Anthropology, Ethnology All books
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.
Alexandre Stern
Who Are You, Homo sapiens? Understanding Our Nature In Order to Live Better
After telling how the art of cooking had humanized, civilized our ancestral apes, Alexandre Stern explores the roots of our humanity to better examine our modern practices and ways of life.
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.
Christine Tardieu
How We Become Bipeds The Wolf-Child Myth
A history of how and why humans are the only mammals that permanently adopted bipedalism.