Social science / Anthropology

Family, Gender and Kinship in Australia: The Social and Cultural Logic of Practice and Subjectivity

by Allon J. Uhlmann

This ethnographically-based exploration draws on sociological, historical and demographic data to provide a comprehensive analysis of family, gender and kinship in Australia.

Unknown Huichol: Shamans and Immortals, Allies against Chaos

by Jay Courtney Fikes

The culmination of 34 years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, this book offers ground-breaking insights into fundamental principles of Huichol shamanism and ritual. The scope and length of Fikes's...

An Archaeology of Architecture: Photowriting the Built Environment

by Dennis Tedlock & Arthur Sze

Page by page, this book takes us on a journey through the built world that ranges from Greece to Guatemala and from New York to San Francisco. Tedlock practices what he calls photowriting, a creative process...

Street Sex Workers' Discourse: Realizing Material Change Through Agential Choice

by Jill McCracken

Incorporating the voices and insights of street sex workers through personal interviews, this monograph argues that the material conditions of many street workers - the physical environments they live in and...

Fire: The Spark That Ignited Human Evolution

by Frances D. Burton

Fire and light, and their impacts on our earliest human ancestor, are the subjects of this innovative study of the development of the species.

An Imagined Geography: Sierra Leonean Muslims in America

by JoAnn D'Alisera

In An Imagined Geography, anthropologist JoAnn D'Alisera demonstrates persuasively that the long-held anthropological paradigms of separate, bounded, and unique communities, geographically located and neatly...

Places in Mind: Public Archaeology as Applied Anthropology

by Paul A. Shackel & Erve J. Chambers

This edited volume provides a cross-section of the cutting-edge ways in which archaeologists are developing new approaches to their work with communities and other stakeholder groups who have special interest...

Nyansapo (the Wisdom Knot): Toward an African Philosophy of Education

by Kwadwo A. Okrah

This study examines the issues of indigenous philosophies, which are embedded in different aspects of socialization process among the Akan of Ghana. The research explores the possibility of forging a new future...

Place and Spirit in Taiwan: Tudi Gong in the Stories, Strategies and Memories of Everyday Life

by Alessandro Dell'Orto

Based on field-work in Taiwan, this book examines the ancient, indigenous religious cult of Tudi Gong both as a religio-social phenomenon and as an appropriate medium for exploring and analysing the social changes...

Receptacle of the Sacred: Illustrated Manuscripts and the Buddhist Book Cult in South Asia

by Jinah Kim

In considering medieval illustrated Buddhist manuscripts as sacred objects of cultic innovation, Receptacle of the Sacred explores how and why the South Asian Buddhist book-cult has survived for almost two millennia...

A Passage to Anthropology: Between Experience and Theory

by Kirsten Hastrup

The postmodernist critique of Objectivism, Realism and Essentialism has somewhat shattered the foundations of anthropology, seriously questioning the legitimacy of studying others. By confronting the critique...

The Sexual Lives of Savages: [1932/1952]

by Malinowski

This volume provides an ethnographic account of courtship, marriage and family life among the people of the Trobriand Islands.

Risk and Acceptability

by Mary Douglas

First published in 1985, Mary Douglas intended Risk and Acceptability as a review of the existing literature on the state of risk theory. Unsatisfied with the current studies of risk, which she found to be flawed...

The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism

by Edmund Leach

Designed to provoke controversy, the papers in this volume concentrate on two main themes: the study of myth and totemism. Starting with an English translation of La Geste d'Asdiwal, which is widely considered...

Malinowski Amongst the Magi: The Natives of Mailu [1915/1988]

by Malinowski

A reissue of Malinowski's first field monograph, containing historical and theoretical material. This edition includes a major essay by Michael Young who draws on Malinowski's diary, unpublished notebooks and...

The Father in Primitive Psychology and Myth in Primitive Psychology: [1927]

by Malinowski

This volume investigates ideas, beliefs and sentiments in relation to social organization.

Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations

by Mary Douglas

Historians as well as anthropologists have contributed to this volume of studies on aspects of witchcraft in a variety of cultures and periods from Tudor England to twentieth-century Africa and New Guinea.

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Dictionary of Symbols

by J. C. Cirlot

The unvarying essential meanings of around 1,000 symbols and symbolic themes commonly found in the art, literature and thought of all cultures through the ages are clarified.

Fieldwork and Footnotes: Studies in the History of European Anthropology

by Arturo Alvarez Roldan & Han Vermeulen

The history of anthropology has great relevance for current debates within the discipline, offering a foundation from which the professionalisation of anthropology can evolve. The authors explore key issues...

Social Experience and Anthropological Knowledge

by Kirsten Hastrup & Peter Hervik

Anthropology poses an explicit challenge to standard notions of scientific knowledge. It claims to produce genuine insights into the workings of culture in general on the basis of individual social experience...