Best anthropology books according to redditors
We found 41 Reddit comments discussing the best anthropology books. We ranked the 23 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 41 Reddit comments discussing the best anthropology books. We ranked the 23 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
In addition to the photos from the TED talk OP shared, there is an older TED talk by Robert Neuwirth on squatter cities.
http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_neuwirth_on_our_shadow_cities
His book, Shadow Cities, is pretty interesting. Not heavily academic and he does miss a lot, though his observations and stories on the cities he goes to are the best part. One of my favorite ones to read about was the Turkish community of Sultanbeyli. A small squatter area that transformed and if I remember right, created it's own infrastructure.
Edit: Link to book. http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Cities-Billion-Squatters-Urban/dp/0415933196
Edit 2: Because I get too excited about the subject and go off on others, a really great book to dig deeper into the subject of urban studies is Urban Life: Readings in the Anthropology of the City by Gmelch, Kemper, and Zenner. Read it for one of my graduate courses recently and loved it. Looks at life in cites on different levels, so it's not just squatter cities. One of my favorite parts was on migration and Mexican communities in the United States.
http://www.amazon.com/Urban-Life-Readings-Anthropology-City/dp/1577666348/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397186036&sr=1-1&keywords=Urban+Life
I can't really delve into any detail, but basically archaeology didn't really become a thing until the mid-19th century. Antiquarianism was around for about 100 years before that, but it was really just about collecting interesting things as historical relics, and not about scientific inquiry or trying to understand the past through archaeological sites and artifacts. It's not that people did not care about archaeological sites, but rather that they just saw them as ruins or old buildings and did not really see them as important places for learning about who and what came before. They may not have even recognized them as ancient places at all.
The case in Italy must surely be different because the history of the Roman empire was well known by 1700 and people must have known that these ruins were built during the Roman Empire, but I don't know much about Italian archaeology or its history. In other parts of the world places that are now considered archaeological sites probably were not seen as anything special and were not recognized as the ruins and artifacts of societies that came thousands of years before. At least not in Western thought; I can't speak for how non-Western people viewed such ruins.
I've also heard that until the 19th century there was no true concept of the passage of time in Western thought. There was the Biblical age, the Classical age, and the modern age; that was it, the world would then end. People of course experienced lifetimes and knew that time passed, but there was no sense of any real change or that a stone celt was actually made by a pre-Biblical culture 8,000 years ago. That concept of long-term change and abandonment just didn't exist, and certainly the concept of deep time did not exist (until the 19th century people knew that the Earth was ~6000 years old). I find this concept very hard to wrap my head around, but that's because I've grown up in a world where deep time exists and things are always changing.
A great source for all this is Bruce Trigger's "A History of Archaeological Thought". The first two or three chapters go over the early development of antiquarianism and archaeology, and how Western thought changed to allow for deep time and the recognition of non-Western pasts (the rest of the book is about how thought within the discipline has changed over the 20th century). Trigger was a true master of archaeology and although this book is long and kind of dense, it is also very accessible to a non-specialist.
You might also find Barbara Bender's "Stonehenge: Making Space (Materializing Culture)" interesting. It is about Stonehenge, obviously, and about how the public perceives and uses Stonehenge. She talks about the history of Stonehenge as a monument, too, including some descriptions of it in the 12th or 13th century A.D. I can't remember exactly what she said about how it was viewed then, but I remember it being very interesting and pretty different from how it is perceived today.
Are you going to be moving to London or elsewhere?
I'd also recommend this book to get a sense of how British people are (it says English, but the Scots and Welsh aren't that different, from a sociological perspective).
This teacher was an archeologist specific to my state.
https://www.amazon.com/Apocalyptic-Grace-Evolution-Culture-Consciousness/dp/1462872190/ref=nodl_
He passed away a few years ago. But the book is a kinda interesting read.
I'm not sure of anything like what you're looking for, but Trigger's History of Archaeological Thought is a pretty decent all around guide to the development of archaeological theory, though it tends to be more US-focused. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0521600499
No problem. Just to summarise -
But yeah, don't let this put you off making a fuss and complaining, they fucked up, you just won't realistically be able to threaten to sue them or have them arrested or anything. Reach out to those organisations I linked above, they may disagree, or they may be able to send e-mails supporting your complaint to the bus company or something.
On an unrelated note, no idea how long you've been in the country, but I always suggest this book to any newcomer to the country, because there's loads of weird unwritten rules and stuff, so learning about them might help you integrate more and understand what the deal with queuing, pubs, bants, etc. is. It's absolutely worth the investment.
Why Race Matters. Written by a philosopher who painstakingly rebuts all the arguments for environmentalism and explains lots of relevant studies. He also goes over the moral ramifications.
>R. Brian Ferguson and others effectively refute Pinker on the details on the violent-death rates he cites from grave sites, but my biggest problem is more conceptual or methodological. The data Pinker's cites for prehistory can't possibly prove his claims. You can't generalize some prehistoric or "tribal" baseline from a few 20th-century hunter-gatherer(ish) and a handful of grave sites. There's far, far too much uncertainty and too many unknowns. The truth is that we have very little idea or not the violent-death rate for the vast majority of human prehistory and history.
Ferguson and others refutations have also been refuted.
Can you refute the refutations of the refuters? And who will refute you then?!?!!?
I actually don't know. But they have been commented on by other anthropologists. See here, here and here. Regardless, I'm going to bow out of the anthropology conversation now, because it's way above my pay-grade.
Philosophy of mind addresses some of these issues under the heading of intentionality.
In (continental) humanities side of things, sociology of emotions and affect theory is so in vogue recently that some scholars already identified as a turn. The focus and approaches vary but one influential strand of thought takes Spinoza-Deleuze's "affect" as a central concept and separates it from emotion. I won't get into details but basically "affects" are about physical bodies' capacities to act and be acted on. For that reason the term abolishes the distinction between physical and mental effects and covers them both. Brian Massumi is maybe the most influential thinker in affect theory who refined the concept of "affect" and put it in context of broader discussions.
The indispensable resources are:
Gregg and Seigworth. The Affect Theory Reader
[Clough and Halley. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social] (http://www.amazon.com/Affective-Turn-Theorizing-Social/dp/0822339250/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375771321&sr=1-1&keywords=affective+turn)
[Brian Massumi. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation] (http://www.amazon.com/Parables-Virtual-Sensation-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822328976/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375771409&sr=1-1&keywords=parables+of+virtual)
Not known that much outside of anthropology but this is very good too: Tim Ingold. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description
Here's another good one: http://www.amazon.ca/History-Archaeological-Thought-Bruce-Trigger/dp/0521600499
It has a large section on post-processualism in reference to other paradigms of archaeological thought. Good book to own for archaeologists in general.
This gets asked every so often, and these are the books I usually recommend for someone wanting to know what's up with archaeology. Start at the top, and keep going down if you're interested. There are many more, but I like these.
When it comes to archaeological theory, Bruce Trigger is your man.
If you are interested in Archaeology, a History of Archaeological Thought by Brice Trigger is a good go-to.
I can recommend a book to you that might help, Watching the English by Kate Fox. She's a British anthropologist, and applies it to her own culture. It's really interesting to see why we behave the way we do and the "rules" of our behaviour.
you may want to check out The Anthropology of Freedom if this topic interests you.
are you free if you are born in a giant pit in the ground in which you can do anything you want to, but with no ladder to get out?
true freedom requires the scaffolding necessary to climb to your highest aspirations.
If you love playing the violin and want to become the world's best violin player, you will need someone who wants to make violins, someone who wants to chop wood to provide the violin maker with material, and a violin teacher to give you lessons. without that scaffolding you cannot be free to become the best violin player you can be. not to mention the things everyone needs to be free--freedom from violence or abuse, socialization and social relationships, food, shelter, water, etc... all of which are necessary for you to be alive and psychologically healthy enough to be able to pursue your passions and desires.
like lil wayne says:
"But they talked that freedom at us
And didn't even leave a ladder, damn"
Something a bit different to the 'here are the weapons/tactics' used approach but very well reviewed (full disclosure: on my shelf but not reached it yet!)
​
https://www.amazon.co.uk/War-conflict-civilisation-primates-robots/dp/184668417X
/u/bioscaf is requesting following book, I have PDF. Anyone else also need it?? PM Me Here to buy.
Anthropology: What Does it Mean to Be Human? 4th Edition
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0190840684
> the townsfolk kinda use the word witch with anybody who has knowledge of the oral folklore (which of course included spells as well as epics and stories) and herbal stuff (which was of course seen as partially magical decades ago)
PBMA is more oriented towards the herbal medicine part of that, from my experience. Again, I never met anyone who was claimed to be a witch, so knowledge of oral tradition never really entered into the picture. However, I'm interested in that kind of thing as an anthropology major and would love to have a chance to sit down and talk to a babaylan (not sure if you know that word but it's a Kinaray-a term for a sort of storyteller/healer/mystic type of person, similar to how you described your grandma).
"Gahum" means the same thing in Hiligaynon, so no need to attempt a translation on my behalf. I know it's translated as "power" by foreign missionaries and such, as in "ang gahum sang Balaan nga Espiritu" (I know because I was one of those missionaries a year and a half ago), but from what I understand it's supposed to refer to more intangible power than something actually tangible, making it more difficult to translate accurately.
As for "gaba", I haven't heard that one before but I'll have to take a look at another one of my various books and see if the author mentions it at all.
hey, looking for these two books
I only require the ebook version, not pdf
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AQLFQIO
https://www.amazon.com/Nervous-System-Michael-Taussig-ebook-dp-B009E3F0LI/dp/B009E3F0LI
That's not the book you are looking for.
This is the perfect book for you.
https://www.amazon.com/Humans-beginning-first-apes-cities-ebook/dp/B00IS80QWI
Found the 50 cent army fake news bot
https://www.amazon.com/Loose-Leaf-Anthropology-Appreciating-Diversity/dp/1259818411/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=anthropology+appreciating+human+diversity+17th+edition&qid=1568043073&s=gateway&sr=8-1
Have you heard the PhDs that argue against your preconceived notions on race? There’s a lot of propaganda against the concept of race in science because of it’s misuse to justify racism in the past. It’s is very taboo and therefore discouraged. The main imperatives against it are, however, political and social. This makes scientists shy away from evidence that does indeed prove that distinct races exist. The differences are fairly superficial but they do exist. Sub-Saharan Africans have different body morphology than Europeans say- they have evolved and adapted in different climates. It’s why blacks have more melanin, longer limbs, less bodily hair and smaller skulls. There’s a reason why the majority of professional runners and basketball players are black.. These differences are genetic, self-evident and it is what constitutes different races. They are not very consequential and the social aspect, like you said, has been overblown and abused. However the evidence, no matter how taboo it might be, speaks for itself.
Source:
https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2014/05/06/race_is_real_what_does_that_mean_for_society_108642.html
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000067867
https://www.amazon.com/Troublesome-Inheritance-Genes-Human-History/dp/1594204462/ref=nodl_
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Race-Matters-Michael-Levin/dp/0983891036/ref=pd_aw_sbs_14_of_3?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0983891036&pd_rd_r=e75b9afd-7185-11e9-bb1d-335c9152e117&pd_rd_w=miEl9&pd_rd_wg=0RmFF&pf_rd_p=aae79475-6dc9-4a12-80e8-27b63108fa72&pf_rd_r=GRZ61MXYQHYC4J0K0WXM&psc=1&refRID=N8XTMQAP1WJRVCX7ZPPP
Maybe Little Benny should read Why Race Matters.
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Race-Matters-Michael-Levin/dp/0983891036
Here are two good sources to start with. The former contains primary documents (including an explanation of the KR's plans for rapid industrialization) and the latter is a history and analysis of the Khmer Rouge:
Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976-1977
Cambodia Communism and the Vietnamese Model
I also highly recommend The Wayfinders - part of the (I think) 2009 CBC Massey Lecture series.
The first or second chapter (it's been about a year since I read it) concentrates on the Micronesian navigating culture.
Great read!
/u/DavidGraeber, I read somewhere that you were thinking of writing a book on "Bullshit education".
Are you still planning on doing that?
If, so any thought on Harry Cleaver's stuff on schoolwork as imposed unwaged work?
Here: https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/OnSchoolwork200606.pdf
There's also the anthropologist Tim Ingold's critique of the transmission model of education in his new book "Anthropology and/as Education":
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-as-Education-Tim-Ingold/dp/041578655X
We're in desperate need of some new critiques of the education system.
It's been years of just regurgitating Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, Jacques Rancière's the The Ignorant Schoolmaster and even John Dewey's stuff on democratic education.
Students would love to read this stuff.
/u/lemon_inside
http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-What-Does-Mean-Human/dp/0195392876
I don't know about online resources on anthropology.
http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-What-Does-Mean-Human/dp/0195392876
Hello I need this book:
Human Evolution and Culture
https://www.amazon.com/Revel-Human-Evolution-Culture-Anthropology/dp/0135193559/ref=olp_product_details?_encoding=UTF8&me=
How’s about a tenured professor with a Ph.D. From Columbia University?
No?
How about one from MIT?
Suit yourself
>Thank you for the shady pdf file guy who unironically has a picture of Himmler as their twitter profile picture, regularly refers to women as "whores" regardless of context, rants while frothing at the mouth about gender studies, and regularly posts in anime subreddits. I am sure that once I read this I will totally come over to your educated world of quarantined subreddits and mongolian paper mache boards.
Wait who has Himmler and speaks of whores? Are you okay? Perhaps you've had too much internet.
The linked PDF is merely a book written on a topic that you appear woefully ignorant of. The author is Michael Levin a Jewish American professor of philosophy at City University of New York. A published author with 3 books and numerous essays.
I've offered you a book, friend. I'll provide an Amazon link as well if downloading PDFs from the internet contributes to your numerous anxieties.
As an aside, you should see someone about the rambling. It's concerning and potentially indicative of an unstable thought process.