The doctor and mrs. a.

In the 1940’s, the young Punjabi “Mrs. A.” reflected on sexuality, gender, and struggle in a dream analysis with psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand, drawing on Hindu myth to conceive a better, socialist future. An unconventional history of gender and sexuality in late colonialism, this book reminds us t...

Critique of identity thinking

Michael Jackson’s response to our beleaguered age is to ask what forms of speech and action are called for in ‘dark times’. He argues that experiences that fall outside the concepts and categories we habitually deploy in rendering life manageable and intelligible have both critical and redempti...

Birds of passage

Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork in Malta, this book traces the complex interactions between hunters, birds and the landscapes they inhabit, as well as the dynamics and politics of bird conservation. Birds of Passage looks at the practice and meaning of hunting in a specific context, ...

Islands of order

Two pioneering anthropologists reveal how complexity science can help us better understand how societies change over timeOver the past two decades, anthropologist J. Stephen Lansing and geneticist Murray Cox have explored dozens of villages on the islands of the Malay Archipelago, combining ethno...

Hidden heretics

A revealing look at Jewish men and women who secretly explore the outside world, in person and online, while remaining in their ultra-Orthodox religious communities What would you do if you questioned your religious faith, but revealing that would cause you to lose your family and the only way of...

Morality at the margins

What does it mean to be young, modern, and Muslim? Documenting everyday life in Lamu (Kenya), this book explores the mundane practices of behavior and speech that create moral personhood. In elaborating everyday practices of Islamic pluralism, the book shows how Muslim societies critically engage...

Financialization

The preacher's wife

From the New York Times bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved, a fascinating look at the world of Christian women celebritiesSince the 1970s, an important new figure has appeared on the center stage of American evangelicalism—the celebrity preacher's wif...

Beyond filial piety

This volume explores emerging cultural meanings and social responses to population aging in contemporary East Asian societies. Drawing on ethnographic, demographic, policy, archival, and media data, the authors trace both common patterns and diverging trends across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sin...

Textures of the ordinary

Textures of the Ordinary shows how life is marked not only by catastrophic events but also by the soft knife of economic deprivation and the repetitive corrosions and routine violence within everyday life itself. As an alternative to normative ethics, this book develops ordinary ethics as attenti...

Hacking diversity

A firsthand look at efforts to improve diversity in software and hackerspace communitiesHacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by...

Fierce medicines, fragile socialities

Comprehensive ethnographic case studies of people living with HIV and ARVs. In-depth observations of the infrastructural conditions and social dynamics shaping day-to-day work routines at Tanzanian HIV treatment centers. Focus on the financial and infrastructural fragilities of treat...

Crossing histories and ethnographies

Presents novel combinations of archival and ethnographic methods in the study of colonial historicities; Offers new perspectives on how to critically connect oral accounts, ethnography, and colonial archives; Brings together an international community of scholars who have conducted e...

The philosophers' gift

For philosophers, the gift fascinates because it demands disinterested generosity. Yet anthropology offers another view. Reciprocity, rather than disinterestedness, Hénaff shows, is central to ceremonial giving, alliance, and the social bond. From actual gift practices, Hénaff develops an origina...

The tongue-tied imagination

Winner, 2021 African Literature Association First Book AwardShould a writer work in a former colonial language or in a vernacular? The language question was one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputatio...

The disabled church

How do communities consent to difference? How do they recognize and create the space and time necessary for the differences and disabilities of those who constitute them? Christian congregations often make assumptions about the shared abilities, practices, and experiences that are necessary for c...

The five hundred year rebellion

How history—spoken, written, visual, broadcast, and shared—has supported five centuries of indigenous Bolivian resistance.

People's car

People's Car studies divergent populist responses to land acquisition for industries in rural India. It contends that landownership enables small landowners to aspire and look forward to social mobility in the non-farm sector, which are contingent upon industrialization. The protests against land...

The revolution we expected

The Revolution We Expected presents a call for individual and societal transformation in order to rebuild and humanize our institutions and our communities to realize a post-patriarchal world and elevated consciousness as a global community.In his last work as an author, celebrated doctor and psy...

Going to pentecost

This is an experimental approach to Pentecostalism, departing from previous studies;  It is explicitly comparative, with very close collaboration amongst the three authors;  It offers new possibilities for the study of religion in global context

Indianthusiasm

Indianthusiasm brings together interviews with twelve Indigenous authors, artists and scholars who comment on the German fascination with North American Indigenous Peoples.

Being bedouin around petra

Takes an ethnographic approach to understanding everyday life of the Bedouin as heritage in contemporary Jordan. Exemplifies the materiality of heritage proclamations and religious transformations. Demonstrates the complex entanglements of Islamic revival, tourism, heritage managemen...

Murujuga

A fascinating case study of the archaeological site at Murujuga, AustraliaLocated in the Dampier Archipelago of Western Australia, Murujuga is the single largest archaeological site in the world. It contains an estimated one million petroglyphs, or rock art motifs, produced by the Indigenous Aust...

What is culture for?

What is culture really for? How to find compassion, hope and perspective in the arts. Many people search for the meaning of life through music, film, literature and the visual arts. But how can we synthesize the emotions we feel through art? This book looks at how works of culture were made - tha...

Making bodies kosher

Integrates archival and ethnographic material to explore healthcare concerns over time  Original study of Haredi Jews in the UK, whereas most focus on Israel or the USA  Explores the continuum of maternity care & child health in a ‘hard to reach’ minority

Where the gods reign

Where the Gods Reign is a magnificent book by one of the greatest ethnobotanical explorers known to this century. It is an essential for those interested in cultural anthropology, ethnobotany, and the Amazon in general.

Watch me play

A look at the revolution in game live streaming and esports broadcastingEvery day thousands of people broadcast their gaming live to audiences over the internet using popular sites such as Twitch, which reaches more than one hundred million viewers a month. In these new platforms for interactive ...

Changing our minds

Changing Our Minds tells you everything that you ought to know about the multi-faceted paradigm of psychedelic research and spiritual practices.

Vine of the soul

Vine of the Soul is an exceptional photographic essay accompanied by detailed descriptions of the Amazonians’ use of medicinal and other sacred plant substances. Over 160 documentary photos, some of the most signifi cant ever taken on the subject, bring the reader along a journey to a world in wh...

Cultural techniques

This volume designates a shift within posthumanistic media studies, that dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations, that reproduce, process and reflect the distinctions that are fundamental for a given culture, e.g. the anthropological difference, the distinctions between natura...

Dancing jacobins

Since independence from Spain, a trope has remained pervasive in Latin America’s republican imaginary: that of an endless antagonism pitting civilization against barbarism as irreconcilable poles within which a nation’s life unfolds. This book apprehends that trope not just as the phantasmatic pr...

Upside-down gods

Human survival requires a reorientation of science away from its exclusive technical and materialist premises focused on control, towards feedback and relational processes of organism-plus-environment. Gregory Bateson’s holistic approach unites culture, communication, psychology, biology and ecol...

The blind man

The Blind Man: A Phantasmography examines the complicated forces of perception, imagination, and phantasms of encounter in the contemporary world. In considering photographs he took while he was traveling in France, anthropologist and writer Robert Desjarlais reflects on a few pictures that show ...

Bad stories

If you’re one of the millions of Americans lying awake at night, asking yourself, How did we get here? you need to read Bad Stories. In a short, sharp lamentation, New York Times bestselling author Steve Almond explains why the election of a cruel con artist was not only possible, but inevitable.

The ethnography of rhythm

A history of the concept of orality (that is, the creation and transmission of literary works without the use of writing), this book shows awareness of this medium emerging from the encounter of many literary and scientific developments (romanticism, post-symbolism, structuralism; physiology, psy...

Industrial labor on the margins of capitalism

The focus on regular versus precarious labour. Case studies from outside the familiar Euro-American core. Ethnographic methods, linking factory work to households and communities. Focus on multiple dimensions of social inequality in diverse industrial settings and on how they int...

Objects and objections of ethnography

The essays in this volume, in all their astonishing richness and diversity, focus on the question of the “other.” Brimming with whole flotillas of new ideas, they delineate subtle and various ways in which that question can be made the basis of an ethnographic project.In them, the author responds...

Realizing the witch

Realizing the Witch follows the unfolding of Benjamin Christensen’s visual narrative in his 1922 film, Häxan (The Witch). Through a close reading of Häxan, Baxstrom and Meyers examine the study of witchcraft from historical and anthropological perspectives, as well as the intersection of popular ...

Ethnographica moralia

Clifford Geertz, in his 1973 Interpretation of Cultures, brought about an epistemological revolution unprecedented since Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism. In place of Lévi-Strauss’s deep structures, Geertz placed “deep meanings” and “thick descriptions,” in a synthesis of the American tradition of cu...

Being brains

Sketches the history of the belief that human beings are essentially their brains, and documents and critically discusses its contemporary forms across a range of contexts, including mental health, the human sciences, and literature and film.

Dangerous citizens

This book simultaneously tells a story—or rather, stories—and a history. The stories are those of Greek Leftists as paradigmatic figures of abjection, given that between 1929 and 1974 tens of thousands of Greek dissidents were detained and tortured in prisons, places of exile, and concentration c...

Is critique secular?

This volume interrogates settled ways of thinking about the seemingly interminable conflict between religious and secular values in our world today. What are the assumptions and resources internal to secular conceptions of critique that help or hinder our understanding of one of the most pressing...

Things

Addressing the relation between religion and things, which has long been conceived in antagonistic terms, the guiding idea of this volume is that religion necessarily requires some kind of incarnation. Exploring the role and place of sacred artifacts, images, bodily fluids, sites and technologies...

Unintended revolution

War in worcester

War in Worcester explores the experiences of the young in taking a stand against the apartheid regime in the 1980s at the height of the struggle for freedom. It combines an analysis of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s process and findings with a close ethnographic study in ...

Vital diplomacy

Focusing on the major ceremonial cycle of the Enawene-nawe people, Vital Diplomacy sheds new light on classic Amazonian themes such as manioc cultivation and cuisine, predatory relations with non-humans, and the interplay of myth and practice, and to consider dynamics of kin, clan, and gender r...

Hezbollah

Featuring a new prologue and conclusion and two new chapters on recent developmentsWith Hezbollah’s entry into the Lebanese government in 2009 and forceful intervention in the Syrian civil war, the potent Shi‘i political and military organization continues to play an enormous role in the Middle E...

Disappointment

Possibilities responds to recent calls to imaginatively and creatively theorize an otherwise by showing how collaboration between an anthropologist and a political movement of marginalized peoples – the anti-drug war movement – can disclose new possibilities for being and acting politically.

Ordinary ethics

What is the place of the ethical in human life? How do we render it visible? How might sustained attention to the ethical transform anthropological theory and enrich our understanding of thought, speech, and social action? This volume offers a significant attempt to address these questions. It is...