Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography
Showing all 8 results
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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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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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Inheritance
£25.00Inheritance
The ancient inheritance that made us who we are. The ancient inheritance that is now driving us to ruin. Every human being is endowed with an inheritance: a set of ancient biases – forged by natural selection and transformed by cultural evolution – that shape every facet of our behaviour. For countless generations, this inheritance has been taking us to ever greater heights: driving the rise of more sophisticated technologies, more organised religions, more expansive empires. But now, for the first time, it is failing us. Suddenly, we find ourselves on a path to destruction. Here, a leading anthropologist offers a sweeping account of how our inheritance has shaped humanity’s past and future.
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Italy in a wineglass
£20.00Italy in a wineglass
A lively, page-turning history of Italy and its wines, from the Roman Empire to climate change.
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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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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.
£12.99