Anthropology, Ethnology All books
Jean-Pierre Changeux
The Natural Foundations of Ethics
Is the sense of morality universal, is it inherent to human nature? The members of this symposium gathered around Jean-Pierre Changeux ponder the diversity of moralities and question themselves about the conflicts due to cultural differences and the possibility of attaining a common morality which would be intrinsic to human nature.
Alexandre Stern
Monkeys in the Kitchen How Cooking Made Us Human
How the invention of culinary and agricultural practices, the discovery and exchange of products, through the millennia have contributed to civilizing the human being.
Françoise Héritier
Male/Female II Dissolving the Hierarchy
The author's approach is not exclusively critical. She also sets out to break down the male-female hierarchy established and perpetuated by our mental categories...
Françoise Héritier
Male/ Female I The Thought Process of Difference
A fascinating work.” Françoise Giroud, Le Figaro
Geneviève Bédoucha
Lunar Eclipse in Yemen An Anthropologist's Emotions and Feelings of Bewilderment
This is a fascinating approach by a woman of a tribal society in a mountain valley in northern Yemen, near the Saudi Arabian border. Partly a travel book and partly a journal of the author's fieldwork, it restores an anthropologist's unique first-hand experience, questionings, hesitations and discoveries, from the first moments spent in an unfamiliar village. There are few anthropological works on Yemen, and even fewer about private life in rural societies in the hinterland of the former Arab Republic of Yemen (the author's fieldwork dates from the 1980s, before reunification). At the time, the presence of a female anthropologist led both men and women to talk openly, often jokingly and provocatively, of male-female relations, and it seemed to encourage women to voice strong criticisms of male behaviour and privileges. The women's comments reveal them to be lucid independent thinkers, and not at all submissive. This book is an invitation to discover a little-known rural community at close quarters, and to penetrate the secret universe of Yemen's many-storied mud houses. It reveals relations between men and women in a closed, but curious and hospitable, Muslim Arab society. An anthropologist and research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Geneviève Bédoucha is a specialist in the relations between socio-political structures and irrigation systems in Arabic and Islamic societies.
Jean-François Amadieu
The Looks Society Beautiful, Young People...and Others
An original thesis on breaking the silence surrounding the importance of appearance, and one that nobody — employer, employee, consumers — wishes to explicitly confront.
Marc Abélès
Is Luxury Worth Considering? An anthropology of luxury
The originality of Marc Abélès, an anthropologist who has always carried out his research against the grain, off the beaten path. A study of luxury that does not lean on classic sociological themes from the time of Bourdieu, those of distinction and domination.
Dan Sperber
The Infectiousness of Ideas
Where do our ideas come from ? Some, just from ourselves, or at least we believe so, but the majority come from others which we then pass on in our turn. The age-old philosophical question on the origins of ideas is analysed here in relation to their mode of dissemination. In his search for the natural element of culture, Dan Sperber presents in this book an epidemiology of ideas which describes how they spread by passing from one person to another, undergoing transformations which are in the same category as mutations. He also investigates how these ideas establish themselves in the long-term by occupying our mental world without our conscious knowledge, which allows us to participate in our culture. Dan Sperber, an anthropologist, is the research director of CNRS.