Many observers of Kenya's complicated history see causes for concern, from the use of public office for private gain to a constitutional structure historically lopsided towards the executive branch. Yet efforts from critics and academics to diagnose...

Fakes, forgery, counterfeits, hoaxes, frauds, knock-offs – such terms speak, ostensibly, to the inverse of truth or the obverse of authenticity and sincerity. Do all cultures equally spend an incredible amount of energy and labor on detecting differe...

Landlocked and with an economy reliant on subsistence agriculture, Niger often comes into the public eye only as an example of deprivation and insecurity. Urban centers have become concentrated areas of unemployment filled with young men bored and id...

In this history of fishing – not as sport but as sustenance – archaeologist and best-selling author Brian Fagan argues that fishing was an indispensable and often overlooked element in the growth of civilization. It sustainably provided enough food t...

Anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were pioneers in using visual anthropological techniques to study the aesthetics of bodily motion in Bali. What is less well known is that they also collected textiles, paintings, puppets, and carving...

Not since Clifford Geertz's "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" has the publication of an anthropological analysis been as eagerly awaited as this book, Terence S. Turner's The Fire of the Jaguar. His reanalysis of the famous myth from the K...

"The Pitt-Rivers Omnibus" brings together the definitive essays and lectures of the influential social anthropologist Julian A. Pitt-Rivers, a corpus of work that has, until now, remained scattered, untranslated, and unedited. Illuminating the themes...

The book contains the edition of a hieratic written text from the Tebtunis temple library, dating to the 1st - 2nd century AD. The ritual text is a compilation of fumigation and libation spells for the main deities of the designed ritual place, the P...

Westerners have long imagined the Himalayas as the world's last untouched place and a repository of redemptive power and wisdom. Beatniks, hippie seekers, spiritual tourists, mountain climbers – diverse groups of people have traveled there over the y...

In 1975, when political scientist Benedict Anderson reached Wat Phai Rong Wua, a massive temple complex in rural Thailand conceived by Buddhist monk Luang Phor Khom, he felt he had wandered into a demented Disneyland. One of the world's most bizarre...