🧲 Books like this
Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
Johan Huizinga · back to the book
What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Friedrich Engels · 216 pages
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Emile Durkheim · 416 pages
Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals
Hal Herzog · 334 pages
Does living with a pet really make people happier and healthier? What can we learn from biomedical research with mice? Who enjoys a better quality of life -- the chicken destined for your dinner plate or the rooster in a Saturday night cockfight? Why is it wrong to eat the family dog? Drawing on more than two decades of research into the emerging field of anthrozoology, the science of human–animal
We Have Never Been Modern
Bruno Latour · 157 pages
With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably separating us for ever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith. What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the sc
Civilization and Its Discontents
Sigmund Freud · 116 pages
Originally published in 1930, this book seeks to answer ultimate questions. What influences led to the creation of civilization? How did it come to be? What determines its course? In this classic work, Freud addresses the contest between aggression and eros, and speaks to issues of human creativity and fulfillment, the place of beauty in culture, and the effects of repression.
The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion
Mircea Eliade · 256 pages
Famed historian of religion Mircea Eliade observes that even moderns who proclaim themselves residents of a completely profane world are still unconsciously nourished by the memory of the sacred. Eliade traces manifestations of the sacred from primitive to modern times in terms of space, time, nature, and the cosmos. In doing so he shows how the total human experience of the religious man compares
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future
Riane Eisler · 261 pages
"In prehistorical times, Eisler argues, women and men lived together in egalitarian communities devoted to nurturance; with the imposition of male domination, female values gave way to creeds of hierarchy, aggression, power, obedience. Eisler, a futurist, posits a new society based on the recovery of more humane values."--Library journal (6/1/85).
The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation
Matt Ridley · 295 pages
If evolution by natural selection relentlessly favors self-interest, why do human beings live in complex societies and show so much cooperative spirit? In The Origins of Virtue, Matt Ridley, a zoologist and former American editor of the Economist, shows that recent research in a number of fields has suggested a resolution of the apparent contradiction between self-interest and mutual aid. Brillia
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 Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
Lewis Hyde · 352 pages
Starting with the premise that the work of art is a gift and not a commodity, this revolutionary book ranges across anthropology, literature, economics, and psychology to show how the 'commerce of the creative spirit' functions in the lives of artists and in culture as a whole.
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 Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently-- And Why
Richard E. Nisbett · 288 pages
A professor of psychology examines the divergent ways in which eastern and western cultures view the world, offering suggestions about how today's interdependent global cultures may be bridged.
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Joseph Campbell · 456 pages
A thoroughly intense and all-embracing read. In the 2-page preface written in 1948, he states such ground-shakingly obvious facts about the human psyche, that you'll wonder why these ideas had never dawned on you before. Then, into the main text of the book, and you're spirited away into an adventure that explores all forms of mythology and their importance in founding different cultures all aroun
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
Rene Girard · 199 pages
Rene Girard holds up the gospels as mirrors that reveal our broken humanity, and shows that they also reflect a new reality that can make us whole. Like Simone Weil, Girard looks at the Bible as a map of human behavior, and sees Jesus Christ as the turning point leading to new life. The title echoes Jesus' words: "I saw Satan falling like lightning from heaven". Girard persuades us that even as ou
Outline of a Theory of Practice
Pierre Bourdieu · 248 pages
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
Carlos Castaneda
Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
Terence McKenna · 323 pages
The Evolution of God
Robert Wright · 567 pages
In this sweeping narrative that takes us from the Stone Age to the Information Age, Robert Wright unveils a hidden pattern that the great monotheistic faiths have followed as they have evolved. Through the prisms of archaeology, theology, and evolutionary psychology, Wright's findings overturn basic assumptions about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and are sure to cause controversy. He explains
The Conquest of America
Tzvetan Todorov · 274 pages
Description. The Conquest of America is a fascinating study of cultural confrontation in the New World, with implications far beyond sixteenth-century America. The book offers an original interpretation of the Spaniards' conquest, colonization, and destruction of pre-Columbian cultures in Mexico and the Caribbean.
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Erving Goffman, Sven Bergstrom · 255 pages
A notable contribution to our understanding of ourselves. This book explores the realm of human behavior in social situations and the way that we appear to others. Dr. Goffman uses the metaphor of theatrical performance as a framework. Each person in everyday social intercourse presents himself and his activity to others, attempts to guide and control the impressions they form of him, and employs