Anthropology
New and Forthcoming in Anthropology
Nlaka'pamux Resistance through Rock Art

Drawing on a unique blend of Indigenous and Western sources, Signs of the Time explores Nlaka’pamux rock art making to reveal the historical and cultural meaning beneath its beguiling imagery.

Stories and Teachings of the Natural World

Cherokee Earth Dwellers offers a rich understanding of nature grounded in Cherokee creature names, oral traditional stories, and reflections of knowledge holders.

How the System Fails Indigenous Peoples

Witness to the Human Rights Tribunals offers a behind-the-scenes account of the difficulties facing Indigenous people in human rights tribunals, and the struggles of experts to keep their own testimony from being undermined.

Messy Ethics in Human Rights Work invites readers to engage reflexively in critical human rights practice by admitting discomfort and dilemma into conversations about ethics.

Narratives from German-Born Turkish Ausländer

Forging Diasporic Citizenship is a work of narrative research that explores the nature and implications of “diasporic citizenship” as it is evolving among German-born, Turkish-origin Berliners.

Indigenous Miniatures of the Pacific Northwest

So Much More Than Art reveals the fascinating practice of miniaturization in Indigenous Northwest Coast art as a subtle form of communication in the face of oppressive colonization.

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Art, and the Seriousness of Play

In a gorgeously illustrated exploration of the art of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Mischief Making demonstrates how playful and punning gestures can shed light on serious subjects.

Ethnography, Colonialism, and the Cannibal Dance

Writing the Hamat̓sa critically surveys more than two centuries worth of published, archival, and oral sources to trace the attempted prohibition, intercultural mediation, and ultimate survival of one of Canada’s most iconic Indigenous ceremonies.

Ethnographic Methods for Local Engagement

The Social Life of Standards reveals how political and technical tools for organizing society are developed, applied, subverted, contested, and reassembled as local communities interact with standards created by external forces.

Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation

In examining how the technologies of museum bureaucracy – the ledger book, the card catalogue, the database – operate through a colonial lens, Cataloguing Culture shines a light on access to and the return of Indigenous cultural heritage.

Anthropology Titles from our Publishing Partners
Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver

The Best Place examines how overlapping housing, mental-health-and-addictions, and overdose crises, alongside their accompanying public health interventions, and the frenetic pace of urban renewal have shaped forms of life and death among young people who use drugs in the city of Vancouver, Canada.

Marriage, Citizenship, and Family in Australian Social Welfare

Between Care and Criminality examines Australian social welfare’s encounter with migration and marriage in an era of intensified border control. It offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how social welfare practitioners carry out a migrant-targeted social policy designed to prevent forced marriage in the aftermath of a 2013 law which criminalized the practice.

A History

Becoming Hopi is a comprehensive look at the history of the people of the Hopi Mesas as it has never been told before. The product of more than fifteen years of collaboration between tribal and academic scholars, this volume presents groundbreaking research demonstrating that the Hopi Mesas are among the great centers of the Pueblo world.  

Being Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century

Increasing numbers of Indigenous peoples are living in cities, yet the vast majority of studies focus solely on rural Indigenous populations. This is the first book to look at urban Indigenous peoples globally and present the urban Indigenous experience—not as the exception but as the norm. Dismissing the false idea that indigeneity is only “authentic” when it is practiced in remote rural areas, these wide-ranging essays show that a vigorous, vibrant, and meaningful indigeneity can be created in urban spaces too and offers perspectives and tools to understand a contemporary Indigenous urban reality.

People of This Land

The Upper Tanana Deneconveys the history and knowledge of Dene elders to current and future generations.

Navajo Homeland
Edited by Lloyd L. Lee

This anthology of essays offers Diné perspectives on the experiences, observations, and examinations of their homeland. Together, the contributors thoughtfully illustrate the complex state of nihikéyah, “our land,” as viewed by Diné people.

Indigenous Stone Ceremonial Sites in Eastern North America

Our Hidden Landscapes introduces people to eastern North America’s Indigenous ceremonial stone landscapes (CSLs)—sacred sites whose principal identifying characteristics are built stone structures that cluster within specific physical landscapes. This volume presents these often unrecognized sites as significant cultural landscapes in need of protection and preservation. Chapters from Indigenous community members, archaeologists, and anthropologists provide a variety of approaches for better understanding, protecting, and preserving these important sacred spaces.

Coast Miwok Resilience and Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California

As an Indigenous scholar researching the history and archaeology of his own tribe, Tsim D. Schneider provides a unique and timely contribution to the growing field of Indigenous archaeology and offers a new perspective on the primary role and relevance of Indigenous places and homelands in the study of colonial encounters.

A Multilayered Ethnography of Functional Medicine

How functional medicine leverages systems biology and epigenetic science to treat the microbiome and reverse chronic disease.

Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives

How do digital technologies shape how people care for each other and, through that, who they are? Calling Family explores how digital devices shape elder care at a distance and how it should be done in order to be considered good. Through Tanja Ahlin's ethnographic fieldwork among families of migrating nurses from Kerala, India, this book aspires to uncover the subtle workings of digital technologies beyond seeing them as tools of communication.

Conversations on Love, Trauma, and Border Crossing

An intimate portrayal of the hardships faced by an undocumented family navigating the medical and educational systems in the United States.

How People Change Themselves across Cultures

Self-Alteration: How People Change Themselves across Cultures approaches the subject of the self and its becoming through the exploration of modes of its transformation, including through religious and spiritual traditions and innovations; embodied participation in therepeutic prorams like psychoanalysis and gendered care services; and through political activism or relationships with animals. The essays in this collection show that both minor and major modes of self-alteration exist in many places and times, and across very different modern societies.  

Taking a holistic approach to the study of aging, this volume uses biological, archaeological, medical, and cultural perspectives to explore how older adults have functioned in societies around the globe and throughout human history.

Movements across Time, Space, and Generations

While aspirations are most often connected to younger people, this volume argues that people do not stop aspiring in older age. Aspiring in Later Life brings together rich ethnographic cases from different regions of the world, offering original insights into how aspirations are pursued over the course of life and in contexts of globalization and mobility.This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition.

The Embodiment of Risk Along the U.S.-México Line

The increasingly militarized U.S.-México border is an intensely physical place, affecting the bodies of all who encounter it. The essays in this volume explore how crossing becomes embodied in individuals on the most basic social unit possible: the human body.

Barter as Economic and Cultural Activism in Medellín, Colombia

Social Exchange examines alternative economies activism in Medellín, Colombia, using twenty-five years of grassroots experimentation with barter markets and community currencies to develop new insights about capitalist culture, social movement strategy, community-building, and the transformation of subjectivities. Hopeful yet critical, this book serves as a useful think-piece for activists and scholars alike.

Nahua Sacred Journeys in Mexico's Huasteca Veracruzana

An ethnographic study based on decades of field research, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain explores five sacred journeys to the peaks of venerated mountains undertaken by Nahua people living in northern Veracruz, Mexico.

The Production and Distribution of Mimbres Pottery assesses a much-expanded INAA data set and presents a new and more-informed interpretation of ceramic production and distribution in the Mimbres region.

The Sanema and the Socialist State in Contemporary Amazonia

A study of the modes of predation used by and against the Sanema people of Venezuela.

Power and Identity at the Margins of the Ancient Near East rethinks the dichotomy between antiquated terms such as “core” and “periphery,” explores lived realities in the margins of central authority, and centers those margins as places of resistance and power in their own right.  

An Archaeological History

Violence and Inequality explores the deep-time archaeological relationship between violence and inequality, focusing on prehistoric archaeology’s contribution to the understanding of the human dynamics among coercive force, aggression, and the state. 

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