In the early 2000s, the central government of China encouraged all of the nation's registered minorities to "salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate" folk medical knowledges in an effort to create local health care systems comparable to the nationally...

Lifeways in Southwest Alaska today remains inextricably bound to the seasonal cycles of sea and land. Community members continue to hunt, fish, and make products from the life found in the rivers and sea. Based on a wealth of oral histories collected...

Why are so many humans religious? Why do we daydream, imagine, and hope? Philosophers, theologians, social scientists, and historians have offered explanations for centuries, but their accounts often ignore or even avoid human evolution. Evolutionary...

For centuries, the Akulmiut people – a Yup'ik group – have been sustained by the annual movements of whitefish. It is a food that sustains and defines them. To this day, many Akulmiut view not only their actions in the world, but their interactions w...

It is common to think of the Arctic as remote, perched at the farthest reaches of the world – a simple and harmonious, isolated utopia. But the reality, as Janne Flora shows us, is anything but. In "Wandering Spirits", Flora reveals how deeply connec...

In this history of fishing – not as sport but as sustenance – archaeologist and best-selling author Brian Fagan argues that fishing was an indispensable and often overlooked element in the growth of civilization. It sustainably provided enough food t...

With its infamously packed cars and disciplined commuters, Tokyo's commuter train network is one of the most complex technical infrastructures on Earth. In "An Anthropology of the Machine", Michael Fisch provides a nuanced perspective on how Tokyo's...

The history of contacts between India and Europe tends to be dominated by the British, but Denmark also played a role on the subcontinent in the colonial era. This book offers insight into that history via a close look at one very specific part of it...

This bilingual collection shares new translations of old stories recorded over the last four decades though interviews with Yup'ik elders from throughout southwest Alaska. Some are true qulirat (traditional tales), while others are recent. Some are w...

As policing has recently become a major topic of public debate, it was also a growing area of ethnographic research".Writing the World of Policing" brings together an international roster of scholars who have conducted fieldwork studies of law enforc...