In the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, the complex interplay between anticolonial resistance and accommodation resounds in its music. Guadeloupean gwoka music – a secular, drum-based tradition – captures the entangled histories of French colonization...

Business consultants everywhere preach the benefits of innovation – and promise to help businesses reap them. A trendy industry, this type of consulting generates courses, workshops, books, and conferences that all claim to hold the secrets of succes...

This splendid illustrated exploration of masks and masking ceremonies from the Democratic Republic of the Congo presents more than 130 outstanding wooden masks dating from the 18th to the 20th century. Visually stunning and spiritually charged, these...

Animal Studies is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field devoted to examining, understanding, and critically evaluating the complex relationships between humans and other animals. Scholarship in Animal Studies draws on a variety of methodologies t...

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...

Since 1975, the Peabody Museum has been publishing "The Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions", a unique series of folio volumes with the goal to document all known Maya inscriptions and their associated figurative art. This is the first of four...

For millennia, "the North" has held a powerful sway in Western culture. Long seen through contradictions – empty of life yet full of promise, populated by indigenous communities yet ripe for conquest, pristine yet marked by a long human history – it...

The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa has defined the childhoods of an entire generation. Over the past twenty years, international NGOs and charities have devoted immense attention to the millions of African children orphaned by the disease. But in "Cryin...

Alaska has long been a nurturing home for artists, with its stunning natural beauty, rich cultural life, and unique communities. In recent years, artists in Alaska have had an additional source of support: the awarding of annual grants to craftsmen,...