The Anthropology Department

The realities of the social life in China's business practices reveal an increasing divergence from the ideologies of the Chinese state. In this engaging work, Xin Liu examines the Asian...

As physicists work toward completing a theory of the Universe and biologists unravel the molecular complexity of life, a glaring incompleteness in this scientific vision becomes apparent. The...

Social Bioarchaeology introduces the exciting and growing biosocial approach in archaeology that challenges the traditional methods of analyzing and interpreting human skeletal remains. Agarwal,...

Written in an informal style with engaging examples, this introduction to the study of language in context presents a provocative new approach to communicative practice. Emphasizing the dual...

Archaeologists have long been interested in the onset of political differentiation, and how this can be inferred from the archaeological record. Here Christine Hastorf looks at the nature of power...

In the Andalusian communities throughout the olive-growing region of southeastern Spain men show themselves to be primarily concerned with two problems of identity: their place in the social...

From Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” to Joseph Conrad’s “fascination of the abomination,” humankind has struggled to make sense of human-upon-human violence...

Were there major population collapses on Pacific Islands following first contact with the West? If so, what were the actual population numbers for islands such as Hawai‘i, Tahiti, or New...

China underwent a dramatic social transformation in the last decade of the twentieth century. This powerful ethnographic study of one community focuses on the logic of everyday practice in post-...

This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience,...

The human head has had important political, ritual and symbolic meanings throughout Andean history. Scholars have spoken of captured and trophy heads, curated crania, symbolic flying heads, head...

Increasingly the body is a possession that does not belong to us. It is bought and sold, bartered and stolen, marketed wholesale or in parts. The professions - especially...

"A cogent, attractively presented case study of a single festival in its diverse forms. It provides a lucid account of cultural change and a careful plotting of causes and influences....

There has never been a single way that social life has heen organized by sex.

The ancient Greeks saw men and women as expressing varying degrees of a single sexual potential; many Native...

Charles Hirschkind's unique study explores how a popular Islamic media form—the cassette sermon—has profoundly transformed the political geography of the Middle East over the last...

Bioprospecting--the exchange of plants for corporate promises of royalties or community development assistance--has been lauded as a way to develop new medicines while offering southern nations...

A Machine to Make a Future represents a remarkably original look at the present and possible future of biotechnology research in the wake of the mapping of the human genome. The central tenet of...

From the opening sequence, in which mid-nineteenth-century Indian fishermen hear the possibility of redemption in an old woman's madness, No Aging in India captures the reader with its interplay...

"In Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, Seth Holmes offers up an important and captivating new ethnography, linking the structural violence inherent in the migrant labor system in the...

In this culmination of his search for anthropological concepts and practices appropriate to the twenty-first century, Paul Rabinow contends that to make sense of the contemporary anthropologists...

Last House on the Hill: BACH Area Reports from Çatalhöyük, Turkey

Edited by Ruth Tringham and Mirjana Stevanović

Published by Cotsen Institute of Archaeology (...

“…a valuable addition to the increasing literature on Japanese multiculturalism which has challenged the long-held homogeneous Japan thesis…A particular contribution of...