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Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation
Margaret Mead · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies
Marcel Mauss · 130 pages
"Since its first publication in English in 1954, Marcel Mauss's Essai sur le Don has been acclaimed as a classic among anthropology texts. A brilliant example of the comparative method, it presents the first systematic study of the custom -- widespread in primitive societies from ancient Rome to present-day Melanesia -- of exchanging gifts." "The gift is a perfect example of what Mauss calls a tot
Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jetha · 400 pages
"A controversial, idea-driven book that challenges everything you know about sex, marriage, family, and society"--Provided by publisher. Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. But this narrative is collapsing. Here, renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, while debunking almost everything we "know" about sex, offer a bold alternati
The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People
E.E. Evans-Pritchard · 271 pages
''Considerable part of the facts related have been previously recorded, chiefly in Sudan notes and records, and Africa.''-Pref.
Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture
Marvin Harris · 276 pages
This book challenges those who argue that we can change the world by changing the way people think. The author shows that no matter how bizarre a people's behavior may seem, it always stems from concrete social and economic conditions. It is by isolating and identifying these conditions that we will be able to understand and cope with some of our own apparently senseless life styles. In a devastat
Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes
Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, Linda L. Shaw · 314 pages
Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil
Nancy Scheper-Hughes · 621 pages
"When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When people are assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the celebrated parched lands of Northeast Brazil, Death Without Weeping is a luminously written, "womanly hearted" account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness, and death that centers on the lives of the women and children of a
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Friedrich Engels · 216 pages
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States
Seth Holmes · 264 pages
"Based on five years of research in the field (including berry-picking and traveling with migrants back and forth from Oaxaca up the West Coast), Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, uncovers how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care."--
Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
Saba Mahmood · 260 pages
"Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. Sab
Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
Arjun Appadurai · 229 pages
"Offering a new framework for the cultural study of globalization, Modernity at Large shows how the imagination works as a social force in today's world, providing new resources for identity and energies for creating alternatives to the nation-state, whose era some see as coming to an end. Appadurai examines to current epoch of globalization, which is characterized by the twin forces of mass migra
Direct Action: An Ethnography
David Graeber · 600 pages
Direct Action: An Ethnography offers a lengthy, traditional anthropological account of anarchist organizing efforts, with a focus on New York City’s Direct Action Network. For fellow researchers, he addresses the difficulties of using the narrative form and offers tips such as notetaking tools used (spiral notebook and rapidograph, a technical pen that eases hand-writing). Throughout, Graeber reco
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari · 456 pages
From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.” One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What hap
The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays
Clifford Geertz · 470 pages
In The Interpretation of Cultures, the most original anthropologist of his generation moved far beyond the traditional confines of his discipline to develop an important new concept of culture. This groundbreaking book, winner of the 1974 Sorokin Award of the American Sociological Association, helped define for an entire generation of anthropologists what their field is ultimately about.
Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
Marc Auge · 98 pages
"Shopping malls, motorways, airport lounges - we are all familiar with these curious spaces which are both everywhere and nowhere. But only now do we have a coherent analysis of their far-reaching effects on public and private experience. Marc Auge has become their anthropologist, and has written a timely and original book." "An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, air
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Emile Durkheim · 416 pages
Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour
Kate Fox · 424 pages
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
Jared Diamond · 512 pages
Overview: Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional soc
The Dancing Girls of Lahore: Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan's Pleasure District
Louise Brown · 328 pages
The dancing girls of Lahore inhabit the Diamond Market in the shadow of a great mosque. The twenty-first century goes on outside the walls of this ancient quarter but scarcely registers within. Though their trade can be described with accuracy as prostitution, the dancing girls have an illustrious history: Beloved by emperors and nawabs, their sophisticated art encompassed the best of Mughal cultu
Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
Johan Huizinga · 227 pages
Ein klassischer Essay der Kulturgeschichte und Anthropologie Ein grundlegendes Element unserer Kultur ist das Spiel. Der Mensch ist ein Spieler – und ohne seine Lust und Fähigkeit zum Spielen hätten sich ganze Bereiche seiner Kultur nicht entwickelt: die Dichtung, das Recht, die Wissenschaft, die bildende Kunst, die Philosophie und viele andere. Johan Huizinga, der große holländische Historiker u