YouTube hosts one billion visitors monthly and sees more than 400 hours of video uploaded every minute. In “Thanks for Watching,” Patricia Lange offers an anthropological perspective on this heavily mediated social environment, demonstrating how core concepts from anthropology—participant-observation, reciprocity, and community—apply to sociality on YouTube and how to reconceptualize an…
Somalis in the Twin Cities and Columbus seeks to understand the integration outcomes of refugees in the Midwest at local and state levels to show how communities struggle with political, social, and economic incorporation. While many immigration titles examine the Latino community, this book focuses on the black Muslim Somalis, providing an important understanding of the lives of this understud…
In this long-awaited sequel to The Invention of Culture, Roy Wagner tackles the logic and motives that underlie cultural invention. Could there be a single, logical factor that makes the invention of the distinction between self and other possible, much as specific human genes allow for language? Wagner explores what he calls “the reciprocity of perspectivesâ€_x009d_ through a journey …
The global public health community has focused care and funding on TB and HIV in Zambia, but adult policy-makers, doctors, and humanitarians often ignore children's perspectives as they confront infectious diseases. Well-intentioned practioners fail to realize how children take on active caregiving roles when their guardians become seriously ill. Using ethnographic methods, and listening to the…
Highly innovative and theoretically incisive, Two Lenins is the first book-length anthropological examination of how social reality can be organized around different yet concurrent ideas of time. Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov grounds his theoretical exploration in fascinating ethnographic and historical material on two Lenins: the first is the famed Soviet leader of the early twentieth century, and th…
The Owners of Kinship investigates how kinship in Indigenous Amazonia is derived from the asymmetrical relation between an “ownerâ€_x009d_ and his or her dependents. Through a comprehensive ethnography of the Kanamari, Luiz Costa shows how this relationship is centered around the bond created between the feeder and the fed. Building on anthropological studies of the acquisition, distri…
In anthropology, as much as in the current popular imagination, kings remain figures of fascination and intrigue. As the cliché goes, kings continue to die spectacular deaths only to remain subjects of vitality and long life. This collection of essays by a teacher and his student — two of the world's most distinguished anthropologists— explores what kingship actually is, histor…
The Anthem Companion to Pierre Bourdieu' provides an introduction to the French sociologist’s thought and an evaluation of the international significance of his work from a range of national perspectives. The contributions in the companion investigate the applicability of Bourdieu’s theories and concepts in diverse sociopolitical contexts and consider the ways they can be said to possess un…
In 1931 Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his famous Remarks on Frazer's “Golden Bough.". At that time, anthropology and philosophy were in close contact—continental thinkers drew heavily on anthropology's theoretical terms, like mana, taboo, and potlatch, in order to help them explore the limits of human belief and imagination. Now the book receives its first translation by an anthropolog…
Jenny Huberman provides an ethnographic study of encounters between western tourists and the children who work as unlicensed peddlers and guides along the riverfront city of Banaras, India. She examines how and why these children elicit such powerful reactions from western tourists and locals in their community as well as how the children themselves experience their work and render it meaningfu…