Arnold van Gennep's masterwork, "The Rites of Passage", has been a staple of anthropological education for more than a century. First published in French in 1909, and translated into English by the University of Chicago Press in 1960, this landmark b...

West African history is inseparable from the history of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. According to historical archaeologist Francois Richard, however, the dominance of this narrative not only colors the range of political discourse about...

Revenge is a primal force at the heart of conflict and justice, as ancient as humanity itself. It persists in all societies and we are fascinated by it, as countless novels, dramas, films and computer games attest. "Getting even" can restore the bala...

John V. Murra's Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, originally given in 1969, are the only major study of the Andean "avenue towards civilization". Collected and published for the first time here, they offer a powerful and insistent perspective on the Andea...

For more than 250 years, Charles de Brosses's term "fetishism" has exerted great influence over our most ambitious thinkers. Used as an alternative to "magic" but nonetheless expressing the material force of magical thought, de Brosses's term has pro...

This volume is the first to collect the most influential essays and lectures of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Published in a wide variety of venues, and often difficult to find, the pieces are brought together here for the first time in a one major vol...

"Race and Photography" studies the changing function of photography from the 1870s to the 1940s within the field of the "science of race", what many today consider the paradigm of pseudo-science. Amos Morris-Reich looks at the ways photography enable...

In this book, Israeli anthropologist Andre Levy returns to his birthplace in Casablanca to provide a deeply nuanced and compelling study of the relationships between Moroccan Jews and Muslims there. Ranging over a century of history – from the Jewish...

"Returns" explores homecomings – the ways people recover and renew their roots. Engaging with indigenous histories of survival and transformation, James Clifford opens fundamental questions about where we are going, separately and together, in a glob...

"Religious Bodies Politic" examines the complex relationship between transnational religion and politics through the lens of one cosmopolitan community in Siberia: Buryats, who live in a semiautonomous republic within Russia with a large Buddhist pop...