Showing titles in Anthropology

Just 70 years ago, the Gulf nation of Qatar was a backwater, reliant on pearl diving. Today it is a gas-laden parvenu with seemingly limitless wealth and ambition. Skyscrapers, museums and futuristic football stadiums rise out of the desert and Ferraris race through the streets. But in the shadows, migrant workers toil in the heat for risible amounts. Inside Qatar reveals how real people live in this surreal place, a land of both great opportunity and great iniquity.

As a kid growing up in Manhattan, William Helmreich played a game with his father they called "Last Stop." They would pick a subway line and ride it to its final destination, and explore the neighborhood there. Decades later, Helmreich teaches university courses about New York, and his love for exploring the city is as strong as ever. Putting his feet to the test, he decided that the only way to truly understand New York was to walk virtually every block of all five boroughs - an astonishing 6,000 miles.

Financial collapses - whether of the junk bond market, the Internet bubble, or the highly leveraged housing market-are often explained as the inevitable result of market cycles: What goes up must come down. In Liquidated, Karen Ho punctures the aura of the abstract, all-powerful market to show how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed.

When Europeans first arrived in North America, between five and eight million Indigenous people were already living there. But how did they come to be here? What were their agricultural, spiritual, and hunting practices? How did their societies evolve, and what challenges do they face today? Eminent historians Theda Perdue and Michael Green begin by describing how nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers followed the bison and woolly mammoth over the Bering land mass between Asia and what is now Alaska between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago, settling throughout North America.

Two centuries ago, nearly half the North American diet was foraged, hunted, or caught in the wild. Today, so-called “wild foods” are becoming expensive luxuries, served to the wealthy in top restaurants. Meanwhile, people who depend on wild foods for survival and sustenance find their lives forever changed as new markets and roads invade the world’s last untamed landscapes. In Feasting Wild, geographer and anthropologist Gina Rae La Cerva embarks on a global culinary adventure to trace our relationship to wild foods.

This book is a profound exploration of the external influences that shape human consciousness, from healing rituals to digital devices. In this voyage through thousands of years of psychosomatic healing, distinguished anthropologist and sociologist Roger Bartra examines the placebo effect as a key to our understanding of human consciousness. Shamans and Robots demonstrates how biology and technology become intertwined within human culture by using the various histories of ritual and symbolic healing to speculate about future developments in artificial intelligence.

Nudge - so heißt die Formel, mit der man andere dazu bewegt, die richtigen Entscheidungen zu treffen. Denn Menschen verhalten sich von Natur aus nicht rational. Nur mit einer Portion List können sie dazu gebracht werden, vernünftig zu handeln. Aber wie schafft man das, ohne sie zu bevormunden? Wie erreicht man zum Beispiel, dass sie sich um ihre Altervorsorge kümmern, umweltbewusst leben oder sich gesund ernähren? Darauf gibt Nudge die Antwort. Das Konzept hat bereits viele Entscheidungsträger überzeugt, darunter US-Präsident Barack Obama.

As one of the last remaining survivors of the Great Depression and the Second World War, I will not go gently into that good night. I want to tell you what the world looks like through my eyes, so you can help change it.... In November 2013, 91-year-old Yorkshireman, RAF veteran, and ex-carpet salesman Harry Leslie Smith’s Guardian article – "This year, I will wear a poppy for the last time" – was shared almost 60,000 times on Facebook and started a huge debate about the state of society.

Just over 125,000 years ago, humanity was going extinct until a dramatic shift occurred—Homo sapiens started tracking the tides in order to eat the nearby oysters. Before long, they’d pulled themselves back from the brink of extinction. What saved us during that period of endangerment? The...

In Grocery, bestselling author Michael Ruhlman offers incisive commentary on America’s relationship with its food and investigates the overlooked source of so much of it—the grocery store. In a culture obsessed with food—how it looks, what it tastes like, where it comes from, what is...

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides an intimate examination of the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system. An anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, Seth M. Holmes shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes' material is visceral and powerful. He trekked with his companions illegally through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them.

For most of human history, life offered no safety net. Environments shifted, resources vanished, and stability was always temporary. People lived on the move—carrying knowledge, forming bonds, and adapting to constant change. This audiobook examines how human life took shape long before familiar societies appeared. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, and evolutionary science, it explores how early humans lived, moved, cooperated, and adapted over deep time.

A fascinating, beautifully illustrated guide to the monsters that are part of our collective psyche, featuring stories from the Lore podcast—now a streaming television series—including “They Made a Tonic,” “Passed Notes,” and “Unboxed,” as well as rare material. They live in...

Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Our minds don’t work the way we think they do. Two renowned psychologists explain how and why our intuitions lead us astray, “[spinning] the plain world [we] know into a wonderment of surprising new insights” (Time). “A must-read for anyone who wants to...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From an award-winning journalist at The Atlantic, these searing essays make a powerful case that “real hope lies not in a sunny nostalgia for American greatness but in seeing this history plain—in all of its brutality, unadorned by euphemism” (The New York...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award From an award-winning historian comes a dazzling history of the birth of cultural anthropology and the adventurous scientists who pioneered it—a sweeping chronicle of discovery...

Hunting is one of humanity's most ancient and universal activities. It has been embedded in every facet of our lives, shaping social bonds, power hierarchies, and interactions with the spirit world. This book tells the story of how hunting evolved from a means of survival practiced with clubs and spears to a genteel display of royal power, and how it has become, in today's world, complicated and hotly contested.

Giulia Blasi parte da una serie di riflessioni personali da attivista in preda a un momento di sconforto per decostruire la narrazione dell'isolamento e mettersi alla ricerca di un'alternativa concreta al senso di impotenza che attraversa il nostro tempo. Il risultato è un libro che non fornisce soluzioni facili per problemi complessi ma prova a disegnare una mappa per orientarsi in un periodo di grande difficoltà collettiva, cercando una via d'uscita dal Tapinocene, l'era dell'infelicità.

With its emphasis on traditional values, family, faith, military service, good manners, small government, and independent-minded people, the South should certainly rise again. Far from being the backwater of prejudice and ignorance that the liberal media would have you believe, the South has always been the center of American culture.