"The Mafia? What is the Mafia? Something you eat? Something you drink? I don't know the Mafia. I have never seen it". So said Mommo Piromalli, a Ndrangheta crime boss, to a journalist in the seventies. In "Mafiacraft", Deborah Puccio-Den explores the...
In April 2018, a large multidisciplinary team of geologists, biologists, social scientists, and local residents explored the rivers, forests, and human communities around the junction of the Caguan and Caqueta Rivers in the lowland Amazonian departme...
ISBN: PB: 9780226465081,
ISBN: HB: 9780226464923,
University of Chicago Press,
May 2018
384 pp.,
22.9x15.2 cm, 11 halftones
In this unsettling and innovative book, anthropologist Stefania Pandolfo addresses the problematic of the subject through a dual examination of psychoanalysis and Islamic theological-medical reasoning, reflecting on the unconscious maladies of the so...
"The Pitt-Rivers Omnibus" brings together the definitive essays and lectures of the influential social anthropologist Julian A. Pitt-Rivers, a corpus of work that has, until now, remained scattered, untranslated, and unedited. Illuminating the themes...
ISBN: PB: 9780226484846,
University of Chicago Press,
October 2017
352 pp.,
22.8x15.2 cm, 11 halftones, 1 table
Over the past few decades, Daoism has become a recognizable part of Western "alternative" spiritual life. Now, that Westernized version of Daoism is going full circle, traveling back from America and Europe to influence Daoism in China.
"Dream Tri...
In February 2016, a multidisciplinary team of geologists, biologists, social scientists, and local residents explored the rivers, forests, and human communities of a remote area in northern Amazonian Peru, along the Putumayo, Algodon, and Mutun river...
The Cordillera Escalera mountain range on the Loreto-San Martin border in Amazonian Peru was barely known to scientists until the September 2013 expedition described in this report. Richly illustrated with twenty four color plates featuring more than...
Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santeria and other religions related to Orisha worship – a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa – Stephan Palmie has grown progressively uneasy with the assumptions inherent in the very term Afro-Cuban...
ISBN: PB: 9780226645780,
ISBN: HB: 9780226645773,
University of Chicago Press,
February 2011
312 pp.,
23x15 cm
Most scholarship on sorcery and witchcraft has narrowly focused on specific times and places, particularly early modern Europe and twentieth-century Africa. And much of that research interprets sorcery as merely a remnant of premodern traditions. Bol...
ISBN: PB: 9780226669656,
ISBN: HB: 9780226669649,
University of Chicago Press,
July 2010
216 pp.,
23x15 cm, 16 halftones
Since the end of the cold war, Africa has seen a dramatic rise in new political and religious phenomena, including an eviscerated privatized state, neoliberal NGOs, Pentecostalism, a resurgence in accusations of witchcraft, a culture of scamming and...