From teddy bears and Winnie-the-Pooh to Smokey Bear, Yogi Bear, and Cocaine Bear, American popular culture has been fascinated with real and fictional bears for more than two centuries. Bears are ubiquitous, appearing in advertisements, as logos for...

Fear Of A Dead White Planet Is A Collaboratively Written Project Meant To Assess The Current Terms Of Planetary And Environmental Thinking In The University. Grounded In Concepts Of Land And Place And Understandings Of Deep Structural Violences Via...

Whilst the fundamental significance of the spoken language for human interaction is widely acknowledged, that of writing is less well known, and in this wide-ranging series of essays Jack Goody examines in depth the complex and often confused...

In this seminal, founding work of political anthropology, Pierre Clastres takes on some of the most abiding and essential questions of human civilization: What is power? What is society? How, among all the possible modes of political organization, did we...

Thucydides' classic work on the history of the Peloponnesian War is the root of Western conceptions of history—including the idea that Western history is the foundation of everyone else's. Here, Marshall Sahlins takes on Thucydides and the conceptions of...

Concerned with the origins of capitalism and the conditions that accompanied its birth, this work argues that capitalism is more than an economic system: it is a culture that affects not just the material but also the social, familial and even spiritual...

In considering how anthropologists have chosen to look at and write about politics, Joan Vincent contends that the anthropological study of politics is itself a historical process. Intended not only as a representation but also as a reinterpretation, her...

Starting with the premise that Europe was made by its imperial projects as much as colonial encounters were shaped by events and conflicts in Europe, the contributors to Tensions of Empire investigate metropolitan-colonial relationships from a new...

In Geneologies of Religion, Talal Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied as a universal concept.The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation—from...

An anthropological study of time, and how it is employed, to discuss humans and human endeavors.

A lifetime's study brings revealing expertise to an oft-misunderstood topic in human history--the origin and language of the Indo-Europeans.

A lively journey through the story of language, from an infant's first word to the languages of the internetLanguage never leaves you alone. It’s there in your head, helping you think. It’s there to help you make relationships – and to break them. It’s...

Drawing on a 30-year-old passion for studying Australia's Indigenous people, this memoir records the author's life and work in Australia against the background of Soviet politics and academia since the revolution.

Clastres's final, posthumous book on the affirmative role of violence in “primitive societies.”The war machine is the motor of the social machine; the primitive social being relies entirely on war, primitive society cannot survive without war. The more...

One of America's leading anthropolgists offers solutions to the perplexing question of why people behave the way they do.Why do Hindus worship cows? Why do Jews and Moslems refuse to eat pork? Why did so many people in post-medieval Europe believe in...

A major, eclectic work of extraordinary scope and unprecedented vision, The Three Worlds is much more than a study of the contemporary Third World. It examines the constituents of development—cultural as well as political and economic—throughout the...