The most recommended anthropology books

According to Julian Jaynes, the mentality predating consciousness was bicameral. To appreciate the subtlety of his arguments, a grand historical sweep is needed.

At over a thousand pages, this magisterial tour through the origins and impact of anthropology, sociology, linguistics, economics, and psychology affords context by showing how, from the sixteenth century to the present day, the emergence of a post-bicameral, introspective language of the self-played out in modern times.

Our views of how the future will unfold affect how we behave in the present.

This book summarizes the interdisciplinary research into how people anticipate the future and how this influences decisions. With the exception of one highly technical chapter (whose results are reprised in plain language), the book is very accessible.

The word ‘fantasy' comes from the Greek ϕαντασία, meaning ‘making visible.’ There are many peoples who are invisible to western civilization. I was trained as an anthropologist; seeing the mysteries of different cultures holds a special attraction for me. The book Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos is anthropology, not fiction, which makes visible a way of life unimaginable to modern man. The people it describes are real, which makes their stories all the more compelling. In one instance, Rasmussen (who was half-Eskimo) grilled a shaman named Aua about the meaning of all their beliefs and rituals. The shaman turned the questions back on Rasmussen and said, “All our customs come from life and turn towards life; we explain nothing, we believe nothing, but in what I have just shown you lies our answer to all you ask.” Aua didn’t answer all that I ask about life; he helped… show more.

This book describes observational evidence in non-human animals showing grief-related behavior after one of their own dies. There are captivating anecdotal stories. One: after Honey Girl, a sea turtle is killed on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, her mate climbs out of the water, up onto the beach to a huge photo memorial to Honey Girl. King describes how he parked himself in front of the photo, staring at it for hours. King asks, was this grief in a reptile? She describes how the behaviors of animals who lose a mate or companion are noticeably distressed. These behaviors and what looks like a complex range of emotions in non-human animals suggest that they also experience grief. Charles Darwin acknowledged that grief is among the emotions that have a universal expression and cuts across species.

King’s book helped with my research for chapter one, “The Evolutionary Origins of Grief.”

If you want to look for a precursor to the modern trend of retelling fairy stories as sci-fi novels, you could do worse than look at The Snow Queen, which unashamedly draws its inspiration from the Hans Christian Anderson tale of the same name. But to talk of Vinge’s novel in those terms is to do it a grave disservice. This is a brilliant example of someone using sci-fi’s fascination with technology and aliens as a mere backdrop to something else. Beyond space travel and intriguing devices, The Snow Queen is a love story, an examination of cultures (Vinge has a background in anthropology), and a poignant plea about the dangers of over-exploitation. Come to The Snow Queen for the writing alone. Even if you loathe sci-fi, I can almost guarantee you will love this.

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 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.

Becoming Animal changed the way I look at my habitat. I hope it does the same for you. In his philosophical musings, David Abram contemplates why nature is something we look at, not something we are. He suggests our calloused coldness and ordered separation from other species allows us to subdue the wild-ness, but it comes with a numbing feeling of solitude. I too believe our disconnect with natural systems fuels many human ailments (physical and psychological). I love Abram’s suggestion that we change the spelling of Earth to Eairth to acknowledge that we, and the air we breathe, are part of this planet, not separate from it. 

Luiz Eduardo Soares is a Brazilian anthropologist who served as the Coordinator of Public Safety in Rio de Janeiro in 1999 and the National Secretary of Public Security in 2003. As a consequence, he has a unique and very personal take on the relationship between poverty, drugs, and violence, and drugs at the local and country level. This book offers the reader a series of engaging essays on Soares’ experiences in office, revealing the near impossibility of reforming the system in the face of endemic corruption and a culture of violence in the public sphere. It is a great read!

To understand human nature you need to take a deep dive into anthropology, particularly into the lives of hunter-gatherers. Because humans are the most flexible animal on this planet, it can be incredibly difficult for an outsider to tell which lessons from any one society are general and which relate to just their small part of the world. The beauty of this book is that the brilliant anthropologist who wrote it does the hard yards for you, narrating a fascinating and highly accessible trip through the lives of hunter-gatherers.

The Vulnerable Observer is a classic work in anthropology in which the author underscores the emotional impact of being a research anthropologist. 

Behar’s wonderfully crafted stories evoke the wisdom of others and demonstrate why it is important for anthropologists to describe the emotional impact of social being in the world. It is an important text for understanding the emotional contours of the human condition.

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.

Even if you have the best intentions heading into a conversation, powerful emotions can easily derail the entire interaction. You headed in wanting to stay calm, but something your spouse, co-worker, or fellow church member said triggered your hot button surfacing powerful emotions. Soon, voices are raised and feelings are hurt. How do you manage powerful emotions when they surface? If you’ve never read a book by the creators of the Harvard Negotiation Project—the leading experts in mediation—this is a must-read by experts who have had to manage the most difficult and potentially explosive conversations imaginable. They remind us that emotions are “powerful, always present, and hard to handle.” Yet, the authors offer practical ways to recognize the emotions you have heading into a conversation with someone you care about and how to deal with them once they surface. 

This volume provides the first global survey of taxation in the premodern world.

The book demonstrates how dispersed societies across the globe adopted a great diversity of fiscal institutions and instruments, such depending on local geographic conditions, political ambitions, and distinct historical settings.

With a coverage including Europe, the Near East, East Asia, and the Americas, this is arguably the most global survey of fiscal states formation that currently exists on the market.

This book also makes an admirable effort in interdisciplinarity approaches to fiscal history, with authors contributing from a wide range of fields including history, anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology.

Donkeys quite literally made the ancient world. When we think of the pyramids of Egypt, we tend today to think in the same thought – camels, but the camel was not domesticated more than a millennium later than the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Thus, when we see the monuments of the ancient world – we are looking at the product of human-animal relations and the humble donkey was at the very heart of these civilizations so revered by the west today. Peter Mitchell does a fantastic job at being the voice for the donkey and setting out the archaeolgical evidence for donkeys so clearly and concisely.

The book as a whole alters the way we think about the ancient world and to some extent the domestication and adoption of the donkey coincides with the development of many an ancient civilization. Perhaps, this is why this book and the donkey in… show more.

Read this book along with the other handsomely published book, Hidden Scholars, and we have a pair that opens up the idealized Southwest and the ideology of White Supremacy behind it. Schemes and sufferings, deals and derring-do abounded in the territory that now boasts our U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Laguna Pueblo citizen Deb Haaland. Don Fowler and his wife Catherine Fowler are themselves archaeologists/ethnographers in the Southwest borderland, my longtime good friends and colleagues, with an eye for arresting details and a story-telling style that make this book a gripping account of how the Romantic Ruins and fascinating Pueblos were created out in America's desert.

I like the practical, straightforward explanations of courage in this book! Kids can realize ways they are already courageous and expand on them. 

The courage cards throughout the story remind me of something I did during a low point in my life. I wrote down examples to prove to myself that I am enough.

Writing down what we have done well helps connect our thoughts and our heart. I believe it helps boost our self-esteem when we have practical examples of things we have done well. You could do courage cards like the story or any type of card that boosts your morale.

Originally written in German and published in 2014, this first full-length study of the revolution is based on extensive research there, including interviews with participants in the revolution. It remains a basic text for any study of the revolution.

Money is often thought of as a valuable thing, like gold or silver. 

This leads us to presume that it must be finite in quality due to its scarcity. Drawing on anthropological studies of objects such as Yap stones, massive stone disks found on a far-flung island in the Pacific Ocean.

Martin shows instead that money is not so much a thing but an abstract system for tracking who has what and who is entitled to what, similar to what the anthropologist Keith Hart has called a “memory bank.” By rethinking money along these lines, we might be able to rethink how we decide who gets what and who doesn’t get what in our communities.

I am Slovene-American, my mother being off the boat. This book told me what I’d wanted to know: how my people engaged with the world around them, not just physically, but metaphysically. Anyone interested in understanding the way folk belief mixed with medicine, and why people would resort to beliefs we would view strange in modern day, could learn quite a bit from this book about the rural folk of Slovenia and their medicine.

It’s also a key resource for one fantasy book I still have in the works, which is reminiscent of Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, and it is a wonderful anthropological resource that shows, very plainly, how magic is alive in this world as much as it is in the fictional ones we love so much.