Anthropology category: 10809 books
The Myth of Quetzalcoatl
Religion, Rulership, and History in the Nahua World
Language: English
Release Date: November 7, 2015
The Myth of Quetzalcoatl is a translation of Alfredo López Austin’s 1973 book Hombre-Dios: Religión y politica en el mundo náhuatl. Despite its pervasive and lasting influence on the study of Mesoamerican history, religion in general, and the Quetzalcoatl myth in particular, this work has not...
by Robert Zingg
Language: English
Release Date: July 22, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: July 22, 2010
In 1930, anthropologists Robert Zingg and Wendell Bennett spent nine months among the Tarahumara of Chihuahua, Mexico, one of the least acculturated indigenous societies in North America. Their fieldwork resulted in The Tarahumara: An Indian Tribe of Northern Mexico (1935), a classic ethnography still...
Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana
The Encounter between the LoDagaa and 'the World on Paper'
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2002
This book presents a new perspective on colonialism in Africa. Drawing on work from a variety of subjects and disciplines – from the ancient Mediterranean to colonial Spain, and from anthropology to psychology – the author argues that colonialism in Africa needs to be understood through the medium...
by Nancy Sullivan
Language: English
Release Date: June 16, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: June 16, 2012
This is a memoir by anthropologist Nancy Sullivan about working and living in Papua New Guinea for 24 years, where she is also married and raising children. Prompted by personal memories, the essays are episodic but also invoke some basic anthropological theory in a way that makes it accessible and...
The Funeral Casino
Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand
Language: English
Release Date: January 10, 2009
The Funeral Casino is a heretical ethnography of the global age. Setting his book within Thailand's pro-democracy movement and the street massacres that accompanied it, Alan Klima offers a strikingly original interpretation of mass-mediated violence through a study of funeral gambling and Buddhist...
by Margaret Mead
Language: English
Release Date: May 10, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: May 10, 2016
Margaret Mead was famous for keeping in touch with a wide circle of friends as we see in this collection of wonderfully revealing correspondence from the field. Written over a period of half a century, these letters to friends, family, and colleagues detail her first fieldwork in Samoa and go on to...
Acquainted with the Night
Excursions Through the World After Dark
Language: English
Release Date: December 6, 2008
Weaving together science and storytelling, art and anthropology, Dewdney takes readers on a fascinating journey through the nocturnal realm. In twelve chapters corresponding to the twelve hours of night, he illuminates night's central themes, including sunsets, nocturnal animals, bedtime stories,...
Cultural Intimacy
Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Societies, and Institutions
Language: English
Release Date: March 2, 2016
In the third edition of this important and influential book, Michael Herzfeld revisits the idea of ‘cultural intimacy’. The chapters examine a range of topics touching on the relationship between state and citizen, and the notion of ‘national character’. Herzfeld provides a developed theoretical...
by Andrew Clifford
Language: English
Release Date: July 18, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: July 18, 2012
"Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity"
The opening line of the film Troy captures the tragic essence of personal mortality: ones' passing into oblivion and fading from all memory. Since the prehistoric dawn of humanity death has shadowed everyone’s footsteps. Even into the...
Sound Play
Video Games and the Musical Imagination
Language: English
Release Date: March 5, 2014
Video games open portals to fantastical worlds where imaginative play and enchantment prevail. These virtual settings afford us considerable freedom to act out with relative impunity. Or do they? Sound Play explores the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of people's creative engagements...
Bali: Sekala & Niskala
Essays on Religion, Ritual, and Art
Language: English
Release Date: September 13, 2011
"The best book on Bali for the serious visitor…Has the freshness of personal experience."—Dr. Hildred Geertz, author of Kinship in Bali and Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University
In Bali, what you see—sekala—is a colorful world of ceremony, ritual, dance, and drama....
The Anthropologist as Writer
Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2016
Writing is crucial to anthropology, but which genres are anthropologists expected to master in the 21st century? This book explores how anthropological writing shapes the intellectual content of the discipline and academic careers. First, chapters identify the different writing genres and contexts...
Anyone
The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology
Language: English
Release Date: July 1, 2012
The significance that people grant to their affiliations as members of nations, religions, classes, races, ethnicities and genders is evidence of the vital need for a cosmopolitan project that originates in the figure of Anyone – the universal and yet individual human being. Cosmopolitanism offers...
Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines : Or Seven Books of Wisdom of the Great Path According to the Late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup's English Rendering
Or Seven Books of Wisdom of the Great Path, According to the Late L=ama Kazi Dawa-Samdup's English Rendering
Language: English
Release Date: July 28, 2000
Books audiotapes and classes about yoga are today as familiar as they are widespread but we in the West have only recently become engaged in the meditative doctrines of the East--only in the last 70 or 80 years in fact. In the early part of the 20th century it was the pioneering efforts of keen scholars...