In The Genealogical Imagination Michael Jackson juxtaposes ethnographic and imaginative writing to explore intergenerational trauma and temporality. Drawing on over fifty years of fieldwork, Jackson recounts the 150-year history of a Sierra Leone family...

As the most influential anthropologist of his generation, Claude Lévi-Strauss left a profound mark on the development of twentieth-century thought. Through a mixture of insights gleaned from linguistics, sociology, and ethnology, Lévi-Strauss elaborated...

From the bestselling author of 1177 B.C., an accessible primer to the archaeologist's craftAn archaeologist with more than thirty seasons of excavation experience, Eric H. Cline has conducted fieldwork around the world, from Greece and Crete to Egypt,...

The hard work required to make God real, how it changes the people who do it, and why it helps explain the enduring power of faithHow do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people—as if they were standing right next to them? Humans tend to see...

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.In 2005, Bolivians elected their first indigenous president, Evo Morales. Ushering in...

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 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...

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...

From an award-winning anthropologist, a lively, accessible, and irreverent introduction to the fieldWhat is anthropology? What can it tell us about the world? Why, in short, does it matter? For well over a century, cultural anthropologists have circled...

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 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...