Anthropology

The meaning that people attribute to things necessarily derives from human transactions and motivations, particularly from how those things are used and circulated. The contributors to this volume examine how things are sold and traded in a variety of...

The Gift brilliantly argues for the importance of creativity in our increasingly money-driven society. Reaching deep into literature, anthropology and psychology Lewis Hyde's modern masterpiece has at its heart the simple and important idea that a 'gift'...

Is this the right book for me? An indispensable guide to this sometimes challenging domain. Using contemporary examples to further your understanding, it takes a broad look at theorists in a range of disciplines. Whether you're encountering postmodernism...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780385483629Author Meredith SmallFormat PaperbackPage Count 336Imprint Doubleday & Co Inc.Publisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 283gDimensions(mm)...

The definitive companion for anyone seeking to delve beneath the surface of Naples. Naples is an Italian city like no other. Drama and darkness are often associated with the Naples, which rests beneath active Mount Vesuvius and is the home of the...

Without the State explores the 2013-14 Euromaidan protests - a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine - through in-depth ethnographic research with leftist, feminist, and student activists in Kyiv. The book discusses the concept of...

"Ailton Krenak's ideas inspire, washing over you with every truth-telling sentence. Read this book." - Tanya Talaga, bestselling author of Seven Fallen Feathers Indigenous peoples have faced the end of the world before. Now, humankind is on a collective...

'One of the great books of our century . . . It speaks with a human voice' Susan SontagTristes Tropiques begins with the line 'I hate travelling and explorers', yet during his life Claude Levi-Strauss travelled from wartime France to the Amazon basin...

1971 was a great year for cinema. Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Dario Argento, Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, Sergio Leone, George Lucas, Sam Peckinpah, Roman Polanski, Nicolas Roeg and Steven Spielberg, among many others, were behind the camera, while...

In AD68 Nero's suicide marked the end of the first dynasty of imperial Rome. The following year was one of drama and danger, though not of chaos.In the surviving books of his Histories the barrister-historian Tacitus, writing some thirty years after the...

Can the study of religion be justified? Scholarship in religion, especially work in "theory and method," is preoccupied with matters of research procedure and thus inarticulate about the goals that motivate scholarship in the field. For that reason, the...

Our history is littered with heads. Over the centuries, they have decorated our churches, festooned our city walls and filled our museums; they have been props for artists and specimens for laboratory scientists, trophies for soldiers and items of barter...

Harry Mount's How England Made the English: From Why We Drive on the Left to Why We Don't Talk to Our Neighbours is packed with astonishing facts and wonderful stories.Q. Why are English train seats so narrow?A. It's all the Romans' fault. The first...

The notion of 'the public sphere' has become increasingly central to theories and studies of democracy, media, and culture over the last few decades. It has also gained political importance in the context of the European Union's efforts to strengthen...

First published in 1967, Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage has been lauded as one of the most significant photobooks of the twentieth century, revealing the horrors of apartheid to the world for the first time and influencing generations of photographers...

A new edition of Steve Taylor's bestselling classic, in which the author provides an Afterword, including research developments that have occurred since the book was first published in 2005. "An important and fascinating book about the origin, history...

As a young girl in China Xinran heard a rumour about a soldier in Tibet who had been brutally fed to the vultures in a ritual known as a sky burial: the tale frightened and fascinated her. Several decades later Xinran met Shu Wan, a Chinese woman who had...

In Deceit and Self Deception Robert Trivers, whose work has been acclaimed by figures such as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, looks at how and why we so often deceive ourselves. We lie to ourselves every day: about how well we drive, how much we're...

"They demolish our houses while we build theirs." This is how a Palestinian stonemason, in line at a checkpoint outside a Jerusalem suburb, described his life to Andrew Ross. Palestinian "stone men", utilizing some of the best quality dolomitic...

Raymond Williams possessed unique authority as Britain's foremost cultural theorist and public intellectual. Informed by an unparalleled range of reference and the resources of deep personal experience, his life's work represents a patient, exemplary...

In 1939, Britain was preparing for war. As well as building aeroplanes and digging Anderson shelters, this meant managing food supplies for the home front.The Ministry of Food rose to the challenge, introducing rationing, encouraging the nation to dig...

Gypsies have always intrigued and fascinated - partly because of their mysterious origins, and partly because of the romance of nomadism. But because they resist assimilation, having survived as a distinct people for over a thousand years, they have also...

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Indonesia is the world's second-largest cigarette market: two out of three men smoke,...

Are you grieving? Would you like to have a better understanding of grief? Are you wanting to support someone who is grieving but don't know how? This beautifully illustrated book written by two experienced Bereavement Practitioners is unlike any other...

Set in the valley of the Mesta, one of the oldest inhabited river valleys in Europe and a nexus for wild plant gatherers, Elixir is an unforgettable exploration of the deep connections between people, plants and place.'Kassabova had me under her spell...

A groundbreaking anthology that probes the disposition towards the visually different Giants. Midgets. Tribal non-Westerners. The very fat. The very thin. Hermaphrodites. Conjoined twins. The disabled. The very hirsute. In American history, all have...

This major study develops a new account of modernity and its relation to the self. Building upon the ideas set out in The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens argues that 'high' or 'late' modernity is a post traditional order characterised by a developed...

What a rare mushroom can teach us about sustaining life on a fragile planetMatsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world-and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees,...

Nearly eleven million Chinese migrants live outside of China. While many of these faces of China's globalization headed for the popular Western destinations of the United States, Australia and Canada, others have been lured by the booming Asian economies...

The reissue of Joseph and Frances Gies's classic bestseller on life in medieval villages. This new reissue of Life in a Medieval Village, by respected historians Joseph and Frances Gies, paints a lively, convincing portrait of rural people at work and...

Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality has been one of the most influential books of the last two decades. It has had an enormous impact on cultural studies and work across many disciplines on gender, sexuality, and the body. Bringing a new set of...

The Third Chimpanzee was first published in 1991 and has been in print ever since. This new, illustrated edition is aimed at a young readership. In it, Jared Diamond explores what makes us human and poses fascinating questions. If we share more than...

________________________For decades, John Humphrys has been at the beating heart of the BBC's news division.From the 9 O'Clock News desk to his marathon 32-year stint on the Today Programme, Humphrys has had a remarkable career as a journalist, steering...

A vibrant, groundbreaking history of American radicalism since the SixtiesWhat happened to the American left after the Sixties? This engrossing account traces the evolution of disruptive protest over the last 40 years to tell a larger story about the...

On April 26, 1986, Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in then Soviet Ukraine. More than 3.5 million people in Ukraine alone, not to mention many citizens of surrounding countries, are still suffering the effects. Life Exposed is the...

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

Soon after publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received a letter that deeply unsettled him. He had expected outrage and accusations of heresy, but this letter was different: it accused him of taking credit for a theory that wasn't his...

Still Standing is a celebration of the vanishing vernacular architecture of Dominica. These small wooden homes, ingeniously crafted and carefully adapted to their environment, have survived hurricanes and earthquakes; in contrast to many modern concrete...

A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the...

'A wonderful and sometimes devastating book ... sophisticated, nuanced, fair-minded and yet very hard hitting' SIMON KUPER'This will transport you to Qatar and teach you with humanity and empathy some of the dark truths about globalisation' BEN...