By Michael Taussig
May 31, 2018
In this ambitious and accomplished work, Taussig explores the complex and interwoven concepts of mimesis, the practice of imitation, and alterity, the opposition of Self and Other. The book moves from the nineteenth-century invention of mimetically capacious machines, such as the camera, to the ...
By Clyde Kluckhohn
September 28, 2017
While the world has undoubtedly been shrinking, at the same time it has grown more complex. The likelihood of culture clashes leading to outright conflict is high, perhaps higher than ever. As Andrea L. Smith convincingly argues in her new introduction to this classic work, certain questions are as...
By Stanley Diamond
May 18, 2017
Anthropology is a kind of debate between human possibilities—a dialectical movement between the anthropologist as a modern man and the primitive peoples he studies. In Search of the Primitive is a tough-minded book containing chapters ranging from encounters in the field to essays on the nature of ...
By Adam Kuper
February 16, 2017
Adam Kuper’s iconoclastic intellectual history argues that the idea of “primitive society” is a western myth. The “primitive” is imagined as the opposite of the “civilised”. But this is a protean myth. As ideas about civilisation change, so the image of primitive society must be adjusted. By way ...
By Tim Ingold
July 19, 2016
Evolution is among the most central and most contested of ideas in the history of anthropology. This book charts the fortunes of the idea from the mid-nineteenth century to recent times. By comparing biological, historical, and anthropological approaches to the study of human culture and social ...
By Michael Herzfeld
March 07, 2016
In the third edition of this important and influential book, Michael Herzfeld revisits the idea of ‘cultural intimacy’. The chapters examine a range of topics touching on the relationship between state and citizen, and the notion of ‘national character’. Herzfeld provides a developed theoretical ...