A stirring memoir of exile and self-discovery by a central figure in ethno-psychiatry. In To Sit on the Earth, pioneering ethno-psychiatrist Tobie Nathan charts his intellectual and emotional journey, from his youthful infatuation with Freud and...

Reconceptualizes human-animal relationships and their political significance in ancient and modern societies. In Live Stock and Dead Things, Hannah Chazin combines zooarchaeology and anthropology to challenge familiar narratives about the role of...

A new collection of essays reflecting on the centrality of writing anthropological practice from one of the discipline's most influential thinkers. Michael Taussig's work is known for its critical insights and bold, experimental style. In the eleven...

Stereotyped as a rather eccentric but generous woman who used her wealth to forward the disciplines of anthropology and folklore and the careers of young scholars, Elsie Clews Parsons was an outspoken feminist, pacifist, and social critic. She shocked...

Over the last two decades, anthropological studies have highlighted the problems of ‘development’ as a discursive regime, arguing that such initiatives are paradoxically used to consolidate inequality and perpetuate poverty. This volume constitutes a...

In 2001, Ethiopian Television aired a documentary about a small, rural village called Awra Amba, where women ploughed, men worked in the kitchen, and so-called harmful traditional practices did not exist. The documentary radically challenged prevailing...

Government bureaucracies across the globe have become increasingly attuned in recent years to cultural diversity within their populations. Using culture as a category to process people and dispense services, however, can create its own problems and...

Marilyn Strathern takes up an issue at the heart of studies of society--anthropologists using relationships to uncover relationships. The role of relations in western (Euro-American) knowledge practices, from the scientific revolution onwards, raises a...

Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a small Chicago adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption, Contingent Kinship charts the entanglement of institutional structures and ideologies of family, race, and class to argue that adoption is powerfully...

Discusses the findings of the archeological excavations at Chalcatzingo in Mexico and examines the influence of the Olmec culture on the region

Religious Architecture in Latium and Etruria, c. 900-500 BC presents the first comprehensive treatment of cult buildings in western central Italy from the Iron Age to the Archaic Period. By analysing the archaeological evidence for the form of early...

J. M. Adovasio has spent the last thirty years at the center of one of our most fiery scientific debates: Who were the first humans in the Americas, and how and when did they get there?At its heart, The First Americans is the story of the revolution in...

Genetic Ancestry focuses on the scientific nature and limitations of genetic ancestry testing. Co-authored by a genetic anthropologist and a cultural anthropologist, it examines the social, historical, and cultural dimensions of how people interpret...

Co-Winner of the Senior Book Prize, American Ethnological SocietyWhat the struggle over the Indonesian rainforests can teach us about the social frictions that shape the world around usRubbing two sticks together produces heat and light while one stick...