Social Anthropology

An award-winning sexuality educator takes down society’s deeply entrenched colonial views on sex and gender throughout history in this accessible, candid, and revolutionary exploration of how we can—and should—reclaim our minds and bodies for a more pleasurable existence for all. When you...

Each of us is endowed with an inheritance—a set of evolved biases and cultural tools that shape every facet of our behavior. For countless generations, this inheritance has taken us to ever greater heights. But now, for the first time, it’s failing us. We find ourselves hurtling toward a future of unprecedented political polarization, deadlier war, and irreparable environmental destruction. In Inheritance, renowned anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse offers a sweeping account of how our biases have shaped humanity’s past and imperiled its future.

When you think of evolution, the picture that most likely comes to mind is a straight-forward progression, the iconic illustration of a primate morphing into a proud, upright human being. But in reality, random events have played huge roles in determining the evolutionary histories of everything from lions to lobsters to humans. However, random genetic novelties are most likely to become fixed in small populations. It is mathematically unlikely that this will happen in large ones.

In this powerful classic, the eminent Swiss philosopher Max Picard argues that though the “flight from God” is not a phenomenon unique to this age, man has nevertheless put himself and society in an extremely dangerous situation with the progressive secularization of Western culture. In the age of faith, Picard says, a man had to make a conscious decision to separate himself from the world of faith. Today, the world, not just the individual, is in flight, and men must extricate themselves from modernity and make a deliberate decision to find and affirm faith.

This volume will revise the way we look at the modern populations of Latin America and North America by providing a totally new view of the history of Native-American and African-American peoples throughout the hemisphere. Africans and Native Americans explores key issues relating to the evolution of racial terminology and European colonialists' perceptions of color, analyzing the development of color classification systems and the specific evolution of key terms such as black, mulatto, and mestizo, which no longer carry their original meanings.

Why is the genome of a salamander 40 times larger than that of a human? Why does the avocado tree produce a million flowers and only a hundred fruits? Why, in short, is there so much waste in nature? In this lively and wide-ranging meditation on the curious accidents and unexpected detours on the path of life, Daniel Milo argues that we ask these questions because we’ve embraced a faulty conception of how evolution - and human society - really works.

In the 1990s a small midwestern American town approved the construction of a massive pork complex, where almost 7 million hogs are birthed, raised, and killed every year. In Porkopolis Alex Blanchette explores how this rural community has been reorganized around the life and death cycles of corporate pigs. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Blanchette immerses listeners into the workplaces that underlie modern meat, from slaughterhouses and corporate offices to artificial insemination barns and bone-rendering facilities.

Paul Farmer has battled AIDS in rural Haiti and deadly strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the slums of Peru. A physician-anthropologist with more than fifteen years in the field, Farmer writes from the front lines of the war against these modern plagues and shows why, even more than those of history, they target the poor.

La storia di come le reti di informazione hanno fatto e disfatto il nostro mondo, dall’autore del bestseller mondiale Sapiens. Negli ultimi centomila anni, noi Sapiens abbiamo accumulato un enorme potere. Eppure, nonostante tutte le nostre scoperte, invenzioni e conquiste, oggi ci troviamo in una crisi esistenziale. Il mondo è sull’orlo del collasso ecologico. La disinformazione dilaga. E ci stiamo buttando a capofitto nell’era dell’intelligenza artificiale, una nuova rete di informazioni che minaccia di annientarci. Perché siamo così autodistruttivi?

Celebrated historian and cultural critic Ronald Sanders offers a compelling and ideology-shattering history of racial prejudice and myth as shaped by political, religious, and economic forces from the 14th Century to the present day. Written with clear-eyed vigor, Sanders draws on a broad history of art, psychology, politics, and religion to inform his striking and soundly reasoned assertions.

From tribal rituals to televised inaugurations, from thrones to algorithms, politics has survived not through brute force but through spectacle, myth, and symbols. Georges Balandier called it the theater of power. This audiobook asks what happens when that theater moves to screens, platforms, and code.

Short on time? Or maybe you’ve already read the book, but need a refresh on the most important takeaways. In a quick, easy read, you can take the main principles from Outliers: The Story of Success. Outliers asserts that a person’s background and environment are every bit as important as intelligence and drive in achieving success. Critics have complained that Gladwell’s explanations for success are simply interesting, but too simplistic. However, the book has sold millions of copies and remains popular.

In Schoolishness, Susan D. Blum continues her journey as an anthropologist and educator. The author defines "schoolishness" as educational practices that emphasize packaged "learning," unimaginative teaching, uniformity, constant evaluation by others, arbitrary forms, predetermined time, and artificial boundaries, resulting in personal and educational alienation, dependence, and dread.

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.

Imagine you were transported back in time to Medieval England and had to start a new life there. Without mobile phones, iPads, internet, and social media networks, when transport means walking or, if you're fortunate, horseback, how will you know where you are or what to do? Where will you live? What is there to eat? What shall you wear? All these questions and many more are answered in this new guidebook for time-travelers. This lively and engaging book will help the listener deal with the new experiences they may encounter and the problems that might occur.

In an era of unprecedented access to knowledge, why does ignorance thrive? Why do conspiracy theories, science denial, and anti-expert sentiment dominate public discourse? And how did we reach a point where misinformation spreads faster than facts, and critical thinking is treated as an elitist threat? From the war on expertise and the rise of conspiracy thinking to the manipulation of public opinion through propaganda and technology, this book reveals the deep-rooted causes of our current crisis.

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.

To be heard as complaining is not to be heard, writes Sara Ahmed. In her sweeping exploration of complaint as a means of resistance, Ahmed attunes her "feminist ear" to those who seek to challenge powerful institutions. She shows how complaints can unbury past complaints, getting them out of filing cabinets or from behind closed doors, allowing us to see institutions more clearly—how they work, and for whom they work.

A "piercing, unsentimental" (New Yorker) history that boldly challenges the idea of a rural American crisis.

Our Political Nature is the first book to reveal the hidden roots of our most deeply held moral values. It shows how political orientations across space and time arise from three clusters of measurable personality traits. These clusters entail opposing attitudes toward tribalism, inequality, and differing perceptions of human nature. Together, these traits are by far the most powerful cause of left-right voting, even leading people to regularly vote against their economic interests.