"I Swear I Saw This" records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig's reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. Taking as a starting point a drawing he made in Medellin in 2006 – as well as its capti...

At the turn of the twentieth century, over forty percent of the world's Jews lived within the Russian Empire, almost all in the Pale of Settlement. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the Jews of the Pale created a distinctive way of life little known...

In "Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes", Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw present a series of guidelines, suggestions, and practical advice for creating useful fieldnotes in a variety of settings, demystifying a process that is ofte...

The most detailed and well-illustrated study of material culture for any northern Athabascan language group to date, "Gwich'in Athabascan Implements" reproduces pre- and early post-contact tools that are historically important to the Athabaskan peopl...

The history of Pre-Columbian collecting is a social and aesthetic history – of ideas, people and organizations, and objects. This richly illustrated volume examines these histories by considering the collection and display of Pre-Columbian objects in...

Writing and recording are key cultural activities that allow humans to communicate across time and space. Whereas Old World writing evolved into the alphabetic system that is now employed around the world, the indigenous peoples in the Americas auton...

The oldest discovered statue, fashioned some fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, is of a bear. The lion was not always king. From antiquity to the Middle Ages, the bear's centrality in cults and mythologies left traces in European languages, litera...

In the Andes, a long history of research on burial records and burial contexts exists for the purpose of reconstructing cultural affiliation, chronology, socioeconomic status, grave content, and human body treatment. Less attention is paid to the lar...

Chichen Itza and Tula have long been conceived as "twin cities" – paired political capitals that share so many aspects of architectural plan, sculptural repertory, and iconographical motifs that they represent a unique case of cultural contact and ar...

In May 1853, Charles Dickens paid a visit to the "savages at Hyde Park Corner", an exhibition of thirteen imported Zulus performing cultural rites ranging from songs and dances to a "witch-hunt" and marriage ceremony. Dickens was not the only Londone...