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The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People
E.E. Evans-Pritchard · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorSex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies
Margaret Mead · 335 pages
Focusing on three tribes from New Guinea, the author advances the theory that many so-called masculine and feminine characteristics are not based on fundamental sex differences, but reflect the cultural conditioning of different societies.
The 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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Emile Durkheim · 416 pages
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
Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes
Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, Linda L. Shaw · 314 pages
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
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
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."--
Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour
Kate Fox · 424 pages
Tristes Tropiques
Claude Levi-Strauss · 418 pages
Tristes Tropiques was an immensely popular bestseller when it was first published in France in 1955. Claude Levi-Strauss's groundbreaking study of the societies of a number of Amazonian peoples is a cornerstone of structural anthropology and an exploration by the author of his own intellectual roots as a professor of philosophy in Brazil before the Second World War, as a Jewish exile from Nazi-oc
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
Argonauts of the Western Pacific
Bronislaw Malinowski · 527 pages
"Bronislaw Malinowski's pathbreaking Argonauts of the Western Pacific is at once a detailed account of exchange in the Melanesian islands and a manifesto of a modernist anthropology. Malinowski argued that the goal of which the ethnographer should never lose sight is 'to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.' Through vivid evocations of Kula li