Written by one of the world's leading scholars of Bedouin culture, this groundbreaking book sheds new light on significant points of convergence between Bedouin and early Israelite cultures, as manifested in the Hebrew Bible. Bailey compares Bedouin...

For the Ankave of Papua New Guinea, men, unlike women, do not reach adulthood and become fathers simply by growing up and reproducing. What fathers – and by extension, men – actually are is a result of a series of relational transformations, operated...

In 1911, the publication of Franz Boas's "The Mind of Primitive Man" challenged widely held claims about race and intelligence that justified violence and inequality. Now, a group of leading scholars examines how this groundbreaking work hinged on re...

In 1986 the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard mounted "From Site to Sight", a groundbreaking traveling exhibition on the historic and contemporary uses of photography in anthropology. Using visual materials from the vast photogra...

"Where the Roads All End" tells the remarkable story of an American family's eight anthropological expeditions to the remote Kalahari Desert in South-West Africa (Namibia) during the 1950s. Raytheon co-founder Laurence Marshall, his wife Lorna, and c...

The terms "birth" and "death" have long denoted the apparent boundaries of our biological lives, situating in time the moments of coming to be and passing away. Yet the specific trajectory of a life can surpass its temporal boundaries. Long after the...

In "The Mediterranean Incarnate", anthropologist Naor Ben-Yehoyada takes us aboard the "Naumachos" for a thirty-seven-day voyage in the fishing grounds between Sicily and Tunisia. He also takes us on a historical exploration of the past eighty years...

Thomas Blanton sheds light on the philosophy surrounding gift giving in Paul's letters and on modern theories of gift exchange through the lens of religion. The exchange of gifts is a fundamental part of society and a foundational element in Greco-Ro...

Since its publication in 1969, Emile Benveniste's Vocabulaire – here in a new translation as the "Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society" – has been the classic reference for tracing the institutional and conceptual genealogy of the sociocu...

While working in Africa, anthropologist Julien Bonhomme encountered an astonishing phenomenon: people being accused of stealing or shrinking the genitals of strangers on the simple occasion of a handshake on the street. As he soon discovered, these a...