Fish bones in the caves of East Timor reveal that humans have systematically fished the seas for at least 42,000 years. But in recent centuries, our ancient, vital relationship with the oceans has changed faster than the tides. As boats and fishing t...

Of all the senses, touch is the most ineffable – and the most neglected in Western culture, all but ignored by philosophers and artists over millennia. Yet it is also the sense that links us most intimately to the world around us, from our mother's c...

In 2001, a collection of open and affirming churches with predominantly African American membership and a Pentecostal style of worship formed a radically new coalition. The group, known now as the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries or TFAM, has at it...

The 2016 presidential election campaign and its aftermath have underscored worrisome trends in the present state of our democracy: the extreme polarization of the electorate, the dismissal of people with opposing views, and the widespread acceptance...

Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, "French Lessons" is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of...

Anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were pioneers in using visual anthropological techniques to study the aesthetics of bodily motion in Bali. What is less well known is that they also collected textiles, paintings, puppets, and carving...

Who are the lords of labor? The owners, or the working bodies? In this smart, ambitious, and powerful book, David Gewanter reads the body as creator and destroyer – ultimately, as the broken mold of its own work. Haunted by his father's autopsy of a...

Not since Clifford Geertz's "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" has the publication of an anthropological analysis been as eagerly awaited as this book, Terence S. Turner's The Fire of the Jaguar. His reanalysis of the famous myth from the K...

This is a turbulent time for the conservation of America's natural and cultural heritage. From the current assaults on environmental protection to the threats of climate change, biodiversity loss, and disparity of environmental justice, the challenge...

The economic crisis of 2008 led to an unprecedented focus on the world of high finance – and revealed it to be far more arcane and influential than most people could ever have imagined. Any hope of avoiding future crises, it's clear, rest on understa...