On a warm summer's night in Athens, Georgia, Patrik Keim stuck a pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger. Keim was an artist, and the room in which he died was an assemblage of the tools of his particular trade: the floor and table were covered...

One of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, Claude Levi-Strauss casts a long shadow over many areas of inquiry, from ethnology and cultural anthropology to literary studies, Marxist theory, and religious studies. In recent years, i...

"People at the Well" investigates habits, practices, and meanings of water through case studies from around the world. With its wide range and impressive diversity, this volume points to water practices in different cultures and shows that water is m...

In Dante's "Inferno", the lowest circle of Hell is reserved for traitors, those who betrayed their closest companions. In a wide range of literatures and mythologies such intimate aggression is a source of ultimate terror, and in "Witchcraft, Intimac...

This remarkable book provides a rare look at the microcosmic world of "hybrid landscapes" – an increasingly popular topic among geographers and environmentalists – by examining chars, which are part-land, part-water, low-lying, sandy masses within th...

"A Place That Matters Yet" unearths the little-known story of Johannesburg's MuseumAfrica, a South African history museum that embodies one of the most dynamic and fraught stories of colonialism and postcolonialism, its life spanning the eras before,...

"Demands of the Day" asks about the logical standards and forms that should guide ethical and experimental anthropology in the twenty-first century. Anthropologists Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis do so by taking up Max Weber's notion of the "d...

"A Monastery in Time" is the first book to describe the life of a Mongolian Buddhist monastery – the Mergen Monastery in Inner Mongolia – from inside its walls. From the Qing occupation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the Cultural...

Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santeria and other religions related to Orisha worship – a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa – Stephan Palmie has grown progressively uneasy with the assumptions inherent in the very term Afro-Cuban...

The fortunes of the late nineteenth century's imperial and industrial powers depended on a single raw material – rubber – with only one source: the Amazon basin. And so began the scramble for the Amazon, a decades-long conflict that found Britain, Fr...