Moving stories of life in a country enduring an ongoing crisisSeven years after the deadliest earthquake in the history of the Western Hemisphere struck Haiti, the island nation remains in crisis, all but ignored by the international community. At the center of this crisis is Lavil--"The City" in Kreyol, as Port-au-Prince is known to Haitians--the cultural, political, and economic capital of Haiti and home to over 2.5 million resilient souls. This immersive and engrossing oral history collection gives voice to the continuing struggle of Haitian people to live, love and prosper while trying to... View More...
This book argues that the Enlightenment created the intellectual foundations of modern anthropology, and cultivated the anthropological pursuit of cultural perspective. View More...
A sweeping look at the war over the Amazon--as activists, locals, and indigenous tribes struggle to save it from the threat of loggers, drug lords, and corrupt cops and politicians Following doctors and detectives, environmental activists and indigenous tribes, The Third Bank of the River traces the history of the Amazon from the arrival of the first Spanish flotilla to the drones that are now mapping unexplored parts of the forest. Grounded in rigorous firsthand reporting and in-depth research, Chris Feliciano Arnold reveals a portrait of Brazil and the Amazon that is complex, bloody, and oft... View More...
In the summer of 1963, anthropologist Jean Briggs journeyed to the Canadian Northwest Territories (now Nunavut) to begin a seventeen-month field study of the Utku, a small group of Inuit First Nations people who live at the mouth of the Back River, northwest of Hudson Bay. Living with a family as their "adopted" daughter--sharing their iglu during the winter and pitching her tent next to theirs in the summer--Briggs observed the emotional patterns of the Utku in the context of their daily life. In this perceptive and highly enjoyable volume the author presents a behavioral description of the U... View More...
In this book, the prominent theorist Partha Chatterjee looks at the creative and powerful results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa that are posited not on identity but on difference with the nationalism propagated by the West. Arguing that scholars have been mistaken in equating political nationalism with nationalism as such, he shows how anticolonialist nationalists produced their own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before beginning their political battle with the imperial power. These nationalists divided their culture into material and spiritual domains, ... View More...
For more than 30 years, renowned anthropologist Wade Davis has traveled the globe, studying the mysteries of sacred plants and celebrating the world's traditional cultures. His passion as an ethnobotanist has brought him to the very center of indigenous life in places as remote and diverse as the Canadian Arctic, the deserts of North Africa, the rain forests of Borneo, the mountains of Tibet, and the surreal cultural landscape of Haiti. In Light at the Edge of the World, Davis explores the idea that these distinct cultures represent unique visions of life itself and have much to teach the res... View More...
In this illuminating book, anthropologist Kirstin Erickson explains how members of the Yaqui tribe, an indigenous group in northern Mexico, construct, negotiate, and continually reimagine their ethnic identity. She examines two interconnected dimensions of the Yaqui ethnic imagination: the simultaneous processes of place making and identification, and the inseparability of ethnicity from female-identified spaces, roles, and practices. Yaquis live in a portion of their ancestral homeland in Sonora, about 250 miles south of the Arizona border. A long history of displacement and ethnic struggle ... View More...
In 1989 three Muslim schoolgirls from a Paris suburb refused to remove their Islamic headscarves in class. The headscarf crisis signaled an Islamic revival among the children of North African immigrants; it also ignited an ongoing debate about the place of Muslims within the secular nation-state. Based on ten years of ethnographic research, The Republic Unsettled alternates between an analysis of Muslim French religiosity and the contradictions of French secularism that this emergent religiosity precipitated. Mayanthi L. Fernando explores how Muslim French draw on both Islamic and secular-repu... View More...
A masterful work of personal reportage, this volume is also a vibrant portrait of a mysterious people and an essential document of a disappearing culture. Fabled, feared, romanticized, and reviled, the Gypsies--or Roma--are among the least understood people on earth. Their culture remains largely obscure, but in Isabel Fonseca they have found an eloquent witness. In Bury Me Standing, alongside unforgettable portraits of individuals--the poet, the politician, the child prostitute--Fonseca offers sharp insights into the humor, language, wisdom, and taboos of the Roma. She traces their exodus o... View More...
Hall, whose Beyond Culture and The Silent Language won a wider readership, has written a ground-breaking investigation of the ways we use and abuse time, rich in insights applicable to our lives. Business readers will enjoy the cross-cultural comparison of American know-how with practices of compartmentalized German, centralized French, and ceremonious Japanese firms. --Publishers Weekly In his pioneering work The Hidden Dimension, Edward T. Hall spoke of different cultures' concepts of space. Now The Dance of Life reveals the ways in which individuals in culture are tied together by invisible... View More...
Holy Harlots examines the intersections of social marginality, morality, and magic in contemporary Brazil by analyzing the beliefs and religious practices related to the Afro-Brazilian spirit entity Pomba Gira. Said to be the disembodied spirit of an unruly harlot, Pomba Gira is a controversial figure in Brazil. Devotees maintain that Pomba Gira possesses an intimate knowledge of human affairs and the mystical power to intervene in the human world. Others view this entity more ambivalently. Kelly E. Hayes provides an intimate and engaging account of the intricate relationship between Pomba Gir... View More...
"Brilliant and intimate. The book is an eloquent rendition of the expansive spatial abstractions and mimetic revolutionary re-imagination it proposes." -Social and Cultural Geography Growing Up Global examines the processes of development and global change through the perspective of children's lives in two seemingly disparate places: New York City and a village in northern Sudan. At the book's core is a longitudinal ethnographic study of children growing up in a Sudanese village that was included in a large state-sponsored agricultural program in the year they were born. It follows a small num... View More...
With an Introduction by Bronislav Malinkowski, Facing Mount Kenya is a central document of the highest distinction in anthropological literature, an invaluable key to the structure of African society and the nature of the African mind. Facing Mount Kenya is not only a formal study of life and death, work and play, sex and the family in one of the greatest tribes of contemporary Africa, but a work of considerable literary merit. The very sight and sound of Kikuyu tribal life presented here are at once comprehensive and intimate, and as precise as they are compassionate. View More...
Eben Kirksey first went to West Papua, the Indonesian-controlled half of New Guinea, as an exchange student in 1998. His later study of West Papua's resistance to the Indonesian occupiers and the forces of globalization morphed as he discovered that collaboration, rather than resistance, was the primary strategy of this dynamic social movement. Accompanying indigenous activists to Washington, London, and the offices of the oil giant BP, Kirksey saw the revolutionaries' knack for getting inside institutions of power and building coalitions with unlikely allies, including many Indonesians. He di... View More...
"The 180 photographs gathered here all relate to South America . . . a testimonial . . . to Brazil and its people more than half a century ago, to whom--as well as to my distant youth--I address a friendly and nostalgic salute."--Claude Levi-StraussClaude Levi-Strauss, internationally known as a brilliant and sometimes controversial anthropologist, is also a skilled and sensitive photographer. Saudades do Brasil--"nostalgia for Brazil," from the title of a musical composition by Darius Milhaud--presents 180 of the more than 3,000 photographs Levi-Strauss took in Brazil between 1935 and 1939. W... View More...
