Anthropology, Ethnology All books
Françoise Héritier, Margarita Xanthakou
Body and Affects
The articles gathered here, written by eminent French anthropologists, present a novel angle on the way societies function. The writers argue that because societies are not abstract intellectual constructions, they cannot be dissociated from the physical individuals that constitute them, or from the affects (feelings and emotions) expressed by them. Included here are studies of Western and non-Western societies on such subjects as skin colour, religious rituals involving animals, witchcraft and flying sorcerers, passion in traditional North African cultures, and breast-feeding (both induced lactation to breastfeed infant girls and spontaneous lactation to breastfeed infant boys) in parts of Italy. Françoise Héritier is an anthropologist and teaches at the Collège de France. She is the author of Les Deux Soeurs et leur mère and Masculin/Féminin I and II, published by Editions Odile Jacob. Margarita Xanthakou, an anthropologist, is a research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).
Olivier Morin
How Traditions Are Born And Die Cultural Trans
A new approach to how culture is transmitted that helps us understand the multicultural society in which we live
Maurice Bloch
The Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge
An introduction to cognitive anthropology by one of the world’s most distinguished anthropologists
Howard Gardner
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed Educating for the Virtues in the Twenty-First Century
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed is an approachable primer on the foundations of ethics in the modern age.
Laurence Podselver
Hasidism: The Jews of France in the Face of Fundamentalism
Based on years of study, this unusual anthropological study, helps us understand the individual itineraries that explain why so many Jews...
Philippe Descola
Claude Lévi-Strauss, A Journey Through the Century
Eminent specialists on Claude Lévi-Strauss, his disciples and intellectual heirs, from Brazil, Canada, France and the U.S., give us a wide-ranging view of every facet of the works and thought of the author...
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.
Alain Froment
Amazing Anatomy The Human Body and Evolution
A remarkable description of the human body, as seen through the history and evolution of the many living species that humans evolved from
Claude Fischler, Véronique Pardo
Special Diets
In many countries, restrictive diets are changing individual eating habits — and profoundly altering the way we relate to one another.