Social and cultural anthropology Books

This first volume is a compilation of numerous essays by Douglas on the Lele in the Belgian Congo covering a fifteen year period. There are early indications of Douglas's cultural imagination and written expression that were to make her works accessible...

First published in 1982, this is one of Mary Douglas' favourite books. It is based on her meetings with friends in which they attempt to apply the grip/group analysis from Natural Symbols. The essays have been important texts for preparing grid/group...

This is an invaluable work looking into new areas relating to India's princely states. Based on an abundance of rarely used archival material, the book sheds new light on diversities related to the princely states such as health policies and practices,...

Agrarian transformations within and across countries have been significantly and dynamically altered during the past few decades compared to previous eras, provoking a variety of reactions from rural poor communities worldwide. The recent convergence of...

Using archaeology and social anthropology, and more than 100 original line drawings and photographs, An Archaeology of Images takes a fresh look at how ancient images of both people and animals were used in the Iron Age and Roman societies of Europe, 600...

First published in 1932.As well as an extensive introduction, this edition contains notes to all four books, a bibliographical index, a general index and an index of Tibetan words. The introduction is particularly valuable in that it sets the importance...

Examining the history and intellectual activity of the medieval Svetambara Jain renunciant order, the Tapa Gaccha, this book focuses on the consolidation by the Tapa Gaccha from the thirteenth century of its identity as the leading Svetambara order. The...

Senegalese Murid migrants have circulated cargo and currency through official and unofficial networks in Africa and the world. Muslim Families in Global Senegal focuses on trade and the transmission of enduring social value though cloth, videos of...

Applies an ethnographic perspective to the study of primatesPrimate Ethnographies, 1/e is a collection of first-person accounts of immersive field studies of primates, people, and institutions, revealing the wide spectrum of primate science (primatology)...

Through a richly detailed examination of the practices of spinning yarn from the fleece of llamas and alpacas, Earth, Water, Fleece and Fabric explores the relationship that herders of the present and of the past have maintained with their herd animals...

Originally published in 1970, this book represents a unique study of beliefs and ritual practices in a pagan religion, and of the processes by which a transformation to Christianity took place.Christianity came to the major islands of Polynesia nearly...

Over the last fifteen years local citizens' movements have spread rapidly throughout Japan. Created with the aim of improving the quality of the local environment, and of environmental management processes, such activities are widely referred to as...

Food is an important cultural marker of identity in contemporary Asian societies, and can provide a medium for the understanding of social relations, family and kinship, class and consumption, gender ideology, and cultural symbolism. However, a truly...

This book follows the work of the 'Good Roots Project' - a multi-year forestry and agriculture research project in the Philippines. The scheme is an attempt on the part of industry, science and the government to better understand the processes of...

Originally published in 1974, Ritual in Industrial Society is based on several years' research including interviews and observations into the importance of ritual in industrial society within modern Britain. The book addresses how identity and meaning...

Originally published in 1989, Death, Ritual and Bereavement examines the social history of death and dying from 1500 to the 1930s. This edited collection focuses on the death-bed, funerals, burials, mourning customs, and the expression of grief. The...

In colonial Africa, Christianity has often supported, sustained, and legitimated a violent process of governance. More recently, however, following decades of violence and oppression, churches and religious organizations have mobilized African publics...

Focusing on Mexican-American and Puerto Rican populations in Chicago, Latino Ethnic Consciousness documents the development of the a collective Hispanic or Latino ethnic identity, distinct and separate from the national and cultural affiliations of...

Does the achievement of economic equality in a multiethnic society require the complete loss of a minority's cultural identity? Beyond Aztlan argues that American society has historically viewed a distinctive cultural identity as something that an ethnic...

The Palace of Culture and Science is a massive Stalinist skyscraper that was "gifted" to Warsaw by the Soviet Union in 1955. Framing the Palace's visual, symbolic, and functional prominence in the everyday life of the Polish capital as a...

At one time Francis L.K. Hsu put forth a hypothesis on kinship that proposed a functional relationship between particular kinship systems and behavior patterns in particular cultural contexts. The controversy provoked among cultural anthropologists by...

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

What does disgust have to do with citizenship? How might pain and pleasure, movement, taste, sound and smell be configured as aspects of national belonging? Senses and Citizenships: Embodying Political Life examines the intersections between sensory...

Originally published in 1998, Ritual, Identity, and the Mayan Diaspora examines the lives and the continuing ritual traditions of the Mayas in the United States. The book focuses on a predominantly Maya town in rural Florida and shows how members of this...

Originally published in 2002 Culture, Ritual and Revolution in Vietnam is a study of the history and consequences of the revolutionary campaign to transform culture and ritual in northern Vietnam. Based upon official documents and several years of field...

Part of the series Key Concepts in Indigenous Studies, this book focuses on the concepts that recur in any discussion of nature, culture and society among the indigenous. This final volume in the five-volume series deals with the two key concepts of...

Irish Ethnologies gives an overview of the field of Irish ethnology, covering representative topics of institutional history and methodology, as well as case studies dealing with religion, ethnicity, memory, development, folk music, and traditional...

Choreographies of the Living explores the implications of shifting from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman reveals the aesthetic impulse itself to be profoundly...

El libro relata la colonización dirigida de Ciudad Romero en las selvas de Panamá en Donoso, Atlántico Centro Occidental en la provincia de Colón y luego la repatriación de los refugiados salvadoreños a el Bajo Lempa. Asimismo, se aborda la migración...

Written by nationally recognized anthropologists Conrad Kottak and Lara Descartes, this ethnography of largely white, middle class families in a town in the midwest explores the role that the media play in influencing how those families cope with...

Progressive Black Masculinities brings together leading black cultural critics including Michael Eric Dyson, Mark Anthony Neal, and Patricia Hill Collins to examine an alternatively demonized and mythologized black masculinity.

This book is an exploration of how Chinese communites in the United States and Germany create and disseminate a sense of diasporic Chinese identity.

In Intoxicated Identities, Tim Mitchell provides a novel and well-grounded framework for understanding subjective drinking experiences from the Aztecs to the present day in areas as diverse as Chiapas, Chihuahua, Oaxaca, Mexico City, Texas and...

The citizens of the Marshall Islands have been told that climate change will doom their country, and they have seen confirmatory omens in the land, air, and sea. This book investigates how grassroots Marshallese society has interpreted and responded to...

This wide-ranging, comparative, and multidisciplinary collection addresses the significance of books in creating the idea of home. The chapters present cases that reveal the affective and sensory dimensions of books and reading in the practice of...

This handbook critically examines the three concepts of exclusion, inequality and stigma and their interrelationship in the Indian context. Divided into five parts, the volume deals with the issues of exclusion, inequality, gender discrimination, health...

In this lively and witty history of the study of political culture, Michael Brint examines the differences between the French sociological tradition from Montesquieu to Tocqueville; the German tradition of cultural philosophy from Kant to Weber; and the...

The idea of diversity dominates cultural policy in the twenty-first century. Against the perceived elitism of the past, policy-makers seek to use culture to address social exclusion. Drawing on original research, this book exposes problems with this...

In recent years the spatial turn in literary and cultural studies has opened up new ways of looking at the interactions among writers, readers, texts, and places. Geocriticism offers a timely new approach, and Geocritical Explorations presents an array...

One of the world's most eminent social anthropologists draws upon his many years of study and research in the field of kinship and social organization to review the development of anthropological theory and method from Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) to...