Here are 100 books that Purity and Danger fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am fascinated by the things people do and the reasons they give for doing them. That people also do things in culturally specific ways and that their culturally specific ways of doing things are related to their culturally specific ideas about what makes sense and what does not inspires in me a sense of awe. As a professor and historian, thinking anthropologically has always been an important tool, because it helps me look for the hidden, cultural logics that guided the behavior of people in history. It helps me ask different questions. And it sharpens my sense of humility for the fundamental unknowability of this world we call home.
Alexei Yurchak was part of the last Soviet generation—the last citizens born in the USSR who also lived through its collapse as adults. As the title suggests, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More is a profound and poetic work about truth and what we come to accept as real. Yurchak wants to explain the paradox that, while Soviet people knew by the 1970s that their government was telling them almost nothing but untruths, they were still shocked to their core by their country’s demise. What I loved most about the book was Yurchak’s descriptions of ordinary life among his generation (their intriguing taste for the operatic qualities of metal, the elaborate public pranks they staged, the way they treated life like performance art). With pathos and humor in equal measure, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More paints a brilliant portrait of a world that millions of…
Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation. Focusing on the major…
I am an emeritus professor from Harvard and have spent decades trying to develop an anthropological mode of understanding history. Far from being “one damned thing after another,” as Henry Ford allegedly put it, history is an attempt to understand the human condition. It brings us into contact with people in the past, showing us how they thought, felt, and acted. For many decades, anthropologists have endeavored to do the same thing, concentrating on people separated from us by space rather than time. By applying anthropological insights to historical research, I think it is possible to make the past come alive to modern readers, while at the same time making it interesting and even amusing.
This collection of essays by one of the greatest anthropologists of the last century inspired a whole generation of historians—for example, Joan Scott and William Sewell, Jr. as well as myself. The essays also should appeal to the general reader because of their well-wrought style and wit. Drawing on Max Weber, Geertz treats cultures as symbolic systems and shows how they helped ordinary people make sense of the world. Far from wandering off into abstractions, he offers fine-grained descriptions of actual events, notably a Balinese cockfight in an essay that has been cited and debated endlessly among social scientists.
In The Interpretation of Cultures, the most original anthropologist of his generation moved far beyond the traditional confines of his discipline to develop an important new concept of culture. This groundbreaking book, winner of the 1974 Sorokin Award of the American Sociological Association, helped define for an entire generation of anthropologists what their field is ultimately about.
I am an emeritus professor from Harvard and have spent decades trying to develop an anthropological mode of understanding history. Far from being “one damned thing after another,” as Henry Ford allegedly put it, history is an attempt to understand the human condition. It brings us into contact with people in the past, showing us how they thought, felt, and acted. For many decades, anthropologists have endeavored to do the same thing, concentrating on people separated from us by space rather than time. By applying anthropological insights to historical research, I think it is possible to make the past come alive to modern readers, while at the same time making it interesting and even amusing.
In translucent prose, Evans-Pritchard shows how the belief in witchcraft and oracles held together with the world-view of the Azande people of the former Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. They reinforced each other, so that if a prophecy failed to identify a witch, it was attributed to a fault in the performance of a ritual, and the power of ritual was reinforced rather than undermined. The Azande were empiricists and discussed the evidence of witchcraft in rational exchanges with Evans-Pritchard. He recreates their dialogue convincingly, often giving them the upper hand. When they asked him to explain why a granary collapsed on a particular person at a particular time, he said, “bad luck.” They replied that “luck” was a shallow concept in comparison with witchcraft, which could be identified with certain individuals and traced in the body.
This acknowledged masterpiece has been abridged to make it more accessible to students. In her introduction, Eva Gillies presents the case for the relevance of the book to modern anthropologists.
I grew up in a family of beautiful, accomplished women at a time when most women stayed home. But the spectacular women in my mother's family also suffered spectacularly, and I was determined to understand family life at its very roots. I studied anthropology and, over a 15-year period, lived in a remote part of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea among a group of Gimi women who spent most of their time apart from men. I shared women's difficult daily lives, participated in their separate rites, learned their myths, and, through my writing, have devoted myself to giving them voices of their own.
A classic of ethnographic description and symbolic analysis based upon fieldwork among the Ndembu of Zambia—a must read for anyone interested in sociological and psychological implications of ritual belief and practice in a small-scale, non-literate, kinship-based society.
A stellar example of what is lost by cancelling "colonialist" literature and discarding the very concepts of "culture" and "religion" as relics of Western intellectual imperialism.
In 10 essays on color symbolism, circumcision rites, rites of passage, social dynamics, and more, Turner lays the groundwork for his proposition that ritual is the key to religion and religion is the key to culture.
A pioneering work of high quality, this collection of anthropological studies provides one of the most detailed records available for an African society-or indeed for any group-of the semantics of ritual symbolism. It combines unusually detailed ethnographic description, based upon field work among the Ndembu of Zambia, with remarkable theoretical sophistication. Professor Turner describes the ritual phenomena in terms both of practice and of their sociological and psychological implications within a preliterate society.
Case histories illustrate the function of ritual in creating community harmony. Data on circumcision rites and medical practices and an essay on color classification have wide implications…
I am an emeritus professor from Harvard and have spent decades trying to develop an anthropological mode of understanding history. Far from being “one damned thing after another,” as Henry Ford allegedly put it, history is an attempt to understand the human condition. It brings us into contact with people in the past, showing us how they thought, felt, and acted. For many decades, anthropologists have endeavored to do the same thing, concentrating on people separated from us by space rather than time. By applying anthropological insights to historical research, I think it is possible to make the past come alive to modern readers, while at the same time making it interesting and even amusing.
Like the anthropologists mentioned above, Sahlins is a superb writer, and succeeds in making esoteric ideas come alive for the non-academic reader. In this work, he shows how Cook’s exploration of the Pacific islands, especially Hawaii, became incorporated in the cosmologies of the indigenous peoples. Because of the time and the way Cook arrived in Kealakekua Bay, Hawaiians took him to be the god Lono. And his death at their hands fit in with their ritual of sacrificing the god to restore the power of the king. It was congruent with local power struggles as well as the cosmological calendar. This book as well as the others will sharpen the reader’s awareness of how events are made to be meaningful in alien cultures, and they can provoke reflections about how we make sense of happenings close to home.
Marshall Sahlins centers these essays on islands—Hawaii, Fiji, New Zealand—whose histories have intersected with European history. But he is also concerned with the insular thinking in Western scholarship that creates false dichotomies between past and present, between structure and event, between the individual and society. Sahlins's provocative reflections form a powerful critique of Western history and anthropology.
As an undergraduate History student, I was told by one of my professors that I thought too much like an anthropologist; as a postgraduate Anthropology student, I was told by another professor that I wrote too much like a historian! At that point, I finally gave up and turned to journalism and fiction writing…though my love for history figures largely in much of what I continue to write and read today.
This is another one that comes down to voice for me: hearing the story of one of the last African slaves to experience the Middle Passage in his own words. It’s moving, thought-provoking, and refocuses the vast and familiar history of the American slave experience to a disarmingly—and powerfully—human scale.
A major literary event: a never-before-published work from the author of the American classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God which brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of the last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade-illegally smuggled from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States.
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, to interview ninety-five-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of…
I am fascinated by the things people do and the reasons they give for doing them. That people also do things in culturally specific ways and that their culturally specific ways of doing things are related to their culturally specific ideas about what makes sense and what does not inspires in me a sense of awe. As a professor and historian, thinking anthropologically has always been an important tool, because it helps me look for the hidden, cultural logics that guided the behavior of people in history. It helps me ask different questions. And it sharpens my sense of humility for the fundamental unknowability of this world we call home.
A lot of Inga Clendinnen’s work dealt with what happens when two very different cultures and ways of making sense of things come into contact. In the subtitle of her book Aztecs: An Interpretation, she boldly asserted her method for approaching history. It is not merely a recitation of facts, it is an elucidation of those facts by an expert steeped in the knowledge of a particular past. Having written about the Maya and the Aztecs, Reading the Holocaust was a departure, topically, geographically, historically. What I found so extraordinary about the book was precisely Clendinnen’s decision to look anthropologically at staggering events historians had often written about in “functional” terms (who did what, when, and where). In so doing, she tried to offer insight into something unthinkable (what the perpetrators thought they were doing) and something unimaginable (what the victims experienced).
More than fifty years after their occurrence, the events of the Holocaust remain for some of their most dedicated students as morally and intellectually baffling, as 'unthinkable', as they were at their first rumouring. Reading the Holocaust, first published in 2002, challenges that bafflement, and the demoralization that attends it. Exploring the experience of the Holocaust from both the victims' and the perpetrators' points of view, as it appears in histories and memoirs, films and poems, Inga Clendinnen seeks to dispel what she calls the 'Gorgon effect': the sickening of imagination and curiosity and the draining of the will that…
I am fascinated by the things people do and the reasons they give for doing them. That people also do things in culturally specific ways and that their culturally specific ways of doing things are related to their culturally specific ideas about what makes sense and what does not inspires in me a sense of awe. As a professor and historian, thinking anthropologically has always been an important tool, because it helps me look for the hidden, cultural logics that guided the behavior of people in history. It helps me ask different questions. And it sharpens my sense of humility for the fundamental unknowability of this world we call home.
The Anti-Witch is kind of a follow-up to Favret-Saada’s complex and brilliant Deadly Words, in which the author wrestled with the phenomenon of modern witchcraft beliefs in northern France’s Bocage region and tried to get inside the logic of those beliefs. I said modern witchcraft beliefs, because for me as a historian, what Favret-Saada contributed most to my understanding of this phenomenon lay in the way that she insisted on its historicity. That’s a historian’s way of saying that she did not treat witchcraft beliefs as “timeless relics” that some people weirdly “still” believe, but rather as an evolving set of practices and ways of thinking about how the world works, and the place of evil within it.
Jeanne Favret-Saada is arguably one of France's most brilliant anthropologists, and The Anti-Witch is nothing less than a masterpiece. A synthesis of ethnographic theory and psychoanalytic revelation, where the line between researcher and subject is blurred - if not erased - The Anti-Witch develops the contours of an anthropology of therapy, while deeply engaging with what it means to be caught in the logic of witchcraft. Through an intimate and provocative sharing of the ethnographic voice with Madame Flora, a "dewitcher," Favret-Saada delivers a critical challenge to some of anthropology's fundamental concepts. Sure to be of interest to practitioners of…
At age five, I was reading under the blankets with a flashlight far past my bedtime. It’s an often told story of how I believed I was getting away with something while my makeshift tent, held up by my head, was lit up like a snowglobe. By age eleven, when I picked up my aunt’s book, I discovered romance novels. I was hooked. I’ve read thousands of romance novels in the almost four decades that have since passed, and I’ve learned that each person who reads a book takes something different from it, and I hope these five books that gave so much to me, might do the same for you.
I loved the entire series for which this book is the fourth, but this book ensured that I can never go back and read the series again; it hurt that much. Still. I loved it. The characters in this series are family in the deepest, most loving and loyal sense of the word, and it is that sense of family that drives the storyline of this book. This series is sexy and taboo, and yet the biggest thing I took from it was the love and trust that pulsed between them. I wondered, often, if there could not have been a different way, if the author could not have chosen a different storyline, but it is in the difficulties that we sometimes find the stunning. And this story was stunningly beautiful.
I’m a Canadian science fiction writer who writes very, very slowly. I’m interested in experimental fiction and books that are unique, both thematically and stylistically. I’d like to think my books fall into this category, or at least that’s what I aspire to. I used to read science fiction exclusively, and the five books I’ve listed here were all read during those formative years; they were fundamental stepping-stones for me, as a writer, and each of them left a profound mark on my idea of how good, or effective, novels can be.
Hand’s sentences are always beautiful, and this novel, her first, is dense with new ideas and original imagery. She evokes a bizarre future in a post-apocalyptic city where twins go on a hallucinogenic quest. Reads like a somewhat disturbing mythology. Gods and talking animals, autistic prophets, feral children, and death is personified. Unforgettable.
The “sensuous and evocative” debut of the Nebula Award–winning author of Waking the Moon: A dystopian journey through a world unburdened by moral taboos (Library Journal). Set in the surreal, post-apocalyptic City of Trees, Winterlong centers on Wendy Wanders, a girl who can tap into the dreams and emotions of the people around her, and her long-lost twin brother, Raphael, a seductive, sacred courtesan to the City’s decadent elite. During their voyage, they encounter man-made and godlike monstrosities—both hideous and gorgeous—in their effort to stop an ancient power from consuming all. Blending science fiction and fantasy, Winterlong is a dark…
