Social Anthropology

While doing fieldwork on the remote Indonesian island of Flores, anthropologist Gregory Forth came across people talking about half-apelike, half-humanlike creatures that once lived in a cave on the slopes of a nearby volcano. Over the years he continued to record what locals had to say about these mystery hominoids while searching for ways to explain them as imaginary symbols of the wild or other cultural representations. We follow Forth on the trail of this mystery hominoid, and the space they occupy in islanders' culture as both natural creatures and as supernatural beings.

Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called “the rainbow colors” around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Edward O. Wilson bridges science and philosophy to create a 21st century treatise on human existence. Once criticized for his over-reliance on genetics, Wilson unfurls here his most expansive and advanced theories on human behavior, recognizing that, even though the human and spider evolved similarly, the poet’s sonnet is wholly different than the spider’s web.

In Up the Youth Club, Emma Warren maps the shifting story of youth clubs in the UK and Northern Ireland, from factory workers in Victorian Boys' and Girls' clubs to renegade self-emancipatory spaces in the 1970s and the music-generating youth clubs of more recent decades. With a mixed lineage in church evangelism, the patronage of the upper classes, grassroots' DIY, and erratic state funding, the youth club has had a huge, yet almost invisible, effect on music, sport, culture and society.

En el tercer libro sobre su iniciación como "hombre de conocimiento", Carlos Castaneda desanda camino hasta los primeros tratos con su maestro, el brujo yaqui don Juan, y añade al recuento de prodigios las arduas labores de disciplina física y mental que desde un principio lo preparaban para un acto decisivo de poder. La historia se cierra con el relato del viaje al que alude el título, intimación de la soledad y la áspera belleza de tal vida.

Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim-displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the 'hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S., as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities.

In its 4.5 billion–year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times: shattered by asteroid impacts, entombed in ice, smothered by methane, and torn apart by unfathomably powerful megavolcanoes. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way. Can we survive it? How?

As a species, Homo sapiens is at a crossroads. Study of our planet’s turbulent past suggests that we are overdue for a catastrophic disaster, whether caused by nature or by human interference.
It’s a frightening prospect, as each of the Earth’s past major disasters—from meteor strikes to bombardment by cosmic radiation—resulted in a mass extinction, where more than 75 percent of the planet’s species died out. But in Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, Annalee Newitz, science journalist and editor of the science Web site io9.com explains that although global disaster is all but inevitable, our chances of long-term species survival are better than ever. Life on Earth has come close to annihilation—humans have, more than once, narrowly avoided extinction just
during the last million years—but every single time a few creatures survived, evolving to adapt to the harshest of conditions.
This brilliantly speculative work of popular science focuses on humanity’s long history of dodging the bullet, as well as on new threats that we may face in years to come. Most important, it explores how scientific breakthroughs today will help us avoid disasters tomorrow. From simulating tsunamis to studying central Turkey’s ancient underground cities; from cultivating cyanobacteria for “living cities” to designing space elevators to make space colonies cost-effective; from using math to stop pandemics to studying the remarkable survival strategies of gray whales, scientists and researchers the world over are discovering the keys to long-term resilience and learning how humans can choose life over death.
Newitz’s remarkable and fascinating journey through the science of mass extinctions is a powerful argument about human ingenuity and our ability to change. In a world populated by doomsday preppers and media commentators obsessively forecasting our demise, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is a compelling voice of hope. It leads us away from apocalyptic thinking into a future where we live to build a better world—on this planet and perhaps on others. Readers of this book will be equipped scientifically, intellectually, and emotionally to face whatever the future holds.

Discover a holistic, biblical vision of sex and gender that honors God and offers good news to the world.

Enter a grave new world of fascination and delight as award-winning journalist Peter Ross uncovers the stories and glories of Britain's best graveyards. Who are London's outcast dead and why is David Bowie their guardian angel? How did a thousand skulls come to be stacked beneath a church in Kent? Why is the music hall star who sang "I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside" buried on a hillside in Glasgow far from the sound of the silvery sea?

Der Historiker und Journalist Rutger Bregman setzt sich in seinem neuen Buch mit dem Wesen des Menschen auseinander. Anders als in der westlichen Denktradition angenommen ist der Mensch seinen Thesen nach nicht böse, sondern im Gegenteil: von Grund auf gut. Und geht man von dieser Prämisse aus, ist es möglich, die Welt und den Menschen in ihr komplett neu und grundoptimistisch zu denken. In seinem mitreißend geschriebenen, überzeugenden Buch präsentiert Bregman Ideen für die Verbesserung der Welt. Sie sind innovativ und mutig und stimmen vor allem hoffnungsfroh.

Somewhere between myths and hard facts you find Nome, poised also between yesterday and tomorrow. Drawing on his background in anthropology and an equal passion for history, Michael Engelhard surveys the seam that links two neighboring continents through the lens of one pivotal city. The region's legacy of millennia shines on pages enriched by this writer's recollections—from mammoths to Cold War monuments, from a spa turned orphanage, to cyclist miners and shaman hoards.

Frenzied crowds, talking ravens, the stench of the Tiber River: life in ancient Rome was stimulating, dynamic, and often downright dangerous. The Romans relaxed and gossiped in baths, stole precious water from aqueducts, and partied and dined to excess. From the smells of fragrant cookshops and religious sacrifices to the cries of public executions and murderous electoral mobs, Guy de la Bedoyere's Populus draws on a host of historical and literary sources to transport us into the intensity of daily life at the height of ancient Rome.

Delving into evolution, anthropology, sociology, biology, veterinary science, and zoology, they break down the walls between disciplines, redefining the boundaries of medicine. Zoobiquity explores how animal and human commonality can be used to diagnose, treat, and heal patients of all species. Both authoritative and accessible, offering cutting-edge research through captivating narratives, this provocative book encourages us to see our essential connection to all living beings

Today we are told to be true to ourselves, look within for answers, and follow our hearts. But when we put our own happiness first, we experience record-breaking levels of aimlessness, loneliness, depression, and anxiety. Self-centeredness always fails to deliver the fulfillment we're seeking.

From a renowned historian comes a ground-breaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution, a number one international best seller that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human”.

The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force.

From Aristotle to Ada Lovelace: a brief history of the mathematical ideas that have forever changed the world and the everyday people and pioneers behind them. The story of our best invention yet. From our ability to calculate the passing of time to the algorithms that control computers and much else in our lives, numbers are everywhere. They are so indispensable that we forget how fundamental they are to our way of life.

For most of human history, we were rural folk. Our daily lives were bound up with working the land, living within the rhythm of the seasons. And yet rural life is oddly invisible our historical records. The daily routine of the peasant, the farmer or the craftsperson could never compete with the glamour of city life, war and royal drama. Lives went unrecorded, stories untold. There is, though, one way in which we can learn about our rural past. The things we have left behind provide a connection that no document can match; physical artefacts are touchstones that breathe life into its history.

In Lurking, Joanne McNeil digs deep and identifies the primary (if sometimes contradictory) concerns of people online: searching, safety, privacy, identity, community, anonymity, and visibility. She charts what it is that brought people online and what keeps us here even as the social equations of digital life - what we’re made to trade, knowingly or otherwise, for the benefits of the internet - have shifted radically beneath us. It is a story we are accustomed to hearing as tales of entrepreneurs and visionaries and dynamic and powerful corporations.

There is the Cornwall Lamorna Ash knew as a child – the idyllic, folklore-rich place where she spent her summer holidays. Then there is the Cornwall she discovers when, feeling increasingly dislocated in London, she moves to Newlyn, a fishing town near Land’s End. This Cornwall is messier and harder; it doesn’t seem like a place that would welcome strangers. Before long, however, Lamorna finds herself on a week-long trawler trip with a crew of local fishermen, afforded a rare glimpse into their world, their warmth and their humour.

At the dawn of the 21st century, British society is still shaped by a private education system devised to gentrify the Victorian middle classes and produce gentlemen to run the Empire. Yet it is not on the political agenda. It is rarely the subject of public debate, and we remain blind to its psychological implications. Can we afford to go on ignoring this issue? Will we continue to sacrifice the welfare of our children to satisfy our antiquated social aspirations?