If speech has long been an emblem of the human species, then talking machines seem to be harbingers of some kind of technological singularity.

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The original Subaltern Studies narrated how Indian peasant communities destroyed the British empire. Subaltern Studies 2.0 prophesies the multi-being demos and liberates Being from Unbeing. Re-kin, Re-nomad, Re-animate, Re-wild! The Animist Revolution has come.

Across Africa, it is not unusual for proponents of liberal democracy and modernization to make room for some aspects of indigenous culture, such as the use of a chief as a political figure. Yet for Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, no such accommodation should be made.

In precarious and tumultuous times, schemes of social support, including cash transfers, are increasingly indispensable as the governance of the nation-state becomes more and more inadequate. In Presence and Social Obligation, James Ferguson argues that conceptual resources for solving this problem are closer to hand than we might think.

Once again, we are witness to a surge in right-wing authoritarianism, ethnonationalism, and white supremacy. Such similarities between present and past suggest that we are not done with the issues raised by the Jewish Question: that is, what is the place of “the Jew”—the minority, the relic, the rootless stranger, the racialized other, the exiled, the displaced, the immigrant, the diasporic?

Kinds of Value showcases, reworks, and extends some of the core resources anthropologists and like-minded scholars have developed for thinking about value. Starting with a simple definition of value, this volume unfolds, explicates, and experiments with its variations.

In his classic essay The Gift, Marcel Mauss argued that gifts can never be truly free; rather, they bring about an expectation of reciprocal exchange. In The Gift Paradigm, Alain Caillé provides the first in-depth, English-language introduction to La Revue du MAUSS—or, “Anti-Utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences,” combining the work of anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and others.

As the planet’s human numbers grow and environmental concerns proliferate, natural scientists, economists, and policy-makers are increasingly turning to new and old questions about families and kinship as matters of concern. This timely work offers vital proposals for forging innovative personal and public connections in the contemporary world.

This is the long-awaited fifth edition of Marshall Sahlins’ classic series of bon mots, ruminations, and musings on the ancients, anthropology, and much else in between.

As the People’s Republic of China has grown in economic power, so too have concerns about what its sustained growth and expanding global influence might mean for the established global order.

Surrealism was not merely an artistic movement to its adherents but an “instrument of knowledge,” an attempt to transform the way we see the world by unleashing the unconscious as a radical, new means of constructing reality. With Making Trouble, sociologist and cultural historian Derek Sayer explores what it might mean to take surrealism’s critique of civilization seriously.

Man—with Variations republishes Mitchell’s writings on Boas, which weave together interviews with the great anthropologist and his students and colleagues to recount a formative period in American anthropology.

Academics routinely engage with colleagues in the research community as a critical part of their work. But teaching tends to be seen as a private matter between a teacher and his or her students. Why shouldn’t faculty members feel a similar impulse to be aware of what their colleagues are doing in the area of teaching?

Schrempp’s understanding of science and myth as operating not in opposition but in reciprocal relation offers an essential corrective to contemporary mischaracterizations.

In recent years, Confucius Institutes have sprung up on more than four hundred and fifty campuses worldwide, including nearly one hundred across the United States. But Marshall Sahlins argues that this seemingly innocuous arrangement conceals the more dubious mission of promoting the political influence of the Chinese government, as guided by the propaganda apparatus of the party-state.

Data is too big to be left to the data analysts. Data: Now Bigger and Better! brings together researchers whose work is deeply informed by the conceptual frameworks of anthropology—frameworks that are comparative as well as field-based.

In 2001 and Counting, renowned anthropologist Bruce Kapferer revisits 2001: A Space Odyssey, making a compelling case for its continued cultural relevance. Kapferer shows that Kubrick’s masterwork speaks to concerns of the contemporary world, including the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, and the material and political effects of neoliberalism.

What is ethics? Is it a system of transcendent moral imperatives or can it be produced by ordinary people in everyday life? Do the daily rules of interaction constitute a code of ethics?

For decades, Israel and Palestine have been locked in ongoing conflict over land that each claims as its own. The conflict is often considered a calculated landgrab, but this characterization does little to take into account the myriad motivations that have shaped it in ways that make it seem intractable. 

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the division between nature and culture has been fundamental to Western thought. In this groundbreaking work, renowned anthropologist Philippe Descola seeks to break down this divide, arguing for a departure from the anthropocentric model and its rigid dualistic conception of nature and culture as distinct phenomena.

In this pamphlet, world-renowned Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro situates the Jesuit missionaries’ accounts of the Tupi people in historical perspective, and in the process draws out some startling and insightful implications of their perceived inconstancy in relation to anthropological debates on culture and religion.

In this lucid and insightful essay, renowned linguist Roy Harris reflects on the early nineteenth-century doctrine of “art for art’s sake.”

As the lynchpin of US strategy in Vietnam, pacification was responsible for the destruction of untold numbers of non-combatants. In this pamphlet, Kurt Jacobsen examines the curious case of the rehabilitation of repressive practices that any sensible civilized nation ought to discard.

How can we make economics genuinely quantitative? This is the question that Gabriel Tarde tackled at the end of his career. In this pamphlet, Latour and Lépinay offer a lively introduction to the work of this forgotten genius of nineteenth-century French social thought.

A spectre is haunting literature today – the spectre of patacriticism.

When the U.S. military decided it needed cultural expertise as much as smart bombs to prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan, they mobilized anthropologists for war. The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual critiques that strategy and offers a blueprint for resistance.

Politicians, pundits, and Pentagon officials are singing the praises of a kinder, gentler American counterinsurgency. Some claim that counterinsurgency is so sophisticated and effective that it is the “graduate level of war.”

What can you say after you say that the world-or at least human life on it-looks like it’s nearing its end? How about starting with wonder at the possibility that dialogue and subjectivity-the bases of human language-are possible now?

Reflecting the decline in college courses on Western Civilization, Marshall Sahlins aims to accelerate the trend by reducing “Western Civ” to about two hours.

Pasta and pizza, in all their infinitely delicious and universally appealing varieties, are inextricably connected to Italian identity. These familiar foods not only represent Italy’s culinary traditions, according to anthropologist Franco La Cecla, they have unified the Italian people and spread Italian culture worldwide.

Understanding Media explores, in a serious yet entertaining way, our common habits of thinking about the presence and significance of media in our lives. Offering analysis of the philosophical and social foundations of contemporary media theory as well as everyday strategies of knowing media, it addresses the advantages and limitations of different ways of understanding media.

Far from a cliché, medievalism has become a dominant paradigm for comprehending America’s perceived enemy in the War on Terror. Yet this cloying post-9/11 rhetoric has served to obscure the intricate ideological machinations of neomedievalism.

Arguing against the common impulse to analogize anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, Bunzl instead offers a framework that locates the two phenomena in different projects of exclusion.

Increasingly today, intellectual rights over traditional knowledge are fiercely contested. But how should we make sense of the politics and meaning of tradition? As the Brazilian anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha highlights in this pamphlet, it is no easy task.

Although Iran dominates today’s headlines and figures centrally on the geopolitical chessboard, the most dramatic development in Iran has gone virtually unnoticed: what one Iranian thinker calls a “liberal renaissance” taking place in the country.

It is easy to mistake the United States for an empire. But as John D. Kelly explains here, the American approach to global relations is best understood as a competition—one in which the United States, through the reshaping of economic theory and the global economy itself, imposes its own rules on a game played to win.

In the twenty-first century, the idea of race in sports is rapidly changing.

Far from being an account of evolution and social relations that has historical and cross-cultural validity, evolutionary psychology is a stunning example of a “science” that twists evolutionary genetics into a myth of human origins.

In a witty and argumentative style, Werner critically analyzes today’s art institutions and reframes the public’s accepted view of them, exposing how their apparent success belies the troubling forces operating within them.

A majority of Americans tell pollsters they want more government intervention to reduce the gap between high- and lower-income citizens, and less than one-third consider high taxes to be a problem. Yet conservative Republicanism currently controls the political discourse. Why?

It’s an enduring axiom: before there is democracy, there is rule of law. Thomas Geoghegan argues here in his lively pamphlet that as the pillars of the American legal system are crumbling, so too is the American democracy.

Keith Hart explores how we have never been more conscious of ourselves as unique personalities, but we live in a society increasingly ruled by faceless corporate forces. He ultimately asks: What place is there for the humanity of individual persons in the dehumanized social and economic frameworks we live within?

Empire and imperialism have returned with a vengeance—not as a set of ideas and practices to be exhumed by the historians, but as paradigms for twenty-first-century living.

Waters has long witnessed the self-destruction occurring in the academic world because of the pressure to publish. Drawing upon his years of experience, he reveals how this principle is destroying the quality of educational institutions and the ideals of higher learning. It is time for scholars to rise up, Waters argues, and reclaim the governance of their institutions.

Everywhere anarchism is on the upswing as a political philosophy—everywhere, that is, except the academy.

How is it that even as criticism drifts away from academia, it becomes more academic? How is it that sifting through a countless array of colorful periodicals and catalogs makes criticism seem to slip even further from our grasp?

In this pamphlet, the Prices crack the yellowing diaries kept by Melville and Frances Herskovits on their famous 1920s expedition deep into the South American jungle, exposing—with their trademark combination of deadpan wit and theoretical rigor—the origins of the field that has come to be known as African diaspora studies.

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This collection of interviews captures Clifford in exchanges with his critics in Brazil, Hawaii, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Portugal, offering a set of provocative reflections on an intellectual career in transformation.

In a series of snapshots after the attack on the World Trade Center—from a day, to a week, up to a year and beyond—Eliot Weinberger offers thoughtful and provocative reflections on his city, the country, and the state of the world.

The Companion Species Manifesto is about the implosion of nature and culture in the joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in “significant otherness.” In all their historical complexity, Donna Haraway tells us, dogs matter.

We live in an age of “popular culture”—another term, to some, for an organic mess of marketing strategies aimed at giving us the illusion of choice. The resulting pamphlet is an impassioned plea for the rebirth of culture with content.

If politics as practiced is talk, then how does a political figure—especially an American President—talk politics? If someone can be all style and no substance, is there any actual political substance to style?

Frank gives us a reading of cultural studies—viewed by some as an important new perspective in the academy, but by others as an unwieldy theoretical fad.

In this pamphlet, McCloskey reveals what she sees as the secret sins of economics (there are two) that no one will discuss. In her view, these sins “cripple” economics as a “scientific enterprise.”

Nystrom and Puckett’s pamphlet gives us the most comprehensive picture available of Richard Rorty’s political views.

Bruno Latour is best known for his work in the cultural study of science. In this pamphlet he turns his attention to another worthy pursuit: the project of peace.

This expanded edition of Waiting for Foucault represents some of the brightest anthropological satire—mixed in with some of the most serious intellectual issues in the human sciences.