Though his work was little known outside Italian intellectual circles for most of the twentieth century, anthropologist and historian of religions Ernesto de Martino is now recognized as one of the most original thinkers in the field. This book is te...

Jeanne Favret-Saada is arguably one of France's most brilliant anthropologists, and "The Anti-Witch" is nothing less than a masterpiece. A synthesis of ethnographic theory and psychoanalytic revelation, where the line between researcher and subject i...

Christopher A. Gregory's "Gifts and Commodities" is one of the undisputed classics of economic anthropology. On its publication in 1982, it spurred intense, ongoing debates about gifts and gifting, value, exchange, and the place of political economy...

There is no more seemingly incorrigible criminal type than the child sex offender. Said to suffer from a deeply rooted paraphilia, he is often considered as outside the moral limits of the human, profoundly resistant to change. Despite these assessme...

Available in English for the first time, anthropologist Carlo Severi's "The Chimera Principle" breaks new theoretical ground for the study of ritual, iconographic technologies, and oral traditions among non-literate peoples. Setting himself against a...

Decades before the marches and victories of the 1960s, a group of Alaska Natives were making civil rights history. Throughout the early twentieth century, the Alaska Native Brotherhood fought for citizenship, voting rights, and education for all Alas...

In 2004, one of the world's last bands of voluntarily isolated nomads left behind their ancestral life in the dwindling thorn forests of northern Paraguay, fleeing ranchers' bulldozers.  "Behold the Black Caiman" is Lucas Bessire's intimate chronicle...

Yaya's Story is a book about Yaya Harouna, a Songhay trader originally from Niger who found a path to America. It is also a book about Paul Stoller – its author – an American anthropologist who found his own path to Africa. Separated by ethnicity, la...

Mozambique has been hailed as a success story by the international community, which has watched it evolve through a series of violent political upheavals: from colonialism, through socialism, to its current democracy. As Juan Obarrio shows, however,...

Successor to Claude Levi-Strauss at the College de France, Philippe Descola has become one of the most important anthropologists working today, and "Beyond Nature and Culture" has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French...