Social science / Anthropology

Devoted to Death

by R. Andrew Chesnut

R. Andrew Chesnut offers a fascinating portrayal of Santa Muerte, a skeleton saint whose cult has attracted millions of devotees over the past decade. Although condemned by mainstream churches, this folk saint's...

Venus of Khala-Kanti

by Angèle Kingué & Christine Schwartz Hartley

The story of Venus of Khala-Kanti unfolds in the ancient forests of an imaginary West African village. The story is at once a straightforward narrative of human courage and an allegory for the amputation of...

China Online: Netspeak and Wordplay Used by over 700 Million Chinese Internet Users

by Véronique Michel, Claude Muller & Sebastien Koval

Dive into China's cool new web-based subculture with China Online!

Using Baidu, China's form of Google, young Chinese web-surfers are creating their own language on the Internet. With this book, you can get an...

Anthropological Conversations: Talking Culture across Disciplines

by Caroline B. Brettell

Brettell explores the cross-disciplinary exchanges, both past and present, which have engaged cultural anthropologists—and invites readers to continue the conversations.

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.

Rapid Qualitative Inquiry: A Field Guide to Team-Based Assessment

by James Beebe

An accessible field guide to Rapid Qualitative Inquiry (RQI)—a team-based, applied research method designed to quickly develop an insider’s perspective on and preliminary understanding of complicated situations....

The Domestication of Language: Cultural Evolution and the Uniqueness of the Human Animal

by Daniel Cloud

Language did not evolve only in the distant past. Our shared understanding of the meanings of words is ever-changing, and we make conscious, rational decisions about which words to use and what to mean by them...

The Social Cancer: A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere

by Jose Rizal

The Social Cancer: A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere from the Spanish of José Rizal By Charles Derbyshire.

Recorded in the history of human sufferings is a cancer of so malignant a character that...

Behold the Proverbs of a People: Proverbial Wisdom in Culture, Literature, and Politics

by Wolfgang Mieder

The preeminent scholar of proverbs addresses the immense cultural impact of proverbs world-wide

Food on the Rails: The Golden Era of Railroad Dining

by Jeri Quinzio

Food on the Rails traces the rise and fall of food on the rails from its rocky start to its glory days to its sad demise. Looking at the foods, the service, the rail station restaurants, the menus, the dining...

The Cultural Revolution and Overacting: Dynamics between Politics and Performance

by Tuo Wang

This postmodern study of the Chinese Cultural Revolution examines the inner mechanism of the mass movement. Utilizing methodologies of cultural anthropology, linguistics, acting theory, and literary criticism,...

The Passage from Youth to Adulthood: Narrative and Cultural Thresholds

by Pierluca Birindelli

This book investigates how young adults build their identities in modern society. Looking at narratives from Italian young adults living with their parents and from university students, along with sociological,...

Love and War: How Militarism Shapes Sexuality and Romance

by Tom Digby

Ideas of masculinity and femininity become sharply defined in war-reliant societies, resulting in a presumed enmity between men and women. This so-called battle of the sexes intensifies in tandem with dispositions...

Lost World

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...

Research Beyond Borders: Multidisciplinary Reflections

by Anjana Narayan, Lise-Hélène Smith, Wiline Pangle & Sami Hanna et al.

This collection draws insights from an interdisciplinary group of scholars specializing in diverse methods used in the social sciences and humanities to reflect on the empirical, methodological, and practical...

Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches

by H. Russell Bernard

Research Methods in Anthropology is the standard textbook for methods classes in anthropology. Written in Russ BernardOs unmistakable conversational style, his guide has launched tens of thousands of students...

Population Control

by JIM MARRS

From the food we eat, the water we drink to the air we breathe, everything these days seems capable of killing us. Recently we have seen an unprecedented number of deaths due to medications for diseases that...

Anthropologists in Arms: The Ethics of Military Anthropology

by George R. Lucas Jr.

Anthropologists in Arms traces the troubled history of social scientists' collaboration with national military, security, and intelligence organizations and analyzes the moral and ethical debates provoked by...

A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend

by Ralph Maud

The luminaries of field research in British Columbia – Boas, Teit, Hill-Tout, Barbeau, and others – are discussed, their work evaluated.

Anthropology of Childhood and Youth: International and Historical Perspectives

by Geoffrey Vitale

In this book, Geoffrey Vitale shows the ways in which people understand, raise, and educate children and youth differently from century to century and from country to country according to the culture, lifestyle,...