Publications
Now showing items 1-38 of 38
The Real Economy
(2020-02-11)
This collection highlights a key metaphor in contemporary discourse about economy and society. The contributors explore how references to reality and the real economy are linked both to the utopias of collective well-being, ...
The Ethics of Space
(2020-02-11)
Across the Western world, full membership of society is established through entitlements to space, formalized in the institutions of property and citizenship. Those without such entitlements thus become less than fully ...
The Mythology in our Language
(2020-02-11)
In 1931 Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his famous Remarks on Frazer’s “Golden Bough,” published posthumously in 1967. At that time, anthropology and philosophy were in close contact—continental thinkers drew heavily on ...
Unexpected Subjects
(2021)
Unexpected Subjects is an ethnography of the encounter between women’s words and the demands of the law in the context of adjudications on intimate partner violence. A study of institutional devices, it focuses on women’s ...
Being and Hearing
(2018-06-30)
"How do deaf people in different societies perceive and conceive the world around them? Drawing on three years of anthropological fieldwork in Nepali deaf communities, Being and Hearing shows how questions of cultural ...
The Logic of Invention
(2017-11-01)
In this long-awaited sequel to The Invention of Culture, Roy Wagner tackles the logic and motives that underlie cultural invention. Could there be a single, logical factor that makes the invention of the distinction between ...
The Mythology in Our Language
(2017-12-01)
In 1931 Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his famous Remarks on Frazer’s “Golden Bough.". At that time, anthropology and philosophy were in close contact—continental thinkers drew heavily on anthropology’s theoretical terms, like ...
From Hospitality to Grace
(2017-11-01)
The Pitt-Rivers Omnibus brings together the definitive essays and lectures of the influential social anthropologist Julian A. Pitt-Rivers, a corpus of work that has, until now, remained scattered, untranslated, and unedited. ...
Arctic Madness
(2020)
The French missionary-linguist Émile Petitot (1838–1916) spent twenty years near the Arctic Circle in Canada, publishing numerous works on First Nations languages and practices. Over time, however, he descended into delirium ...
Fake
(2018)
Fakes, forgery, counterfeits, hoaxes, bullshit, frauds, knock offs—such terms speak, ostensibly, to the inverse of truth or the obverse of authenticity and sincerity. But what does the modern human obsession with fabrications ...
A Witch's Hand
(2024)
From 1971 to 1972, William E. Mitchell undertook fieldwork on suffering and healing among the Lujere of Papua New Guinea’s Upper Sepik River Basin. At a time when it was not yet common to make colonial agencies a subject ...
Why We Play
(2016-07-31)
Whether it’s childhood make-believe, the theater, sports, or even market speculation, play is one of humanity’s seemingly purest activities: a form of entertainment and leisure and a chance to explore the world and its ...
Values of Happiness
(2016-11-30)
How people conceive of happiness reveals much about who they are and the values they hold dear. Drawing on ethnographic insights from diverse field sites around the world, this book offers a unique window onto the ways in ...
Before and After Gender
(2016-05-31)
Written in the early 1970s amidst widespread debate over the causes of gender inequality, Marilyn Strathern’s Before and After Gender was intended as a widely accessible analysis of gender as a powerful cultural code and ...
Two Lenins
(2017-11-01)
Highly innovative and theoretically incisive, Two Lenins is the first book-length anthropological examination of how social reality can be organized around different yet concurrent ideas of time. Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov ...
The Owners of Kinship
(2018-01-01)
The Owners of Kinship investigates how kinship in Indigenous Amazonia is derived from the asymmetrical relation between an “owner” and his or her dependents. Through a comprehensive ethnography of the Kanamari, Luiz Costa ...
Classic Concepts in Anthropology
(2017-12-15)
The late anthropologist Valerio Valeri (1944–98) was best known for his substantial writings on societies of Polynesia and eastern Indonesia. This volume, however, presents a lesser-known side of Valeri’s genius through a ...
Mistrust
(2017-11-01)
Trust occupies a unique place in contemporary discourse. Seen as both necessary and good, it is variously depicted as enhancing the social fabric, lowering crime rates, increasing happiness, and generating prosperity. It ...
On Kings
(2017-11-01)
In anthropology, as much as in the current popular imagination, kings remain figures of fascination and intrigue. As the cliché goes, kings continue to die spectacular deaths only to remain subjects of vitality and long ...
Fernando Ortiz
(2023)
Cross-regional scholarly dialogue inspired by the work of the pioneering Cuban scholar. Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) coined the term “transculturation” in 1940. This was an early case of theory from the South: concepts ...
The Imensity of Being Singular
(2023)
In this powerful new work, Simone Toji reconsiders ethnography as a form of appreciation of the contradictions inherent in the making of life itself. Recovering Bronislaw Malinowski’s idea of the “imponderabilia of actual ...
How Is It Between Us?
(2023)
A new theory of relational ethics that tackles contemporary issues. In How Is It Between Us?, Jarrett Zigon puts anthropology and phenomenological hermeneutics in conversation to develop a new theory of relational ethics. ...
Property, Substance, and Effect
(2023)
This title draws on Strathern’s interest in the reification of social relations. If the world is shrinking in terms of resources and their access, it is expanding in terms of new candidates for proprietorship. How new ...
Mafiacraft
(2021)
"The Mafia? What is the Mafia? Something you eat? Something you drink? I don't know the Mafia. I've never seen it." Mafiosi have often reacted this way to questions from journalists and law enforcement. Social scientists ...
Pandemic Exposures
(2021)
For people and governments around the world, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to place the preservation of human life at odds with the pursuit of economic and social life. Yet this simple alternative belies the ...
Nullius
(2022)
Nullius is an anthropological account of the troubled status of ownership in India and its consequences for our understanding of sovereignty and social relations. Though property rights and ownership are said to be a ...
Agricultural Reason in the Shadow of Subsistence Capitalism
(2024)
This collection of essays by Arjun Appadurai based on his fieldwork in rural Maharashtra, India, in the early 1980s is one of the few anthropological treatments of agricultural reasoning. In conversation with agronomists, ...
Who Killed Jules Crevaux?
(2024)
The first book to explore the deaths of explorer Jules Crevaux and his crew from an Indigenous perspective.In 1882, the celebrated French explorer Jules Crevaux and his crew were killed by Indigenous people in the Bolivian ...
Wild and Wonderful
(2025)
In Wild and Wonderful, social anthropologist Vanessa Manceron investigates an understudied but indispensable scientific practice: getting to know and recognize the living worlds around us. Her research takes her to England, ...
Imacoqwa’s Arrow
(2025)
A pathbreaking study of Yagwoia cosmological concepts. In Imacoqwa’s Arrow, Jadran Mimica draws on decades of field research to bring us a rich ethnographic account of myth and meaning in the lifeworlds of the Yagwoia of ...
Becoming Somebody Else
(2025)
A study of homelessness and addiction exploring the void of drug-induced blackout and its impact on identity and time. What does it mean to exist outside the normative temporality of life, of housed living, and, ultimately, ...
The Elementary Forms of Corruption
(2025)
Seeks to better understand the nature of corruption through a case study of a rural Brazilian community’s response to the country’s political fraud. The Elementary Forms of Corruption is an ethnographic history of rural ...
Science in the Forest, Science in the Past
(2020)
This collection brings together leading anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and artificial-intelligence researchers to discuss the sciences and mathematics used in various Eastern, Western, and Indigenous societies, ...
The Ethics of Space
(2020)
Across the Western world, full membership of society is established through entitlements to space and formalized in the institutions of property and citizenship. Those without such entitlements are deemed less than fully ...
Pandora’s Box
(2021)
In this book, written between 1979 and 2020, Gilbert Lewis distills a lifetime of insights he garnered as a medical anthropologist. He asks: How do beliefs about illness in different societies influence their members’ ...
Ethics or the Right Thing?
(2022)
A sympathetic examination of the failure of anti-corruption efforts in contemporary Indonesia. Combining ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Kupang with an acute historical sensibility, Sylvia Tidey shows how good ...
Of Humans, Pigs, and Souls
(2020)
For the Yagwoia-Angan people of Papua New Guinea womba is a malignant power with the potential to afflict any soul with cravings for pig meat and human flesh. Drawing on long-term research among the Yagwoia, and in an ...
An Outline of the Origins of Money
(2024)
"On this subject, I only knew the excellent little book by the late Schurtz”— Marcel Mauss, 1914, “Les origines de la notion de monnaie”.Heinrich Schurtz’s 1898 book has been a touchstone for economic historians, ...