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...

A remarkable investigation into the hominoids of Flores Island, their place on the evolutionary spectrum—and whether or not they still survive.While doing fieldwork on the remote Indonesian island of Flores, anthropologist Gregory Forth came across...

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...

The first book length anthropological study of voluntary assisted dying in Switzerland, Leaving is a narrative account of five people who ended their lives with assistance. Stavrianakis places his observations of the judgment to end life in this way...

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...

Drawn from more than two decades of pathbreaking writing, the iconic and bestselling David Graeber's most important essays and interviews."The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make...

What 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 alone is just a stick. It is the friction that produces movement,...

Full of playful graphics, provocative questions, and curious facts, this book asks what makes a city and how we might make them differently.What makes a city a city? Who says? Drafted over decades out of a dialogue between artist and author Nika...

A concise, accessible introduction to language endangerment and why it is one of the most urgent challenges of our times.58% of the world’s languages—or, approximately 4,000 languages—are endangered. When we break this figure down, we realize that...

We know that prehistoric humans made fire and shaped tools, but in this book the author argues that our ancestors shaped us - the human face, our racial differences and our problematic relationship with nature are all self-made. The author suggests that...

A harrowing history of a grim chapter in politics and science, in which groups of influential thinkers shaped global policy with the aim of determining who had the right to have children―and who was worthy of life. The Shortest History books deliver...

The Mountain of Names offers a Kaleidoscopic view of the nature of the family throughout history. From primitive societies, where family and kinship define each person's sense of self, through the genealogies of aristocratic families, the rise of modern...