58 books like Kava

For those who read French, Vincent Lebot and geographer wife Patricia Siméoni offer a “coffee table” kava compendium filled with beautiful historic and contemporary illustrations—both classic kava engravings and contemporary photographs. Although focused on the origins and use of kava in Vanuatu, the authors range widely and discuss kava production and consumption across the Pacific. Appendices gather all known kava origin myths and stories, and island names for kava bowls, drinking cups, filters, and other preparation equipment. Maps depict kava’s historical and contemporary range, and the authors discuss cultivation techniques within suitable ecosystems. They advocate that Pacific Islanders concentrate on marketing the “noble varieties” of the plant, grown in its traditional terroir, along the lines of high-quality French wine. 

Anthropologist Ron Brunton delves back into 19th-century theory that proposed two waves of Pacific immigrants, one that chewed betelnut (Areca catechu kernels mixed with Piper betle vine and lime), and the other that preferred kava. He wonders why kava is mostly absent in the Solomon Islands despite its presence in scattered communities in New Guinea to the west, and then in Vanuatu, Fiji, and much of Polynesia to the east. He proposes that kava originated in the Bismarck Archipelago and that Solomon Islanders subsequently abandoned kava consumption, perhaps as an element of some religious innovation. We now know that kava originated in northern Vanuatu and found its way back west into New Guinea, north to Micronesian Pohnpei and Kosrae, and east to Fiji and much of Polynesia. Brunton, though, offers good ethnographic information about kava’s place in Pacific cultures, including on Tanna.

Kilham was an early promoter of kava as an herbal treatment for anxiety and other disorders. Kava, in fact, has proven therapeutic benefits and, along with anxiety and insomnia, treats depression, stress, muscle pain, urinary problems, and much more. It also has an emotional leveling effect, promoting temporary feelings of happiness and peace. Kilham brings readers along to Vanuatu and other Pacific Islands as he investigated kava’s local uses and its potential for consumers everywhere. Readers will appreciate the description of his first kava taste of kava that sparked his passionate promotion of the plant.

David Bindman was among the first scholars to dive deeply into the critically important relationship between aesthetics (including standards of beauty) and the emergence of race within the nascent human sciences. Bindman is a very careful scholar who, in addition to being a superb art historian, pays careful attention to the subtle shifts in terminology (and iconography) that reflect substantive changes in the way that non-European groups were seen and depicted during the Enlightenment era, be they “savages,” Blacks, or Asians. Scholars of race will find unexpected links between aesthetics and race here, including Winckelmann on the link between climate and the supremacy of Greek statues – or Lavater’s aesthetic-driven understanding of human physiognomy. Since it was first published in 2002, this beautifully illustrated book opened up a whole field of research.

This is the major book of my teacher, Anthony D. Smith, which seeks to explain why nationalism has become the dominant ideology of much of humanity.

In it, he argues that nationalism seeks to answer profound questions of identity arising from the crises generated by the global secular, political, and economic revolutions of modernity. Although nationalism is a predominantly modern phenomenon, its power rests on its ability to evoke and renovate the myths, symbols, and memories of older ethnic communities to legitimise political demands for autonomy.

Smith takes the symbolic world of nationalists seriously, particularly their preoccupation with national golden ages that are evoked to inspire a drive for a glorious future. 

Did you know there is a research center in Utah made for scientists to pretend they are living on Mars? Or that deep-sea submarines and arctic explorers are supposed to be giving us a taste for finding life on Jupiter’s moon Europa?

My friend and co-author, Anthropologist Lisa Messeri, followed planetary scientists to the unlikeliest of places to witness them transform the planets they study from distant pinpricks in the sky or traces on a graph, into places we can explore or even inhabit.

I loved feeling like I was traveling alongside her as she visits remote telescopes in Chile, Mars camp in the desert, and even sits next to computer scientists building Google Mars to show how our dreams of the extraterrestrial are made right here on Earth.

Ethiopia is a country with the second largest population in Africa. There are over 80 ethnic groups and languages, living in a region that includes the largest area of mountains in Africa and also the lowest point on the earth’s land surface. While this book tells the history of the Christian north, including the national epic which tells how Ethiopian kings are descended from Solomon of Israel, it also describes the culture and traditions of other societies which make up this fascinating country, and shows both the tensions and the creativity within Ethiopian society. 

There are many sweeping histories of Jerusalem, but this book tells the intimate stories of people and places that often get short shrift.

Teller takes us into the Arab as well as Jewish worlds of the Old City, and he serves as a gentle guide in the passionate and fraught politics of a city that, as he writes, “wears its history like a teenager wears a school uniform – joyless.”

What does it mean to be “indigenous”? The answer is never simple, and I particularly like the way Andrew Canessa approaches the question by drawing us into people’s lives in an Aymara-speaking community in highland Bolivia and exploring how the people themselves understand different ways of being indigenous in different contexts. In the process he shows how “indigenous” identity is complex and situationally defined.

Margaret Mead belonged to a rambunctious generation of anthropologists who were trained by Franz Boas at Columbia. His star students were unconventional women—Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Deloria, and Zora Neal Hurston—who asked different questions and told different stories than any scholars before them. Were gender and race merely cultural constructions, and what would it take to overhaul them? How did Native Americans and Black Americans understand themselves, without the distortion of the white gaze? Could humans learn to live with their differences, or would the fascists win?

King unpacks the human drama in which these scholars participated on both the interpersonal and the global scale.