Decades before the marches and victories of the 1960s, a group of Alaska Natives were making civil rights history. Throughout the early twentieth century, the Alaska Native Brotherhood fought for citizenship, voting rights, and education for all Alas...

In 2004, one of the world's last bands of voluntarily isolated nomads left behind their ancestral life in the dwindling thorn forests of northern Paraguay, fleeing ranchers' bulldozers.  "Behold the Black Caiman" is Lucas Bessire's intimate chronicle...

Yaya's Story is a book about Yaya Harouna, a Songhay trader originally from Niger who found a path to America. It is also a book about Paul Stoller – its author – an American anthropologist who found his own path to Africa. Separated by ethnicity, la...

Mozambique has been hailed as a success story by the international community, which has watched it evolve through a series of violent political upheavals: from colonialism, through socialism, to its current democracy. As Juan Obarrio shows, however,...

Successor to Claude Levi-Strauss at the College de France, Philippe Descola has become one of the most important anthropologists working today, and "Beyond Nature and Culture" has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French...

A dance begins beneath the outstretched branches of the giant umunyinya tree in Rwanda. First there is drumming and clapping, then the lead dancers step into the center of the gathering. The dancing subsides and the gacaca court, the community hearin...

"The Call of the Trance" is a magnificent book that takes us to the unchartered frontiers of the forbidden. From initiation ceremonies to crises of hysteria, from suicide attempts to the ecstasies of witches, Catherine Clement explores in simple but...

In Abyssinian poetry, the "wax"‌ is the obvious meaning, the "gold"‌ is the hidden meaning. In "Wax and Gold", Donald N. Levine explores mid-to-late-twentieth-century Ethiopian society on the same two levels, using modern sociology and psychology to...

In this pithy two-part essay, Marshall Sahlins reinvigorates the debates on what constitutes kinship, building on some of the best scholarship in the field to produce an original outlook on the deepest bond humans can have. Covering thinkers from Ari...

In 1963, Howard S. Becker gave a lecture about deviance, challenging the then-conventional definition that deviance was inherently criminal and abnormal and arguing that instead, deviance was better understood as a function of labeling.   At the end...