Showing titles in Anthropology

In 1881, a writer in the Saturday Review called tattooing ‘an art without a history’. ‘No-one’, it went on, ‘has made it the business of his life to study the development of tattooing.’ Until now. Painted People is a beguiling and intimate look at an untold history of humanity. The...

From an award-winning journalist, a reflective, smart, and deeply reported look at the millennial generation that draws on the experiences of five diverse individuals and explores where we go from here. What happened to millennials? At the birth of America’s largest living generation, the outlook was strong: unparalleled economic growth, the emerging Internet, the rise of the cell phone, and a geopolitics that had allegedly reached “the end of history” all set expectations exceedingly high for a cohort entering adulthood at the dawn of the new millennium.

A unique and irreverent take on everything that's wrong with our “national conversation about race”—and what to do about it How to Be Less Stupid About Race is your essential guide to breaking through the half-truths and ridiculous misconceptions that have thoroughly corrupted the way race...

From the former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York comes a timely and passionate case for the role of the well-designed object in the digital age. In this delightful exploration of craft in its many forms, curator and scholar Glenn Adamson explores how raw materials, tools, design and technique come together to produce objects of beauty and utility.

Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life - and death - in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence.

Monsters, in all their terrifying glory, have preoccupied humans since we began telling stories. But where did these stories come from? In Monsterland, award-winning author Nicholas Jubber goes on a journey to discover more about the monsters we’ve invented, lurking in the dark and the wild places of the earth—giants, dragons, ogres, zombies, ghosts, demons—all with one thing in common: their ability to terrify.

Syeda X left the holy city of Banaras (now Varanasi) for Delhi with her young family in the aftermath of riots and communal violence in the early '90s. In Delhi, she settled into the life of a poor migrant, juggling multiple jobs a day - from sewing soccer balls and removing the stems from raisins, to shelling almonds sold in bulk to multinationals and assisting in illegal abortions. Syeda has held over 50 different jobs in 30 years, earning paltry sums in the process. And if she ever took a day off, her job would be lost to another faceless migrant.

Joe Posnanski enters the colorful world of Harry Houdini and his legions of devoted fans to explore the illusionist’s impact on global culture—and why his legacy endures to this day. Nearly a century after Harry Houdini died on Halloween in 1926, he feels as modern and alive as ever. The...

Der Historiker und Journalist Rutger Bregman setzt sich in seinem neuen Buch mit dem Wesen des Menschen auseinander. Anders als in der westlichen Denktradition angenommen ist der Mensch seinen Thesen nach nicht böse, sondern im Gegenteil: von Grund auf gut. Und geht man von dieser Prämisse aus, ist es möglich, die Welt und den Menschen in ihr komplett neu und grundoptimistisch zu denken. In seinem mitreißend geschriebenen, überzeugenden Buch präsentiert Bregman Ideen für die Verbesserung der Welt. Sie sind innovativ und mutig und stimmen vor allem hoffnungsfroh.

Characterized by petty rivalries, self-indulgence and lack of responsibility, our actions fail to fulfill what Robert Bly describes as our true soul longing. With characteristic irreverence and storytelling from various cultures, Bly tells us what we should be doing about green-haired adolescents and idle elders, not to mention televisions and computers. His insightful focus illuminates the truths and possibilities of a culture caught in an adolescent phase of development.

The field of folklore studies is over two centuries old, and it's full of amazing insights about human behavior, creativity, and community. Folklore studies is as interdisciplinary as it gets, squished somewhere between anthropology and linguistics and religious studies and comparative literature and more. It’s all about the informal human interactions, the million tiny acts and stories and beliefs and arts that function as social glue even if they seem beneath notice.

From the perspective of Western modernity, humanity inhabits a disenchanted cosmos. Yet the vast majority of cultures throughout human history treat spirits as very real persons, members of a cosmic society who interact with humans and control their fate. In most cultures, even today, people are but a small part of an enchanted universe misconstrued by the transcendent categories of "religion" and the "supernatural." The New Science of the Enchanted Universe shows how anthropologists and other social scientists must rethink these cultures of immanence and study them by their own lights.

Race has provided the rationale and excuse for some of the worst atrocities in human history. Yet, according to many biologists, physical anthropologists, and geneticists, there is no valid scientific justification for the concept of race. To be more precise, although there is clearly some physical basis for the variations that underlie perceptions of race, clear boundaries among "races" remain highly elusive from a purely biological standpoint.

Since the 1970s, an important new figure has appeared on the center stage of American evangelicalism - the celebrity preacher's wife. Although most evangelical traditions bar women from ordained ministry, many women have carved out unofficial positions of power in their husbands' spiritual empires or their own ministries. The biggest stars - such as Beth Moore, Joyce Meyer, and Victoria Osteen - write best-selling books, grab high ratings on Christian television, and even preach.

The rise of human civilization and all of recorded history occurred in this warm period, known as the Holocene. Until very recently, we had no detailed record of climate changes during the Holocene. Now we do. In this engrossing and captivating look at the human effects of climate variability, Brian Fagan shows how climate functioned as what the historian Paul Kennedy described as one of the “deeper transformations” of history—a more important historical factor than we understand.

Throughout history, depopulation was the product of catastrophe: ice ages, plagues, the collapse of civilisations. This time, however, we're thinning ourselves deliberately, by choosing to have fewer babies than we need to replace ourselves. In much of the developed and developing world, that decline is already underway, as urbanisation, women's empowerment, and waning religiosity lead to smaller and smaller families. In Empty Planet, Ibbitson and Bricker draw on a wealth of research and firsthand reporting to illustrate the dramatic consequences of this population decline.

In all of Roman history there was never a more turbulent year than A.D. 69, the ill-omened "Year of the Three Emperors". By some miracle, the greatest historian of the age, Tacitus, was able to chronicle those momentous events in a work he called The History. In its pages are some of the most memorable events of Roman history described in some of the most intensely passionate prose ever devised.

It is likely not terribly surprising that surfers like to party. The 1960-'70s image, bolstered by Tom Wolfe and Big Wednesday, was one of mild outlaws. Tanned boys who refused to grow up, spending their days drinking beer and smoking joints on the beach in between mindless hours in the water. As the surf brands accidentally morphed into a multimillion- then multibillion-dollar industry beginning in the 1980s, however, the derelict portrait began to harm business.

The picture of classical antiquity most of us learned in school is framed in certain ways - glossing over misogyny while omitting the seeds of feminist resistance. Many of today's harmful practices, like school dress codes, exploitation of the environment and rape culture, have their roots in the ancient world. But in Antigone Rising, classicist Helen Morales reminds us that the myths have subversive power because they are told - and read - in different ways.

Are you happy? Right now? Happy enough? As happy as everyone else? Could you be happier if you tried harder? After she packed up her British worldview (that most things were basically rubbish) and moved to America, journalist and documentary filmmaker Ruth Whippman found herself increasingly perplexed by the American obsession with one topic above all others: happiness. The subject came up everywhere: at the playground swings, at the meat counter in the supermarket, and even at the gynecologist.