Social science / Anthropology

The Serpent and the Rainbow

by Wade Davis

In April 1982, ethnobotanist Wade Davis arrived in Haiti to investigate two documented cases of zombis -- people who had reappeared in Haitian society years after they had been officially declared dead and had...

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition

by Jared Diamond

In Jared Diamond’s follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the author explores how climate change, the population explosion and political discord create the conditions for the collapse...

African Political Systems

by Meyer Fortes

AFRICAN POLITICAL SYSTEMS by Fortes, Meyer CONTENTS: EDITORS' NOTE. PREFACE. Professor A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, M.A. (Cantab.), Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Oxford INTRODUCTION....

Counterplay: An Anthropologist at the Chessboard

by Robert R. Desjarlais

"Chess gets a hold of some people, like a virus or a drug," writes Robert Desjarlais in this absorbing book. Drawing on his lifelong fascination with the game, Desjarlais guides readers into the world of twenty-first-century...

Bowling Alone

by Robert D. Putnam

Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work -- but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified in this brilliant volume, Bowling Alone...

Anthropology: The Basics

by Peter Metcalf

The ultimate guide for the student encountering anthropology for the first time, Anthropology: The Basics explains and explores key anthropological concepts including:

• what is anthropology?
• how can we distinguish...

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

by Natasha Dow Schüll

Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels and card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals. Addiction by Design takes readers into...

How Ancient Europeans Saw the World: Vision, Patterns, and the Shaping of the Mind in Prehistoric Times

by Peter S. S. Wells

The peoples who inhabited Europe during the two millennia before the Roman conquests had established urban centers, large-scale production of goods such as pottery and iron tools, a money economy, and elaborate...

Mexico: Why a Few Are Rich and the People Poor

by Ramon Ruiz

Explicitly focusing on the malaise of underdevelopment that has shaped the country since the Spanish conquest, Ramón Eduardo Ruiz offers a panoramic interpretation of Mexican history and culture from the pre-Hispanic...

The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

by Wade Davis

Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? Anthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to...

Spain Is Different

by Helen Wattley-Ames

Seven years after the publication of the first edition, Spain is still different, but it is also changing-modernizing rapidly and participating as an active member of the European Union.The second edition of...

Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People

by Jon Entine

Could our sense of who we are really turn on a sliver of DNA? In our multiethnic world, questions of individual identity are becoming increasingly unclear. Now in ABRAHAM'S CHILDREN bestselling author Jon Entine...

Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World

by Doug Saunders

Look around: the largest migration in human history is under way. For the first time ever, more people are living in cities than in rural areas. Between 2007 and 2050, the world’s cities will have absorbed...

Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research: An Introduction

by Margaret D. LeCompte & Jean J. Schensul

This first volume of the Ethnographer's Toolkit provides a practical, straightforward introduction to ethnography and ethnographic practice to the student and novice fieldworker.

The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics

by Barrett Watten

Provocative cultural readings of avant-garde literature and art.

Skull Wars Kennewick Man, Archaeology, And The Battle For Native American Identity

by David H. Thomas

Centered on the lawsuit over Kennewick Man, this lively history illuminates one of the most contentious issues in science: the battle between archeologists and American Indians.

Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia

by Robert W. Hefner

Civil Islam tells the story of Islam and democratization in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation. Challenging stereotypes of Islam as antagonistic to democracy, this study of courage and reformation...

Lost World: Rewriting Prehistory---How New Science Is Tracing

by Tom Koppel

For decades the issue seemed moot. The first settlers, we were told, were big-game hunters who arrived from Asia at the end of the Ice Age some 12,000 years ago, crossing a land bridge at the Bering Strait and...

Japanese Women, Class and the Tea Ceremony

by Kaeko Chiba

This book examines the complex relationship between gender and class among Japanese tea ceremony (chad?) practitioners in Japan; it argues that chad? has a cultural, economic, social and symbolic value and...

Indigenous Knowledge, Ecology, and Evolutionary Biology

by Raymond Pierotti

Indigenous ways of understanding and interacting with the natural world are characterized as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), which derives from emphasizing relationships and connections among species....