In 1911, the publication of Franz Boas's "The Mind of Primitive Man" challenged widely held claims about race and intelligence that justified violence and inequality. Now, a group of leading scholars examines how this groundbreaking work hinged on re...

Curators make many decisions when they build collections or design exhibitions, plotting a passage of discovery that also tells an essential story. Collecting captures the past in a way useful to the present and the future. Exhibits play to our sense...

For much of history, strangers were routinely classified as barbarians and inferiors, seldom as fellow human beings. The notion of a common humanity was counterintuitive and thus had to be invented. Siep Stuurman traces evolving ideas of human equali...

How do contemporary generations come to terms with losses inflicted by imperialism, colonialism, and war that took place decades ago? How do descendants of perpetrators and victims establish new relations in today's globalized economy? With "Inherita...

In anthropology, a field that is known for its critical edge and intellectual agility, few books manage to maintain both historical value and contemporary relevance. Roy Wagner's "The Invention of Culture", originally published in 1975, is one. Wagne...

In the Roman and Byzantine Near East, the holy fool emerged in Christianity as a way of describing individuals whose apparent madness allowed them to achieve a higher level of spirituality. "Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium" examines how the figure...

As with the compass needle, so people have always been most powerfully attracted northwards; everyone carries within them their own concept of north. "The Idea of North" is a study, ranging widely in time and place, of some of the ways in which these...

This exquisitely illustrated and extensive map charts the peoples and languages of Alaska natives. The author, who founded the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and directed it until 2000, was responsible for assembl...

This compelling book explores the lived experience of empire in the Pacific, the last region to be contacted and colonized by Europeans following the great voyages of Captain Cook. Unlike conventional accounts that emphasize confrontation and the des...

"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...