Discover the spiritual threads that bind Amazonian life and culture.Tsewa’s Gift is a profound exploration of the cultural and spiritual life of the indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon. Anthropologist Michael F. Brown delves into the concept of tsewa, a spiritual force central to the worldview of the Aguaruna people, revealing how this belief system shapes social relationships, moral obligations, and the exchange of gifts. Through vivid ethn...

Michael Brown undertakes a thorough study of Eyeliner's BUY NOW, a vaporwave homage to the kitsch electronic sounds of the 1980s and 1990s.Eyeliner's BUY NOW (2015) belongs to a new genre for our times: vaporwave. Emerging in the early 2010s on the internet, vaporwave originated with a cohort of millennial artists who reimagined the musical soundtracks of 1980s-1990s consumerism with an adroit mixture of irony and sincerity. One of these was Eyeli...

Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? In The Wayfinders, renowned anthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world's indigenous cultures.In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ. In the Amazon we meet the descendants of a true lost civilization, the...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • David Byrne’s incisive and enthusiastic look at the musical art form, from its very inceptions to the influences that shape it, whether acoustical, economic, social, or technological—now updated with a new chapter on digital curation.“How Music Works is a buoyant hybrid of social history, anthropological survey, autobiography, personal philosophy, and business manual”—The Boston GlobeUtilizing h...

This landmark book shows how five African civilizations—Yoruba, Kongo, Ejagham, Mande and Cross River—have informed and are reflected in the aesthetic, social and metaphysical traditions (music, sculpture, textiles, architecture, religion, idiogrammatic writing) of black people in the United States, Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad, Mexico, Brazil and other places in the New World.

'One of the best music books of the year' – Neil McCormick, Daily TelegraphWhat if the song that would change your life is already out there – buried somewhere in 100 million tracks, one skipped click away?In You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song, former Spotify "Data Alchemist" Glenn McDonald opens the black box of music streaming and shows how it is quietly transforming what we hear, how artists earn a living and what music means in...

This second edition of Catherine J. Allen's distinctive ethnography of the Quechua-speaking people of the Andes brings their story into the present. She has added an extensive afterword based on her visits to Sonqo in 1995 and 2000 and has updated and revised parts of the original text. The book focuses on the very real problem of cultural continuity in a changing world, and Allen finds that the hold life has in 2002 is not the same as it was in 1985.

Martín Prechtel’s experiences growing up on a Pueblo Indian reservation, his years of apprenticing to a Guatemalan shaman, and his flight from Guatemala’s brutal civil war to life in the U.S. inform this lyrical blend of memoir, cultural commentary, and spiritual call to arms. The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic is both an epic story and a cry to the heart of humanity based on the author’s realization that human survival depends on keeping alive the seeds of our “original forgotten ...

One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of culturalecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted?Simon Reynolds, one of the finest...

"An anthology of nature writing by people of color, providing deeply personal connections to—or disconnects from—nature." —NPRFrom African American to Asian American, indigenous to immigrant, "multiracial" to "mixed-blood," the diversity of cultures in this world is matched only by the diversity of stories explaining our cultural origins: stories of creation and destruction, displacement and heartbreak, hope and mystery.With writing from Jamaica Kincaid on th...

An NPR Best Book of the Year: "A pointedly passionate look at what's been lost in the digital era." — Los Angeles TimesA longtime musician and former member of the indie band Galaxie 500 who has also taught at Harvard, Damon Krukowski has watched cultural life lurch from analog to digital. And as an artist who has weathered that transition, he has challenging, urgent questions for both creators and consumers about what we have thrown away...

Mourning the death of loved ones and recovering from their loss are universal human experiences, yet the grieving process is as different between cultures as it is among individuals. As late as the 1960s, the Wari' Indians of the western Amazonian rainforest ate the roasted flesh of their dead as an expression of compassion for the deceased and for his or her close relatives. By removing and transforming the corpse, which embodied ties between the living and the dead and was a focus of gri...