Computerized processes are everywhere in our society. They are the automated phone messaging systems that businesses use to screen calls; the link between student standardized test scores and public schools' access to resources; the algorithms that r...

This is a multidisciplinary study of the early contact period of Alaskan Native history that follows a major hunting and fishing Inupiaq group at a time of momentous change in their lifeways. The Amilgaqtau yaagmiut were the most powerful group in th...

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,...

About a millennium ago, in Cairo, someone completed a large and richly illustrated book. In the course of thirty-five chapters, our unknown author guided the reader on a journey from the outermost cosmos and planets to Earth and its lands, islands, f...

In 1961, John F. Kennedy referred to the Papuans as "living, as it were, in the Stone Age". For the most part, politicians and scholars have since learned not to call people "primitive", but when it comes to the Papuans, the Stone-Age stain persists...

Our knowledge of neolithic and bronze age Europe is growing rapidly, and this book offers a major contribution to our understanding of the language and history of the peoples of that period. The editors have taken a deliberately cross-disciplinary ap...

For sale in CIS only! "This book is about a story (Ousmane Sembene's Xala), about a time (the aftermath of Senegalese Independence), and about a place (Dakar, the capital of Senegal). It's also about the collaboration between an artist and an anthro...

"Legacies, Logics, Logistics" brings together a set of essays, written both before and after the financial crisis of 2007-2008, by eminent Africanist and economic anthropologist Jane I. Guyer. Each was written initially for a conference on a defined...

For more than a century, urban North Africans have sought to protect and revive Andalusi music, a prestigious Arabic-language performance tradition said to originate in the "lost paradise" of medieval Islamic Spain. Yet despite the Andalusi repertoir...