Shem Pete (1896-1989), a colorful and brilliant raconteur from Susitna Station, Alaska, left a rich legacy of knowledge about the Upper Cook Inlet Dena'ina world. Shem was one of the most versatile storytellers and historians in twentieth century Ala...

Consider Miles Davis, horn held high, sculpting a powerful musical statement full of tonal patterns, inside jokes, and thrilling climactic phrases – all on the fly. Or think of a comedy troupe riffing on a couple of cues from the audience until the w...

For millennia, "the North" has held a powerful sway in Western culture. Long seen through contradictions – empty of life yet full of promise, populated by indigenous communities yet ripe for conquest, pristine yet marked by a long human history – it...

Over the past few decades, maternal childbirth injuries have become a potent symbol of Western biomedical intervention in Africa, affecting over one million women across the global south. Western-funded hospitals have sprung up, offering surgical sut...

Now part and parcel of everyday life almost everywhere, mobile phones have radically transformed how we acquire and exchange information. Many anticipated that in Africa, where most have gone from no phone to mobile phone, improved access to telecomm...

In "The Mediterranean Incarnate", anthropologist Naor Ben-Yehoyada takes us aboard the "Naumachos" for a thirty-seven-day voyage in the fishing grounds between Sicily and Tunisia. He also takes us on a historical exploration of the past eighty years...

Religion has been a central part of human experience since at least the dawn of recorded history. The gods change, as do the rituals, but the underlying desire remains – a desire to belong to something larger, greater, most lasting than our mortal, f...

The influx of African migrants into Europe in recent years has raised important issues about changing labor economies, new technologies of border control, and the effects of armed conflict. But attention to such broad questions often obscures a funda...

In this book, renowned anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff make a startling but absolutely convincing claim about our modern era: it is not by our arts, our politics, or our science that we understand ourselves – it is by our crimes. Surveying...

In the final years of the twentieth century, emigres from engineering and computer science devoted themselves to biology and resolved that if the aim of biology is to understand life, then making life would yield better theories than experimentation....