NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award WinnerFinalist for the National Book Critics Circle AwardFrom an award-winning historian comes a dazzling history of the birth of cultural anthropology and the adventurous scientists who pioneered...

An Ecological Perspective on the Eastern Pueblos; Three Perspectives on Puebloan Prehistory; Rio Grande Ethnohistory; A New Perspective on American Indian Linguistics; Some Unsolved Problems of Pueblo Social Organization; Ritual Drama and Pueblo World...

An in-depth and beautifully illustrated look at one of the most revered works of antiquity, the Ishtar Gate of ancient BabylonIn the ancient Near East, expert craftspeople were more than technicians: they numbered among those special members of society...

"MacKendrick writes so enthusiastically that all laymen who have a serious interest in scholarship and antiquity will delight in following his story." --New York Times Book Review

Spain's most productive, creative, and highly regarded anthropologist, Carmelo Lison-Tolosana was born in the small Aragonese community he calls Belmonte." This work reflects both his deep knowledge of the village and the objectivity of his professional...

How does law transform family, sexuality, and community in the fractured social world characteristic of the colonizing process? The law was a cornerstone of the so-called civilizing process of nineteenth-century colonialism. It was simultaneously a means...

The Swiss thinker J. J. Bachofen is most often connected with his theory of matriarchy, or "mother right," but that concept is only a small part of his contribution to our understanding of cultural history. This book includes an autobiographical essay...

Recent insights into the nature of representation and power relations have signaled an important shift in perspective on anthropology: from a fieldwork-based "science" of culture to an interpretive activity bound to the discursive and ideological process...

Perhaps the most famous modern-day millenarian movements are the "cargo cults" of Melanesia, active especially during the 1930s and 1950s. Melanesians had long believed that the sign of the millennium would be the arrival of their ancestors in ships...

“Grieve well and you grow stronger.” Anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter heard this wisdom over and over while living in post-Katrina New Orleans, where everyday violence disproportionately affects Black communities. What does it mean to grieve well?...

From Boas to Black Power investigates how U.S. cultural anthropologists wrote about race, racism, and "America" in the 20th century as a window into the greater project of U.S. anti-racist liberalism. Anthropology as a discipline and the American project...

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Women Mobilizing Memory, a transnational exploration of the intersection of feminism, history, and memory, shows how the recollection of violent histories can generate possibilities for progressive futures. Questioning the politics of memory-making in...

How can we think of life in its dual expression, matter and experience, the living and the lived? Philosophers and, more recently, social scientists have offered multiple answers to this question, often privileging one expression or the other – the...

In Pacific societies, local knowledge, which has been accumulated over thousands of years and is irreplaceable, is rapidly disappearing. With the extinction of languages, the ability to observe and interpret the world from varying perspectives is also...

In Secular Translations, the anthropologist Talal Asad reflects on his lifelong engagement with secularism and its contradictions. He draws out the ambiguities in our concepts of the religious and the secular through a rich consideration of...

“It is the contemporary elixir from which all manner of being emerges, the metamorphic sublime, an alchemist’s dream.” So begins Palma Africana, the latest attempt by anthropologist Michael Taussig to make sense of the contemporary moment. But to what...

As Katherine Verdery observes, "There's nothing like reading your secret police file to make you wonder who you really are." In 1973 Verdery began her doctoral fieldwork in the Transylvanian region of Romania, ruled at the time by communist dictator...