Anthropology

The Malleus is an important text and is frequently quoted by authors across a wide range of scholarly disciplines. Yet it also presents serious difficulties: it is difficult to understand out of context, and is not generally representative of late...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Tree explores the forms, uses, and alliances of this living object's entanglement with humanity, from antiquity to the present. Trees tower...

"Dissanayake argues that art was central to human evolutionary adaptation and that the aesthetic faculty is a basic psychological component of every human being. In her view, art is intimately linked to the origins of religious practices and to...

Richard Schechner's pioneering textbook is a lively, accessible overview of the full range of performance, with primary extracts, student activities, key biographies, and over 200 images of global performance. The publication of Performance Studies: An...

Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis's brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world's most industrially advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the...

Located only blocks from Tokyo's glittering Ginza, Tsukiji--the world's largest marketplace for seafood--is a prominent landmark, well known but little understood by most Tokyoites: a supplier for countless fishmongers and sushi chefs, and a popular and...

The academic world has been plagued in recent years by scepticism about truth and knowledge. Paul Boghossian, in his long-awaited first book, sweeps away relativist claims that there is no such thing as objective truth or knowledge, but only truth or...

First published in 1920, How to Dine in Style opens a window onto the golden age of elegant dining, where the basic function of ingesting nourishment was elevated to a high social art, attended by intricate details and elaborate ritual. Starched linens,...

In a world of swift and sweeping cultural transformations, few have seen changes as rapid and dramatic as those experienced by the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea in the last four decades. A remote people never directly "missionized," the Urapmin began in...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780805211740Author Ruth R. WisseFormat PaperbackPage Count 256Imprint Schocken BooksPublisher Schocken Books

Our early ancestors lived in small groups and worked actively to preserve social equality. As they created larger societies, however, inequality rose, and by 2500 bce truly egalitarian societies were on the wane. In The Creation of Inequality, Kent...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781532693182Author Robert StraussFormat PaperbackPage Count 238Imprint Wipf & Stock PublishersPublisher Wipf & Stock PublishersWeight(grams)...

Who are the agents of financial regulation? Is good (or bad) financial governance merely the work of legislators and regulators? Here Annelise Riles argues that financial governance is made not just through top-down laws and policies but also through the...

Crumpled Paper Boat is a book of experimental ventures in ethnographic writing, an exploration of the possibilities of a literary anthropology. These original essays from notable writers in the field blur the boundaries between ethnography and genres...

Bone is a marvel, an adaptable and resilient building material developed over 500 million years of evolutionary history. It has manifested itself in wings, sails, horns, armour, and an even greater array of appendages since the time of its origin. In...

Listen to David Hesmondhalgh discuss the arguments at the core of 'Why Music Matters' with Laurie Taylor on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed here: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03q9q2n/Thinking_Allowed_Why_Music_Matters_Bhangra_and_Belonging/ In what ways...

The assault on the Bastille, the Reign of Terror, Danton mocking his executioner, Robespierre dispensing a fearful justice, and the archetypal gadfly Marat - the events and figures of the French Revolution have exercised a hold on the historical...

Red Tape presents a major new theory of the state developed by the renowned anthropologist Akhil Gupta. Seeking to understand the chronic and widespread poverty in India, the world's fourth largest economy, Gupta conceives of the relation between the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780143113744Author Christine KenneallyFormat PaperbackPage Count 368Imprint Penguin USAPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 340gDimensions(mm) 213mm *...

The study of material culture is concerned with the relationship between persons and things in the past and in the present, in urban and industrialized and in small-scale societies across the globe. The Handbook of Material Culture provides a critical...

Autism has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years, thanks to dramatically increasing rates of diagnosis, extensive organizational mobilization, journalistic coverage, biomedical research, and clinical innovation. Understanding Autism, a...

The Agricultural Dilemma questions everything we think we know about the current state of agriculture and how to, or perhaps more importantly how not to, feed a world with a growing population. This book is about the three fundamental forms of...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy - until they were overthrown by the voices of the...

The first generation of children born after Rwanda's 1994 genocide is just now reaching maturity, setting aside their school uniforms to take up adult roles in Rwandan society and the economy. At the same time, Rwanda's post-war government has begun to...

The ethnic and religious violence that characterized the late twentieth century calls for new ways of thinking and writing about politics. Listening to the voices of people who experience political violence-either as victims or as perpetrators-gives new...

This new collection gathers 23 highly insightful yet previously difficult-to-find interviews with Baudrillard, ranging over topics as diverse as art, war, technology, globalisation, terrorism and the fate of humanity. From familiar themes to the less...

"The sacred texts of Ifa, repository of the accumulated wisdom of countless generations of Yoruba people, are an invaluable source not only for all students of African oral literature and Yoruba civilization, but also for future generations interested in...

Examines the role of imagination in the cultural development of our shrinking world. The world is growing smaller. Every day we hear this idea expressed and witness its reality in our lives-through the people we meet, the products we buy, the foods we...

In the village of Elmdon in north-west Essex, members of certain families are distinguished from other residents as being `real Elmdon'. Through a detailed ethnography of the structure of the village, and the interrelationships between its various...

This book assesses the impact of writing on human societies, both in the Ancient Near East and in twentieth-century Africa, and highlights some general features of social systems that have been influenced by this major change in the mode of communication...

Bryan D. Palmer reinterprets the history of labour and the left in the United States during the 1930s through a discussion of the emergence of Trotskyism in the most advanced capitalist country in the world. Focussing on James P. Cannon, the founder of...

In the 1990s a small midwestern American town approved the construction of a massive pork complex, where almost 7 million hogs are birthed, raised, and killed every year. In Porkopolis Alex Blanchette explores how this rural community has been...

A bold redefinition of historical inquiry based on the "cropscape"-the people, creatures, technologies, ideas, and places that surround a crop Human efforts to move crops from one place to another have been a key driving force in history. Crops have...

Webb Keane argues that by looking at representations as concrete practices we may find them to be thoroughly entangled in the tensions and hazards of social existence. This book explores the performances and transactions that lie at the heart of public...

Culture Smart guides help travellers have a more meaningful and successful time abroad through a better understanding of the local culture. Chapters on values, attitudes, customs, and daily life will help you make the most of your visit, while tips on...

Dreamscapes of Modernity offers the first book-length treatment of sociotechnical imaginaries, a concept originated by Sheila Jasanoff and developed in close collaboration with Sang-Hyun Kim to describe how visions of scientific and technological...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781629631035Author Penny RimbaudFormat PaperbackPage Count 122Imprint PM PressPublisher PM PressWeight(grams) 107g

Edited by Barry Cunliffe, one of the world's leading archaeologists, this book provides a comprehensive account of prehistoric Europe from the coming of the Stone Age to the fall of the Roman Empire. Unique in its approach, it is a history of both...

A century ago, the idea of indigenous people as an active force in the contemporary world was unthinkable. It was assumed that native societies everywhere would be swept away by the forward march of the West and its own peculiar brand of progress and...

In this deeply personal book, the last one she wrote before her death in 2018, Deborah Bird Rose explores the shimmer of life - the iridescent pulse of beauty and power, the processes of transition and transformation - that flows across and between...