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...

In Abyssinian poetry, the "wax"‌ is the obvious meaning, the "gold"‌ is the hidden meaning. In "Wax and Gold", Donald N. Levine explores mid-to-late-twentieth-century Ethiopian society on the same two levels, using modern sociology and psychology to...

In this pithy two-part essay, Marshall Sahlins reinvigorates the debates on what constitutes kinship, building on some of the best scholarship in the field to produce an original outlook on the deepest bond humans can have. Covering thinkers from Ari...

In 1963, Howard S. Becker gave a lecture about deviance, challenging the then-conventional definition that deviance was inherently criminal and abnormal and arguing that instead, deviance was better understood as a function of labeling.   At the end...

In "Stambeli", Richard C. Jankowsky presents a vivid ethnographic account of the healing trance music created by the descendants of sub-Saharan slaves brought to Tunisia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Stambeli music calls upon an ela...

"Feelings at the Margins" offers a uniquely interdisciplinary take on the contemporary phenomenon of marginalization in Indonesia and its emotional impact on affected individuals and groups. By combining anthropological, political, and historical per...

The word "possession" is trickier than we often think, especially in the context of the Black Atlantic and its religions and economy. Here possession can refer to spirits, material goods, and, indeed, people. In "Spirited Things", Paul Christopher Jo...