Social and cultural anthropology Books

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 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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

In the nineteenth century anarchists were accused of conspiracy by governments afraid of revolution, but in the current century various "conspiracy theories" suggest that anarchists are controlled by government itself. The Illuminati were a network of...

Women, Magic, Wisdom: Explore a Japanese myth through the words and images of key scholars and artists.Alluring, nurturing, dangerous, and vulnerable the yamamba, or Japanese mountain witch, has intrigued audiences for centuries. What is it about the...

A celebration of achievement, accomplishments, and courage!Native American Medal of Honor recipients, Heisman Trophy recipients, U.S. Olympians, a U.S. vice president, Congressional representatives, NASA astronauts, Pulitzer Prize recipients, U.S. poet...

"The cumulative power of these shared stories is nothing short of astonishing. Ping Chong creates a tremendous tapestry of lives."-Twin Cities ReaderIn Chong's extraordinary series of choral documentary dramas, bodies that had once been rendered...

The fascinating origin story of Wilson Duff, the pioneering BC anthropologist and museologist remembered for his contributions to research on First Nations cultures of the Northwest Coast. Wilson Duff was born in 1925 in the city of Vancouver and his...

*Winner of the 2019 Archaeology & Ancient History PROSE award from the Association of American Publishers (AAP)*This is the first book to survey the 'hidden half' of prehistoric societies as revealed by archaeology - from Australopithecines to...

What happens when American Indians take over an institution designed to eliminate them?The Bureau of Indian Affairs was hatched in the U.S. Department of War to subjugate and eliminate American Indians. Yet beginning in the 1970s, American Indians and...

FINALIST FOR THE GREGORY BATESONPRIZE FROM THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONDispelling stereotypes about garment workers in the global apparel industryCastoffs of Capital examines how female garment workers experience their work and personal...

A searing critique of the "freedom" that America offers to the victims of its imperialist machinations of war and occupation Meaningless Citizenship traces the costs of America's long-term military involvement around the world by following the forced...

A powerful new understanding of cooperation as an antidote to alienation and inequalityFrom the crises of racial inequity and capitalism that inspired the Black Lives Matter movement and the Green New Deal to the coronavirus pandemic, stories of mutual...

A fascinating and unprecedented ethnography of animal sanctuaries in the United States In the past three decades, animal rights advocates have established everything from elephant sanctuaries in Africa to shelters that rehabilitate animals used in...

The Villa Tugendhat, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1928, is an icon of architectural modernism. Behind the Glass tells the true story of the large family connected to it, who rose to prominence through industrial textile manufacturing.The book traces...

Onscreen/Offscreen is an ethnographic study of the ontological politics of cinema in South India.Based on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Onscreen/Offscreen is an exploration of the politics and being of...

Essays on the history of psychedelics, the present renaissance, and visions for an inclusive and equitable future. As psychedelics and psychedelic-assisted therapies explode into the popular consciousness, what does it mean to cultivate and embody a...

A comprehensive guide to understanding Vietnam's long and tumultuous historyA Brief History of Vietnam explores the turbulent history of a land that has risen from the ashes of war to become the newest Asian tiger economy. This book expertly...

Korean culture developed on a 600-mile-long peninsula, bordered on the north by mountains and three sides by the sea, set apart from the Asian mainland. Korea was one of the last countries in Asia to be visited by Westerners and its borders have remained...

For millennia, China was the largest and richest nation on earth. Two centuries ago, however, its economy sank into a depression from which it had not fully recovered-until now. China's modern resurgence as the world's largest nation in terms of...

Two volumes in one!This is a complete, two-volume set of one of the greatest books on 19th century Japanese history and culture. Though Lafcadio Hearn went on to write a dozen more books on Japan, this collection of first impressions remains his most...

This book tells the story of Bali the "paradise island of the Pacific" its rulers and its people, and their encounters with the Western world. Bali is a perennially popular tourist destination. It is also home to a fascinating people with a long and...