' morality - religion, social control, sin, virtue, evil, duty, purity and pollution. But what of the examination of anthropology...

Focusing on everyday experiences of sexuality in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, this book considers personal narratives and other queer artefacts to shed light on linguistic and performative strategies of resistance, referred to as queer...