Robert L. Carneiro is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in anthropology in the twentieth century, best known for “A Theory of the Origin of the State” (1970). His efforts throughout his career brought cultural evolutionism from its nineteenth-century origins into the twenty-first century. This book is comprised of thirteen essays, ordered and balanced according to Carneiro’s own conceptual arrangement, and aims to contribute to revitalizing this durable, illuminating t...

"With his accustomed skill and ingenuity, Graber makes a case for the future unification of the world without the necessity of global war." Robert Carneiro, American Museum of Natural History Can we predict the world's political future? The surprising wealth of research critiqued in this book suggests that earlier assessments of world trends pointed too pessimistically toward the likelihood of a future repressive world-state. Offering an impressive analysis of long-term historical patterns...

NATIONAL BESTSELLERNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERRenowned activist and public intellectual David Graeber teams up with professor of comparative archaeology David Wengrow to deliver a trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution--from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social inequality--and revealing new possibilities for ...

If you want to know what anthropology is, look at what anthropologists do. This Very Short Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology combines an accessible account of some of the disciplines guiding principles and methodology with abundant examples and illustrations of anthropologists at work. Peter Just and John Monaghan begin by discussing anthropologys most important contributions to modern thought: its investigation of culture as a distinctively human character...

With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith. What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between ...

The Social Animal is a classic investigation of human beings as social animals.The Social Animal is a short, wide-ranging, witty and accessible book that sets out the present extent of our knowledge about how human societies and institutions really work, and what motivates the people who live within them.W. G. Runciman’s superb book is a welcome corrective to the view that there are no societies, only collections of individuals and their families: he shows that wherever the...

Liberty and freedom are frequently invoked to justify political action. Presidents as diverse as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush have built their policies on some version of these noble values. Yet in practice, idealist agendas often turn sour as they confront specific circumstances on the ground. Demonstrated by incidents at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, the pursuit of liberty and freedom can lead to violence and repression, u...

For more than two decades, William D. Gairdner has been a major voice from the conservative resistance, primarily through his bestselling books The Trouble with Canada . . . Still, The War Against the Family, and The Trouble with Democracy.Now, in this new book, his passionate, probing, and provocative intellect is hard at work, ranging over hot button issues of the day in the spheres of culture, the family, politics, and science. His quick-hit, entertain...

This book offers a much-needed new political theory of an old phenomenon. The last decade alone has marked the highest number of migrations in recorded history. Constrained by environmental, economic, and political instability, scores of people are on the move. But other sorts of changes—from global tourism to undocumented labor—have led to the fact that to some extent, we are all becoming migrants. The migrant has become the political figure of our time.Rather than viewing migrati...

This influential book challenges one of the most pervasive and powerful beliefs of our time--that Europe rose to modernity and world dominance due to unique qualities of race, environment, culture, mind, or spirit, and that progress for the rest of the world resulted from the diffusion of European civilization. J. M. Blaut persuasively argues that this doctrine is not grounded in the facts of history and geography, but in the ideology of colonialism. Blaut traces the colonizer's model of t...

This early work by Franz Boas was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'Anthropology and Modern Life' is a work on the study of humans and their lives in various societies. Franz Boas was born on July 9th 1958, in Minden, Westphalia. Even though Boas had a passion the natural sciences, he enrolled at the University at Kiel as an undergraduate in Physics. Boas completed his degree with a dissertation on the optical properties o...

This updated second edition of Mark Moberg's lively book offers a fresh look at the history of anthropological theory. Covering key concepts and theorists, Engaging Anthropological Theory examines the historical context of anthropological ideas and the contested nature of anthropology itself. Anthropological ideas regarding human diversity have always been rooted in the sociopolitical conditions in which they arose and exploring them in context helps students understand how and wh...