**“Perhaps the finest and most profound account of ethnographic fieldwork and discovery that has ever entered the anthropological literature.”—The Wall Street Journal“If you want to experience a profoundly different culture without the exhausting travel (to say nothing of the cost), this is an excellent choice.”—The Washington Post**One of Time’s 32 Books You Need to Read This Summer * One of National Geographic’s Be...

Few people these days would oppose making the public realm of space, social services and jobs accessible to women and men with disabilities. But what about access to the private realm of desire and sexuality? How can one also facilitate access to that, in ways that respect the integrity of disabled adults, and also of those people who work with and care for them?Loneliness and Its Opposite documents how two countries generally imagined to be progressive engage with these q...

Renowned linguistic anthropologist Don Kulick first went to study the tiny jungle village of Gapun in New Guinea over thirty years ago to document how it was that their native language, Tayap, was dying. But you can't study a language without settling in among the people, understanding how they speak every day, and even more, how they live. This book takes us inside the village as Kulick came to know it, revealing what it is like to live in a difficult-to-get-to village of two hundred peop...

In this dramatic and compelling narrative, anthropologist Don Kulick follows the lives of a group of transgendered prostitutes (called travestis in Portuguese) in the Brazilian city Salvador. Travestis are males who, often beginning at ages as young as ten, adopt female names, clothing styles, hairstyles, and linguistic pronouns. More dramatically, they ingest massive doses of female hormones and inject up to twenty liters of industrial silicone into their bodies to creat...

This volume explores a diverse array of cultural contexts to understand how vulnerabilities were involved in survival, domination, representation, relationality, agency, and humanity.Viewed as a prospect to be grasped rather than as a limit to be overcome, vulnerability has emerged as a key concept—a framework for thinking about a myriad of phenomena—in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and bioethics. In Changing Vulnerability, contributors focus on obj...

This book is about how we might think about vulnerability—what it is and how it operates—by looking at cases where different kinds of vulnerabilities clash.Disability is often portrayed as a vulnerability in itself, and disabled people are often labelled a prototypical “vulnerable group”. This book disassembles that label by highlighting how vulnerabilities involving people with disabilities emerge and how they often conflict with other vulnerabilities: the vulnerabilities of disab...

Taboo looks at the ethnographer and sexuality in anthropological fieldwork and considers the many roles that sexuality plays in the anthropological production of knowledge and texts. How does the sexual identity that anthropologists have in their "home" society affect the kind of sexuality they are allowed to express in other cultures? How is the anthropologists' sexuality perceived by the people with whom he or she does research? How common is sexual violence and intimidation in ...

On Thursday, December 16, 1773, an estimated seven dozen men, many amateurishly disguised as Indians—then a symbol of freedom—dumped about ┬ú10,000 worth of tea in the harbor. Whatever their motives at the time, they unleashed a social, political, and economic firestorm that would culminate in the Declaration of Independence two and a half years later.The Boston Tea Party provoked a reign of terror in Boston and other American cities, as Americans began inflicting unimaginable barb...

*Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction*Prize-winning poet and journalist Eliza Griswold’s Amity and Prosperity is an expose on how fracking shattered a rural Pennsylvania town, and how one lifelong resident brought the story into the national spotlight. This is an incredible true account of investigative journalism and a devastating indictment of energy politics in America.Stacey Haney, a lifelong resident of Amity, P...

Jacksonland is the thrilling narrative history of two men—President Andrew Jackson and Cherokee chief John Ross—who led their respective nations at a crossroads of American history. Five decades after the Revolutionary War, the United States approached a constitutional crisis. At its center stood two former military comrades locked in a struggle that tested the boundaries of our fledgling democracy. Jacksonland is their story.One man we recognize: Andrew Jackson—w...

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, an entwined narrative of the most adventurous year of all time, when three expeditions simultaneously raced to the top, bottom, and heights of the world.As 1909 dawned, the greatest jewels of exploration—set at the world’s frozen extremes—lay unclaimed: the North and South Poles and the so-called “Third Pole,” the pole of altitude, located in unexplored heights of the Himalaya. Before the calendar turned, three expeditions...

Pompeii, Machu Picchu, the Valley of the Kings, the Parthenon—the names of these legendary archaeological sites conjure up romance and mystery. The news is full of archaeology: treasures found and treasures lost. Archaeological research tantalizes us with possibilities (are modern humans really part Neanderthal?). Where are the archaeologists behind these stories? What kind of work do they actually do, and why does it matter?Marilyn Johnson's Lives in Ruins is an absorbing...