Social Science Anthropology

Internationally revered cultural anthropologist and marketing expert Clotaire Rapaille reveals for the first time the techniques he has used to improve profitability and practices for dozens of Fortune 100 companies. His groundbreaking revelations shed light not just on business but on the way every human being acts and lives around the world.

One of the twentieth century's most influential books, this classic work of anthropology offers a groundbreaking exploration of what culture is With The Interpretation of Cultures, the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz developed the concept of thick description, and in so doing, he...

We have long attributed man's violent, aggressive, competitive nature to his animal ancestry. But what if we are just as given to cooperation, empathy, and morality by virtue of our genes? What if our behavior actually makes us apes? What kind of apes are we?

In 1963 Colin Fletcher became the first man to walk the length of Grand canyon, below the Rim. It began with a dream, when he and a friend detoured from a cross-country trip to take a hurried look at the great natural wonder. Standing on the Rim, surrounded by the profound and almost mystical silence, Fletcher knew that something had happened to the way he looked at things. He also knew that the Canyon, with its depths and distances, cliffs, buttes, and hanging terraces, beckoned to him, calling him on a journey that would challenge both his body and his mind.

A compelling account of the four-thousand-year history of a people that spans the globe and transcends the ages. From the ancient and simple faith of a small tribe to a global religion with adherents in every nation, the path of the Jews is traced through countless expulsions and migrations, the great tragedy of the Holocaust, and the joy of founding a homeland in Israel. Putting the struggle of a persecuted people into perspective, Max Dimont asks whether the tragic sufferings of the Jews have actually been the key to their survival, as other nations and races vanished into obscurity.

USA: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture takes you on a tour of the core influences and ideals that have shaped this great country and have driven the behavior and attitudes found on Main Street and in the workplace. It looks at Americans at work, at home, and at play, and provides the visitor with an up-to-date cultural road map of this dynamic, multifaceted society.

In 1994, Rwanda was the scene of the first acts since World War II to be legally defined as genocide. Two years later, Clea Koff, a twenty-three-year-old forensic anthropologist, left the safe confines of a lab in Berkeley, California, to serve as one of sixteen scientists chosen by the United Nations to unearth the physical evidence of the Rwandan genocide. Over the next four years, Koff’s grueling investigations took her across geography synonymous with some of the worst crimes of the twentieth century.

Sex, Time, and Power offers a tantalizing answer to an age-old question: Why did big-brained Homo sapiens suddenly emerge some 150,000 years ago? The key, according to Shlain, is female sexuality. Drawing on an awesome breadth of research, he shows how, long ago, the narrowness of the newly bipedal human female's pelvis and the increasing size of infants' heads precipitated a crisis for the species. Natural selection allowed for reconfiguration of hormonal cycles, entraining women with the periodicity of the moon - and imbuing women with the concept of time.

Anthropologist Jeremy Narby has altered how we understand the Shamanic cultures and traditions that have undergone a worldwide revival in recent years. Now, in one of his most extraordinary journeys, Narby travels the globe - from the Amazon Basin to the Far East - to probe what traditional healers and pioneering researchers understand about the intelligence present in all forms of life. Intelligence in Nature presents overwhelming illustrative evidence that independent intelligence is not unique to humanity alone.

As late as the 1960s, the Wari' Indians of the western Amazonian rainforest ate the roasted flesh of their dead as an expression of compassion for the deceased and for his or her close relatives. By removing and transforming the corpse, Wari' death rites helped the bereaved kin accept their loss and go on with their lives. Drawing on the recollections of Wari' elders who participated in consuming the dead, this book presents one of the richest, most authoritative ethnographic accounts of funerary cannibalism ever recorded.

Ever since Darwin and The Descent of Man, the existence of humans has been attributed to our intelligence and adaptability. But in Catching Fire, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham presents a startling alternative: our evolutionary success is the result of cooking. In a groundbreaking theory of our origins, Wrangham shows that the shift from raw to cooked foods was the key factor in human evolution.

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 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.

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.

Is it really human nature to stab one another in the back in our climb up the corporate ladder? Competitive, selfish behavior is often explained away as instinctive, thanks to evolution and "survival of the fittest", but in fact, humans are equally hard-wired for empathy. Using research from the fields of anthropology, psychology, animal behavior, and neuroscience, Frans de Waal brilliantly argues that humans are group animals.

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.

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?

The Territorial Imperative is a work of wit, of literary wealth, of high adventure. The author draws on his inexhaustible knowledge of animal ways and takes his listeners on deep excursions into the ancient animal world, and on deep penetrations of the contemporary human wilderness.

Noticing society's creeping descent into infantilisation is one thing, however understanding the roots and causes of the phenomenon is not quite so easy. But in this topical and vitally important new work, cultural theorist and academic, Dr Keith Hayward, exposes the deep social, psychological and political dangers of a world characterised by denuded adult autonomy.

Michael Crawley immerses himself in various endurance cultures and asks what makes enduring together meaningful to people. He learns how Nepalese runners face different challenges depending on their location up a mountain, from those in the lowlands and ‘middle hills’ to Sherpas from the Solu Khumbu, and observes Tarahumara ultrarunners’ ability to cover extreme distances on highly technical terrain. But he also delves into the history of Dance Marathons, six-day pedestrianism races in Madison Square Gardens and the unique Enhanced Games.