Fakes, forgery, counterfeits, hoaxes, frauds, knock-offs – such terms speak, ostensibly, to the inverse of truth or the obverse of authenticity and sincerity. Do all cultures equally spend an incredible amount of energy and labor on detecting differe...

A generation of aspiring business managers has been taught to see a world of difference as a world of opportunity. In "Making Global MBAs", Andrew Orta provocatively examines the culture of contemporary business education, and the ways MBA programs p...

In recent years life itself has become a focus of intense thought in anthropological work, spanning concerns as diverse as concepts of life in the biosciences and sovereign power and biopolitics, to a rethinking of the boundaries between human and no...

In 1931 Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his famous "Remarks on Frazer's "Golden Bough", published posthumously in 1967. At that time, anthropology and philosophy were in close contact – continental thinkers drew heavily on anthropology's theoretical terms,...

This book offers a rich assortment of some of Michael Silverstein's most important lectures at the University of Chicago over the past forty years, all of which converge on theoretical issues involved in the semiotic, cognitive, and sociopolitical st...

In this long-awaited sequel to "The Invention of Culture", Roy Wagner tackles the logic and motives that underlie cultural invention. Could there be a single, logical factor that makes the invention of the distinction between self and other possible,...

We have all found ourselves involuntarily addressing inanimate objects as though they were human. For a fleeting instant, we act as though our cars and computers can hear us. In situations like ritual or play, objects acquire a range of human charact...

The late anthropologist Valerio Valeri (1944-1998) was best known for his substantial writings on societies of Polynesia and eastern Indonesia. This volume, however, presents a lesser-known side of Valeri's genius through a dazzlingly erudite set of...

How do deaf people in different societies perceive and conceive the world around them? Drawing on three years of anthropological fieldwork in Nepali deaf communities, "Being and Hearing" shows how questions of cultural difference are profoundly shape...

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...