Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography
Showing all 11 results
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Courting the Wild Twin
£11.99Courting the Wild Twin
‘Fabulous.’ Dan Richards, author of Holloway ‘Terrifically strange and thrilling.’ Melissa Harrison, author of All Among the Barley ‘A modern-day bard.’ Madeline Miller, author of Circe This is a book of literary activism – an antidote to the shallow thinking that typifies our age. In Courting the Wild Twin, acclaimed scholar, mythologist and author of Smoke Hole and Bardskull, Martin Shaw unravels two ancient European fairy tales concerning the mysterious ‘wild twin’ located deep inside all of us. By reading these tales and becoming storytellers ourselves, he challenges us to confront modern life with purpose, courage, and creativity. Martin summons the reader to the ‘ragged edge of the dark wood’ to seek out this estranged, exiled self – the part we generally shun or ignore to conform to societal norms – and invite it back into our consciousness. If there was something we we
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Fans
£20.00Fans
From the acclaimed science writer and author of Wayfinding, a journey into the world of superfans and an exploration of the psychology of fandom.
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Growing up human
£12.99Growing up human
In ‘Growing Up Human’, bioarchaeologist Brenna Hassett brings the science of physical anthropology to bear on understanding how our evolutionary history has shaped a phenomenon every reader will have experienced – childhood.
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How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures
£10.99How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures
Every society in the history of humanity has lived with religion. In this book, evolutionary psychologist Professor Robin Dunbar tracks its origins back to what he terms the ‘mystical stance’ – the aspect of human psychology that predisposes us to believe in a transcendent world, and which makes an encounter with the spiritual possible. As he explores world religions and their many derivatives, as well as religions of experience practised by hunter-gatherer societies since time immemorial, Dunbar argues that this instinct is not a peculiar human quirk, an aberration on our otherwise efficient evolutionary journey. Rather, religion confers an advantage: it can benefit our individual health and wellbeing, but, more importantly, it fosters social bonding at large scale, helping hold fractious societies together.
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Pirate enlightenment, or, The real Libertalia
£10.99Pirate enlightenment, or, The real Libertalia
The Enlightenment did not begin in Europe. Its true origins lie thousands of miles away on the island of Madagascar, in the late 17th century, when it was home to several thousand pirates. This was the Golden Age of Piracy, a period of violent buccaneering and rollicking legends – but it was also, argues anthropologist David Graeber, a brief window of radical democracy, as the pirate settlers attempted to apply the egalitarian principles of their ships to a new society on land. For Graeber, Madagascar’s lost pirate utopia represents some of the first stirrings of Enlightenment political thought. In this jewel of a book, he offers a way to ‘decolonise the Enlightenment’, demonstrating how this mixed community experimented with an alternative vision of human freedom, far from that being formulated in the salons and coffee houses of Europe.
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Putin and the Return of History
£25.00Putin and the Return of History
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has reshaped history. In the decades after the collapse of Soviet communism, the West convinced itself that liberal democracy would henceforth be the dominant, ultimately unique, system of governance. Putin is a paradox. In the early years of his presidency, he appeared to commit himself to friendship with the West, suggesting that Russia could join the European Union or even NATO. He said he supported free-market democracy and civil rights. But the Putin of those years is unrecognisable today. So, what happened? Was he lying when he proclaimed his support for freedom, democracy and friendship with the West? Or, was he sincere? This book examines these questions in the context of Russia’s thousand-year past, tracing the forces and the myths that have shaped Putin’s politics of aggression.
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Relic
£9.99Relic
‘Object Lessons’ is a series of short books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Every culture, every religion, every era has enshrined otherwise regular objects with a significance which stretches beyond their literal importance. Whether the bone of a Catholic martyr, the tooth of a Buddhist lama, or the cloak of a Sufi saint, relics are material conduits to the immaterial world. Yet relics aren’t just a feature of religion. The exact same sense of the transcendent animates objects of political, historical, and cultural significance. From Abraham Lincoln’s death mask to Vladimir Lenin’s embalmed corpse, Emily Dickinson’s envelopes to Jimi Hendrix’s guitar pick, relics are the objects which the faithful understand as being more than just objects. Material things of sacred importance, relics are indicative of a culture’s deepest values.
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Secrets of the Sprakkar
£12.99Secrets of the Sprakkar
Iceland is the best place on earth to be a woman – but why? For the past twelve years, the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report has ranked Iceland number one on its list of countries closing the gap in equality between men and women. What is it about Iceland that makes many women’s experience there so positive? Eliza Reid, the First Lady of Iceland, examines her adopted homeland’s attitude toward women – the deep-seated cultural sense of fairness, the influence of current and historical role models, and, crucially, the areas where Iceland still has room for improvement.
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The museum of other people
£12.99The museum of other people
This is a history of the ways in which foreign and prehistoric peoples were represented in museums of anthropology, with their displays of arts and artifacts, their dioramas, their special exhibitions, and their arrays of skulls and skeletons.
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The patriarchs
£10.99The patriarchs
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2023
A WATERSTONES BOOK OF YEAR FOR POLITICS 2023
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Wild woman
£18.99Wild woman
Surviving in the wilderness has long been associated with men, and traditionally conservation and environmental biology have been male-dominated subjects. Yet many remarkable women also choose to live and work in wild and challenging landscapes. In her book, Philippa Forrester studies and celebrates what it means to be a wild woman. Taking an anthropological approach, Philippa considers the grit and determination required for women to maintain connections to wildlife. She reveals stories of female conservation heroes and other extraordinary wild women and relates some of her own experiences from three decades spent travelling around the world working in some of the wildest places on Earth.
£18.99