100 books like The Interpretation of Cultures

For me, the power of both history and anthropology as disciplines of knowledge is their shared capacity for taking a thing you thought you knew and showing you that you didn’t actually know anything about it at all—in fact, you didn’t even know what questions to ask about it. I would be seriously remiss in a list like this if I did not mention the book that first fascinated me, as a historian, with the anthropologist’s way of posing questions. In this towering classic of British social anthropology, Professor Douglas forces us completely to rethink something we actually never think about at all: dirt. But trust me, once you pose the question, “what is dirt?” you can never think about filth (and its structural counterpart, purity) in the same way again.

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.

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. 

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.

I was extremely lucky to conduct my PhD research on Tokaido road in the 1990s. Books by scholars of Japanese Studies like Marily Ivy were extremely influential and opened my eyes to aspects that would not have been visible to me otherwise. 

The Discourses of the Vanishing was one such book that dispelled deeply rooted myths of Japan, especially the belief that Japan is a fully modernized country, that Japanese society is monolithic, and that Japan’s most noteworthy locales are its highly urbanized areas. What brought me to the book was Ivy’s examination of the Exotic Japan campaign of Japan’s railways in the late 1980s. This campaign was woven with powerful notions of furusato (nostalgia for one’s native place), neo-Japonesque exoticism, and other imaginary references of post-bubble Japan meant to appeal to women as new targets of Japan’s consumption campaigns.

Across the book’s six chapters, Ivy also takes us to… show more.

I’m not lying when I say that this book saved my life. I was going through a particularly difficult moment when I read it, and let’s say that it made me find the beauty in life once again. After reading The Anthropocene Reviewed, my once monochrome world burst with colors. This essay collection points out ideas about things in daily life that an average person would never notice. It makes you smile dumbly at the ceiling and say, “this world is beautiful.”

Some people are sticklers for following norms and conventions, while others take a more relaxed approach. The same goes for entire cultures, which vary on a continuum from very tight (think Singapore or the military) to very loose (think Amsterdam or hippy communes). This book brings together a wealth of experimental data showing that societal norms tighten or loosen in response to perceptions of threat.

Even though the specific nature of those threats inevitably varies and the cultural systems of the scores of societies in which Gelfand has gathered data are diverse, the same underlying patterns are discernible everywhere. Gelfand’s work explores the profound ramifications of this discovery both for our understanding of history and of the world we live in today. 

When the pandemic first started and we learned that we would be teaching fully online, I snuck back into my office on campus to grab the books I knew that I would need during the pandemic. This was one of the first books I grabbed because I knew that I needed to reread it before I answered any questions about COVID.

Paula Treichler does an amazing job discussing how disease has an “epidemic of meanings” and how those meaning influence the decisions we make and how we treat others. This book clearly shows how some narratives take hold while others are obscured. 

Richard Nisbett is one of the most influential social psychologists in the world, and we collaborated on the 1987 book Induction. His book on intelligence gives a good introduction to the psychology of intelligence and an incisive critique of attempts to use dubious research on a genetic basis for intelligence to explain racial inequality.

My parents were born in India and migrated to the US. Postcolonial thinkers have helped me understand how imperial history continues to shape contemporary identities, not only in Britain but for those of us located all over the world whose family histories are intertwined with it.

More than anyone else, Stuart Hall has made the relationship between the imperial past and the present visible. In this collection of essays, Hall examines identity, showing how our understandings of ourselves are not absolute and intrinsic but shaped by history and politics.

Hall gives us the tools to locate ourselves in history, rethink our identity and relation to community, and contest dominant structures of race and power.