"The Pitt-Rivers Omnibus" brings together the definitive essays and lectures of the influential social anthropologist Julian A. Pitt-Rivers, a corpus of work that has, until now, remained scattered, untranslated, and unedited. Illuminating the themes...

Bronislaw Malinowski's path-breaking research in the Trobriand Islands shaped much of modern anthropology's disciplinary paradigm. Yet many conundrums remain. For example, Malinowski asserted that baloma spirits of the dead were responsible for procr...

John V. Murra's Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, originally given in 1969, are the only major study of the Andean "avenue towards civilization". Collected and published for the first time here, they offer a powerful and insistent perspective on the Andea...

"The Art of Life and Death" explores how the world appears to people who have an acute perspective on it: those who are close to death. Based on extensive ethnographic research, Andrew Irving brings to life the lived experiences, imaginative lifeworl...

Since its publication in 1969, Emile Benveniste's Vocabulaire – here in a new translation as the "Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society" – has been the classic reference for tracing the institutional and conceptual genealogy of the sociocu...

What do we mean when we refer to the world? How does the world relate to the human person? Are the two interdependent and, if so, in what way? What does the world mean for the ethnographer and the anthropologist? Much has been said of worlds and worl...

How people conceive of happiness reveals much about who they are and the values they hold dear. Drawing on ethnographic insights from diverse field sites around the world, this book offers a unique window onto the ways in which people grapple with fu...