Anthropology

For more than a thousand years, people in the rainforests of India and Burma have worked with elephants to log these otherwise impassable forests and move people and goods (often illicitly) under cover of the forest canopy. Jacob Shell takes us deep into...

Conceptualised in 1920s Japan by Yanagi Soetsu, the Mingei movement has spread world wide since the 1950s, creating phenomena as diverse as Mingei museums, Mingei connoisseurs and collectors, Mingei shops and Mingei restaurants. The theory, at its core...

In every part of the world and in every era, philosophers have reflected on the meaning of culture and its philosophical significance. Japanese Philosophers on Society and Culture:Nishida Kitaro, Watsuji Tetsuro, and Kuki Shuzo explores how three of...

Using case studies drawn from all areas of museum studies, Museums and their Communities explores the museums as a site of representation, identity and memory, and considers how it can influence its community. Focusing on the museum as an institution,...

Drawing on fieldwork from diverse Amerindian societies whose lives and worlds are undergoing processes of transformation, adaptation, and deterioration, this volume offers new insights into the indigenous constitutions of humanity, personhood, and...

What is creativity? What is the relationship between work life and personal life? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? These deep and deeply personal questions spring to the fore in Thomas Yarrow's vivid...

In anthropology, a field that is known for its critical edge and intellectual agility, few books manage to maintain both historical value and contemporary relevance. Roy Wagner's The Invention of Culture, originally published in 1981, is one. Wagner...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. When the Sony Walkman debuted in 1979, people were enthralled by the novel experience it offered: immersion in the music of their choice,...

The study of hunter-gatherers has had a profound impact on thinking about human nature and about the nature of society. The subject has especially influenced ideas on social evolution and on the development of human culture. Anthropologists and...

In this beautifully written and lavishly illustrated book Liza Dalby traces the history of the kimono - its designs, uses, aesthetics and social significance. The colourful and stylised kimono, the national garment of Japan, expresses not only Japanese...

What is joie de vivre, and why is it a fundamentally French concept? In search of those ineffable qualities that make up the joy of living, this lively book takes readers on a voyage to France through forays into literature, history, and culture. How...

Here is an original and provocative anthropological approach to the fundamental philosophical question of what makes life worth living. Gordon Mathews considers this perennial issue by examining nine pairs of similarly situated individuals in the United...

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.The Stranger at the Feast is a pathbreaking ethnographic...

In the years before Indian Independence in 1947, the Nagas of Northeast India came to exemplify an exotic society. Peoples of the Hills, radically different in culture and beliefs from the better-known Hindu peoples of the plains, they were renowned for...

In 2008, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad invited international investors to the first-ever Palestine Investment Conference, which was designed to jump-start the process of integrating Palestine into the global economy. As Fayyad described the...

Just one generation ago, the Sora tribe in India lived in a world populated by the spirits of their dead, who spoke to them through shamans in trance. Every day, they negotiated their wellbeing in heated arguments or in quiet reflections on their...

Entrepreneurial Selves is an ethnography of neoliberalism. Bridging political economy and affect studies, Carla Freeman turns a spotlight on the entrepreneur, a figure saluted across the globe as the very embodiment of neoliberalism. Steeped in more than...

The Iranian city experienced a major transformation when the Pahlavi Dynasty initiated a project of modernization in the 1920s. The Rite of Urban Passage investigates this process by focusing on the spatial dynamics of Muharram processions, a ritual that...

This completely revised edition provides a synthesis of the forces that shaped the evolution of the human growth pattern, the biocultural factors that direct its expression, the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that regulate individual development, and...

A terrible sin, a gift from the gods, a mental illness, a natural human variation--over the centuries homosexuality has been defined in all these ways. Now, in a generous work which synthesizes research in biology, history, psychology, and politics,...

The first ethnographic exploration of the contentious debate over whether nonhuman primates are capable of cultureIn the 1950s, Japanese zoologists took note when a number of macaques invented and passed on new food-washing behaviors within their troop...

Footwork is an original street-corner ethnography drawing on the themes of urban regeneration, lost space and the 24-hour city. From the rough sleeping homeless to street drinkers and sex workers, it shows how urban modernisation, development and...

In recent scholarship there is an emerging interest in the integration of philosophy and theology. Philosophers and theologians address the relationship between body and soul and its implications for theological anthropology. In so doing,...

Ethnography and Virtual Worlds is the only book of its kind--a concise, comprehensive, and practical guide for students, teachers, designers, and scholars interested in using ethnographic methods to study online virtual worlds, including both game and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781645178170Author Robert ArpFormat PaperbackPage Count 960Imprint Thunder Bay PressPublisher Thunder Bay PressWeight(grams) 1996gDimensions(mm) 212mm *...

Man the Hunted argues that primates, including the earliest members of the human family, have evolved as the prey of any number of predators, including wild cats and dogs, hyenas, snakes, crocodiles, and even birds. The authors' studies of predators on...

A compelling guide to the fundamental place of humour and comedy within Western culture-by one of its greatest exponents Written by an acknowledged master of comedy, this study reflects on the nature of humour and the functions it serves. Why do we...

This book provides a number of effective tools to aid in the recovery of LGBTQIA historic material by providing extensive glossary and non-glossary written descriptions, and how to use those terms and phrases in searching effectively online and offline...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780980231649Author James DeMeoFormat PaperbackPage Count 482Imprint Natural Energy WorksPublisher Natural Energy WorksWeight(grams) 1108g

One of the towering classics of twentieth century French literature, Phantom Africa is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work: a book composed of one man's compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journal--by turns melodramatic,...

"Life in Crisis" tells the story of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders or MSF) and its effort to "save lives" on a global scale. Begun in 1971 as a French alternative to the Red Cross, the MSF has grown into an international institution...

In 1550 the German adventurer Hans Staden was serving as a gunner in a Portuguese fort on the Brazilian coast. While out hunting, he was captured by the Tupinamba, an indigenous people who had a reputation for engaging in ritual cannibalism and who, as...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780988604308Author Berdine ArdreyFormat PaperbackPage Count 328Imprint Storydesign LtdPublisher Storydesign LtdWeight(grams) 481gDimensions(mm) 229mm *...

Over the last several decades, life in Lahore has been undergoing profound transformations, from rapid and uneven urbanization to expanding state institutions and informal economies. What do these transformations look like if viewed from the lens of...

New forms of transnational mobility and diasporic belonging have become emblematic of a supposed 'global' condition of uprootedness. Yet much recent theorizing of our so-called 'postmodern' life emphasizes movement and fluidity without interrogating who...

Throughout her distinguished career, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has sought to locate and confront shifting forms of social and cultural oppression. As her work shows, the best method for doing so is through extended practice in the ethics of reading. In...

In 2004, one of the world's last bands of voluntarily isolated nomads left behind their ancestral life in the dwindling thorn forests of northern Paraguay, fleeing ranchers' bulldozers. Behold the Black Caiman is Lucas Bessire's intimate chronicle of the...

Drawing on the explosion of academic and public interest in cognitive science in the past two decades, this volume features articles that combine literary and cultural analysis with insights from neuroscience, cognitive evolutionary psychology and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262526623Author Dorothy HoslerFormat PaperbackPage Count 320Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press LtdWeight(grams) 930g

In this book, one of the most accomplished and thoughtful cultural commentators of the day, considers the contradictory nature of cultural relations. Elizabeth Wilson explores these themes through an examination of fashion, feminism, consumer culture,...