INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution―from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and...

History has portrayed Shaka, founder of the Zulu nation, as a pitiless and savage conqueror. Yet British fortune-seekers of the 1820s found Shaka's Zulus a dignified people whose martial qualities were tempered by generosity and hospitality. Within a few...

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From the prehistoric peoples who inhabited the Americas at the end of the last Ice Age to the American Indian of the 20th century, this book encompasses the whole historical and cultural range of Indian life in Corth, Central, and South America. 32 pages...

This comprehensive guide to deciphering Maya hieroglyphs contains a complete outline of the writing, presenting individual signs and their meanings, the script's grammatical structure and content, and explanations of the sophisticated Maya calendrical...

The 10th anniversary editionA Guardian Best Book about DeforestationA New Scientist Best Book of the YearA Taipei Times Best Book of the Year“A perfectly grounded account of what it is like to live an indigenous life in communion with one’s personal...

This is one of the first systematic attempts to bring language within the neo-Darwinian framework of modern evolutionary theory. Twenty-four coordinated essays by linguists, phoneticians, anthropologists, psychologists and cognitive scientists explore...

Book by Kiste, Robert C

The romantic, nineteenth-century image of the Bedouin as fierce, independent nomads on camelback racing across an endless desert persists in the West. Yet since the era of Ottoman rule, the Mzeina Bedouin of the South Sinai desert have lived under...

This study analyzes the manner in which the perception of human difference has changed from the time of the Renaissance to the 20th century. Building on the insights of Foucault and Garfinkel, it charts how humanity has become contained within the...

Visual anthropology has proved to offer fruitful methods of research and representation to applied projects of social intervention. Through a series of case studies based on applied visual anthropological work in a range of contexts (health and medicine,...

Cargo cults have long exerted a remarkable attraction on Westerners, and the last decade has seen the publication of much new work on the subject. This collection of original essays is based on fieldwork in Melanesia, Fiji, Australia, and Indonesia by...

The Pacific has long been a space of conquest, exploration, fantasy, and resistance. Pacific Islanders had established civilizations and cultures of travel well before European explorers arrived, initiating centuries of upheaval and transformation. The...

With elegance and candor, Greg Dening offers a panoramic collection of rich and densely textured essays that demonstrate how we can only understand our present through our consciousness of the past and how in thinking about the past we mirror the time...

The task of the anthropologist is to take ideas, concepts and beliefs from one culture and translate them into first another language, and then into the language of anthropology. This process is both fascinating and complex. Not only does it raise...

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Lone Star Muslims offers an engaging and insightful look at contemporary Muslim American life in Texas. It illuminates the dynamics of the Pakistani Muslim community in Houston, a city with one of the largest Muslim populations in the south and...

This book assesses the impact of writing on human societies, both in the Ancient Near East and in twentieth-century Africa, and highlights some general features of social systems that have been influenced by this major change in the mode of communication...

The existential conditions under which most Latin Americans live are explored in this book in a systematic dialectic between primary documents and social science analysis. The authors developed their own interpretatioins in an ongoing argument, drawing...