Following the story of one middle class family as they work, eat, love, and grow, Everyday Life in Global Morocco provides a moving and engaging exploration of how world issues impact lives. Rachel Newcomb shows how larger issues like gentrification, changing diets, and nontraditional approaches to marriage and fertility are changing what the everyday looks and feels like in Morocco. Newcomb's close engagement with the Benjelloun family presents a...

This definitive source on the intricate tattoos of Polynesia's Marquesas Islands offers a rare glimpse of a dying art. Because of the colonial authorities' 1884 ban on tattooing, there remained only a single surviving tattoo artist at the time of this 1921 survey-and a dwindling number of living examples. These 38 plates of black-and-white drawings and photographs provide an unusually complete and intimate record of a sophisticated art form. The Marquesas...

In cities throughout Africa, local inhabitants live alongside large populations of "strangers." Bruce Whitehouse explores the condition of strangerhood for residents who have come from the West African Sahel to settle in Brazzaville, Congo. Whitehouse considers how these migrants live simultaneously inside and outside of Congolese society as merchants, as Muslims in a predominantly non-Muslim society, and as parents seeking to instill in their children...

What Are The Ancients Trying To Tell Us? Join researcher and scientist Amir D. Aczel on a time-traveling journey through the past and discover what the ancient caves of France and Spain may reveal about the origin of language, art, and human thought as he illuminates one of the greatest mysteries in anthropology.

Within anthropology, as elsewhere in the human sciences, there is a tendency to divide knowledge making into two separate poles: conceptual (theory) vs. empirical (ethnography). In Theory Can Be More than It Used to Be, Dominic Boyer, James D. Faubion, and George E. Marcus argue that we need to take a step back from the assumption that we know what theory is to investigate how theory-a matter of concepts, of analytic practice, of medium of value,...

In this classic book, Michael Taussig explores the social significance of the devil in the folklore of contemporary plantation workers and miners in South America. Grounding his analysis in Marxist theory, Taussig finds that the fetishization of evil, in the image of the devil, mediates the conflict between precapitalist and capitalist modes of objectifying the human condition. He links traditional narratives of the devil-pact, in which the soul is...

Durante su último viaje a Japón, Claude Lévi-Strauss ofreció tres conferencias, inéditas hasta hoy, que componen los tres capítulos de este libro. Estos textos a la vez límpidos y concretos constituyen una puerta de entrada ideal al pensamiento de Lévi-Strauss, que retoma y comenta las grandes problemáticas de su obra: las relaciones entre naturaleza y cultura y las correspondencias entre el pensamiento mítico y el pensamiento histórico....

On Christmas Eve 1951, Santa Claus was hanged and then publicly burned outside of the Cathedral of Dijon in France. That same decade, ethnologists began to study the indigenous cultures of central New Guinea, and found men and women affectionately consuming the flesh of the ones they loved. "Everyone calls what is not their own custom barbarism," said Montaigne. In these essays, Claude Lévi-Strauss shows us behavior that is bizarre, shocking, and...

Passage to Manhood addresses the intersection of modernity, heroin use, and HIV/AIDS as they are embodied in a new rite-of-passage among young men in the Sichuan province of southwestern China. Through a nuanced analysis of the Nuosu population, this book seeks to answer why the Nuosu has a disproportionately large number of opiate users and HIV positive individuals relative to others in Sichuan. By focusing on the experiences of Nuosu migrants and...

China's patrilineal and patriarchal tradition has encouraged a long-standing preference for male heirs within families. Coupled with China's birth-planning policy, this has led to a severe gender imbalance. But a counterpattern is emerging in rural China where a noticeable proportion of young couples have willingly accepted having a single daughter. They are doing so even as birth-planning policies are being relaxed and having a second child, and...