Anthropology Books

How Romans coped with the anxieties and risks of childbirthAcross the vast expanse of the Roman Empire, anxieties about childbirth tied individuals to one another, to the highest levels of imperial politics, even to the movements of the stars. Birthing...

Finalist, 2024 Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction Finalist, 2024 Writers' Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing These days, everyone feels insecure. We are financially stressed and emotionally overwhelmed. The status quo isn't...

A timeless psychological study of a young man's deep alienation from society.Set in the early 20th century, Kokoro opens with a chance encounter on a beach near Tokyo that irrevocably links a young student to a man he simply calls Sensei...

The story of the Roman Empire's enormous wine industry told through the remarkable ceramic storage and shipping containers that made it possibleThe average resident of ancient Rome drank two-hundred-and-fifty liters of wine a year, almost a bottle a day,...

Political strategies for tackling climate change and other "long problems" that span generationsClimate change and its consequences unfold over many generations. Past emissions affect our climate today, just as our actions shape the climate of tomorrow,...

This collection of short essays examines the place of women in the history of psychedelics.While some of the subjects are pioneers in their own right, the authors in this collection go beyond merely adding women to the past in psychedelic history,...

Are war and inequality inevitable, because evolution made men competitive and dominant? Think again with this entertaining yet powerful new history of 'true' human nature.How did humans, a species that evolved to be cooperative and egalitarian, develop...

Is social media a waste of time? Is love with an artificial intelligence being possible? Gather your opinions and get ready to DEBATE IN KOREAN!Korean Conversations and Debating offers intermediate and advanced level students the tools they need to bring...

The uses of shame (and shamelessness) in spheres that range from social media and consumerism to polarised politics and mass violence.Today, we are caught in a shame spiral - a vortex of mutual shaming that pervades everything from politics to social...

An original study of empire creation and its consequences, from ancient through early modern times.The world's first great empires established by the ancient Persians, Chinese, and Romans are well known, but not the empires that emerged on their margins...

45,000 years ago, rare and precious statues of faceless women with hourglass figures, sturdy hips and generous breasts surfaced across Europe. Spanning thousands of years and nurturing many a fantasy, they are known as the prehistoric Venus figurines...

Following one woman's voyage across the Antarctic, this elegant debut confronts the dark history of the whaling industry and the mystery of one young whaler's death against the backdrop of the vast Southern Oceans."Urgent and moving."-Publishers Weekly...

A groundbreaking collection of seminal works by renowned anthropologist and cultural critic, Ghassan Hage. Praised by internationally acclaimed author of Complaint!, Sara Ahmed, as 'a new way of accounting for race, its affective grammars, its...

A journey through unexplored spaces that foreground new ways of inhabiting the urbanOne of the fundamental dimensions of urbanization is its radical transformation of nature. Today domestic animals make up more than twice the biomass of people on the...

A powerful case for why anthropology should study outsiders of thought and their speculative ideasWhat sort of thinking is needed to study anomalies in thought? In this trenchantly argued and beautifully written book, anthropologist Peter Skafish...

A powerful and provocative collection of essays that offers poignant reflections on living between society's most charged, politicized, and intractably polar spaces - between black and white, rich and poor, thin and fat.Savala Nolan knows what...

'Lucid and lyrical...a vivid history of Japan's turbocharged (and painful) modernisation.' - The Daily Telegraph In A History of Modern Japan, cultural historian Christopher Harding delves into the untold stories of...

Audience demand: .Proven market appeal: , published by Cleis Press, which has sold 2,000 copies. This new book will be far more thorough, have a color photo insert, and receive proper support to reach its endemic audience and all those who've heard of...

Work is a joke. Laughing at it is political.Humor, Groucho Marx asserted, is 'reason gone mad.' For Walter Benjamin, laughter was 'the most revolutionary emotion.' In a moment when great numbers of people are...

Yurlmun: Mokare Mia Boodja, which means 'Returning to Mokare's Home Country' explores early encounters between Menang people and the British colonists and features the stories behind 14 rare, significant objects that originated from the Menang Noongar...

A new narrative for the emergence of human music, drawing from archaeology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory.What is the origin of music? In the last few decades this centuries-old puzzle has been reinvigorated by new...

Offering invaluable information and illustrations to help travelers understand a country's people and avoid cultural faux pas Taking readers beyond the stereotypical images of windmills, clogs, and tulips, this pocket-sized guide helps visitors...

Culture Smart! Zambia offers the reader a glimpse behind the tourist panorama of unspoilt nature and the busy urban life, luxury hotels, shopping malls, and rush-hour bottlenecks of Zambia s big cities. It paints a vivid picture of the psyche of a people...

When you enter Greece's mountainous peninsula, with its long coastline and unique archipelago, you are returning to the cradle of Western civilization. And while the ancient Greeks fashioned our political, ethical, aesthetic, and scientific values, their...

Visitors marvel at Hong Kong's breathtaking location, its amazing architecture, its exciting shopping, and its fine dining. And yet it is a land of opposites of order juxtaposed with chaos, of ancient etiquette and seemingly abrupt manners, a place where...

Culture Smart! Kenya provides a cultural bridge that will carry you beyond the gloss of the hotels and deep into the warp and weft of everyday life; beyond the game parks and into the intricacies of community and wildlife coexistence; beyond the bounds...

We all know about giving and receiving gifts: they can be touching or puzzling, either strengthening bonds of friendship or becoming a burden. Gifts are an integral part of human societies and this volume explores how, over the centuries, books and...

The first work dedicated solely to the subject of slang words and their meanings, this book is a lost gem originally intended to educate the polite London classes in the parlance of thieves and ruffians, should they be so unlucky as to wander into the...

What common condition can be treated with cow dung? How do crushed oystershells ease heartburn? Can eels cure deafness? And how do you stop a stubborn case of the hiccups? If someone was struck down by illness or injury in the late eighteenth century,...

What does it mean to be human? And what, if anything, does it have to do with being a member of the animal species Homo sapiens? This dazzling book gets to the very heart of our rather unscientific motivations and prejudices, showing how they...

Fat. Such a little word evokes big responses. While 'fat' describes the size and shape of bodies - their appearance - our negative reactions to corpulence also depend on something tangible and tactile. As this book argues, there is more to fat than meets...

In much of Central Africa, eating wildlife is seen as a normal, desirable and common-sense practice. Almost all wild animals, from the largest mammals to the smallest invertebrates, are hunted, traded and consumed, providing vital income and nutrition...

The emotion and trauma of the Partition are buried deep, but Aanchal Malhotra has found a way to recover them. Through the possessions saved by her own great-grandparents as they fled their homes, she discovers the unique power of such objects: to unlock...

'Becoming An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java' is an ethnographic monograph that examines the ways in which the peoples of a peri-urban locality in East Java, Indonesia conceive of the person, by looking at how their...

A courageously personal exploration of gender identity across Muslim cultures, from the West to South Asia.From an early age, Leyla Jagiella knew that she would be defined by two things: being Muslim and being trans. Struggling to negotiate these...

This is a comprehensive history of a legendarily proud and passionate but lonely people. Much of Europe once knew them as 'child-devouring cannibals' and 'bloodthirsty Huns', but it was not long before the Hungarians became steadfast defenders of...

The ultimate visual guide to Samurai history and culture! The Samurai are continuously celebrated as the greatest warriors the world has ever seen. They ruled Japan for centuries, finally uniting the nation after a prolonged period of brutal war and...

This fascinating book tells the story of the people of Japan, from ancient teenage priest-queens to teeming hordes of salarymen, a nation that once sought to conquer China, yet also shut itself away for two centuries in self-imposed seclusion...

Proverbs, once described as 'the wisdom of many and the wit of one', offer unique insights the way of life and the social mores of past generations.This book features an introduction which explores the role of proverbs in Scottish culture and over 1,000...

In 1801, some five years after Robert Burns' death, nine of his friends sat down to dinner in what is now known as Burns Cottage in Alloway to celebrate his extraordinary life and to give thanks for his friendship. Over the years the informal theme from...

A big-hitting historical analysis of technology which uses the computer as a can-opener to expose the inequality innate in capitalismCapitalism likes us to believe in the steady, inevitable march of progress, from the abacus to the iPad. But the...

Highly regarded woodpecker expert Gerard Gorman presents a unique natural, social, and cultural history of woodpeckers. Woodpeckers are among the most remarkable birds in the avian world, having evolved a unique anatomy that enables them to peck and bore...

A writer and anthropologist searches for wild foods - and reveals what we lose in a world where wildness itself is misunderstood, commodified, and hotly pursuedTwo centuries ago, nearly half the North American diet was found in the wild. Today, so-called...

"An illuminating and memorable twenty-first-century journey. From this angle, Burning Man looks bourgeois." -Ted Conover, author of Newjack and The Routes of ManAt age twenty-two, writer Chris Urquhart left a life of middle-class comfort to document the...

This compact book records a quest for understanding, to find the story behind the Snayackstx (Sinixt) First Nation. Known in the United States as the Arrow Lakes Indians of the Colville Confederated Tribes, the tribe lived along the upper Columbia River...

For those interested in continuing the struggle for decolonisation, the word 'multiculturalism' can seem like a sad joke. After all, institutionalized multiculturalism today is a muck of buzzwords, branding strategies, and virtue...

In African-Australian Marriage Migration: An Ethnography of (Un)happiness, Henrike A. Hoogenraad follows journeys of marriage migration among African-Australian couples. The study narrates these journeys as 'happiness projects' since...

This volume places the Flint, Michigan, water contamination disaster in the context of a broader crisis created by neoliberal governance in the United States. Authors from a range of disciplines (including sociology, criminal justice, anthropology,...