Everyday Life & Anthropology

Archaeologists notice what survives: brooches, cups, beads. Four graves in northern Poland kept something softer, and it changes the picture of a richly furnished burial.

Human bodies were dismembered, defleshed and eaten in three caves near Granada. The radiocarbon dates and the marks on the bones point to different moments and different behaviours, from a violent episode to the ritual treatment of the dead.

Camera makers told parents for a century that children longed to take pictures, yet almost nobody had asked what children actually did with their cameras. The story starts with unruly schoolboy photographic societies, where assignments went undone, teachers were snapped unawares and one darkroom burned down.

A folk opera imagines a kitchen table where neighboring is a verb, empathy is not a bad word, and money does not decide who gets care. Everyone gets a seat.

In this book I grapple with a problem: Is human development directional? Does human evolution move in a particular direction? In recent decades the dominant view in the various sciences...

I have always been interested in applying the techniques of archaeology to understand peoples who were described by others but who left no written record themselves. Julius Caesar’s descriptions of...

The discussion and arguments are generally easy to follow. Even so, my guess is that the casual reader will most likely turn first to the graphics, which were chosen to...

From the Iliad onwards, via Aristophanes and the gospel of Matthew, to Augustine and beyond, Greek and Latin texts in many genres are constellated with dream-descriptions. The best ancient minds,...

Calexico takes the reader to a border unlike the stereotypes. The lawlessness of some border flashpoints dominates border news. The bulk of Americans, those of us living far from the 2,000...

Animal Ethos is framed by efforts to unearth and decipher moral thought and action in experimental forms of laboratory science. More specifically, as an ethnographic project, it attends to the...

This is a book about how we experience and imagine time. Although treatments of that subject often focus on the clock, modern time consciousness is organized around calendars as well....

My book, Timepass, examines the lives of middle class young men in India who have spent long periods in education but cannot find secure salaried work. Joblessness growth is a major...

The Alchemy of Meth, to me, is really about the second part of the title, A Decomposition. It is steeped in the materials of meth making, but it is also...

My book reconsiders the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1949 from a novel perspective: the spread of consumerism in a self-proclaimed communist country. The book title, Unending...

We humans are so proud of our big brains because it "feels" like brain size must be an advantage, but is it? As some of the essays in this book suggest, a lot of bad behavior and negative thoughts come out of those big brains as well. We feel superior to other animals who are doing just fine in their particular habitat, and we often feel it is our "right" to rule everything on the planet. Our big brains might, in the end, be our downfall

Each of the chapters begins with a case study, the first-person story of an individual who held, or discovered, a family secret. A close friend of mine browsed through the...

This book is about how surveillance functioned in communist Romania from 1973 to 1988, the period during which I was one of its subjects. The text contains many verbatim quotations...

The Cuban Hustle documents the myriad ways in which ordinary Cubans have sought to survive, hustle, and invent alternative cultures in the twenty-year period following the collapse of the Soviet...

The Man in the Dog Park describes the experience of homelessness from a homeless point of view. Co-authored with a homeless man, the book is based on scores of interviews...

It is early May 2009, only a few days before the impending school inspection by the provincial delegate. The Dong village of Longxing has been selected as one of the...

A Future in Ruins tells the story of UNESCO and its efforts to save the cultural wonders of the world, largely through its famous World Heritage program. I wanted to...

Household Gods is a history of the British love-affair with the domestic interior from the age of mass manufacture to modernism. In no other country was domesticity so celebrated and...

For a book that touts the power of storytelling, I would be remiss not to recommend that casual readers flip to pages of aid recipients telling stories from their own...

Remaking the Heartland examines the profound social transformation that has taken place in the middle of the United States during the past half century. This is a region known for...

I’m what is known in my field as a “dirt archaeologist.” I’ve been excavating archaeological sites in various places for 43 years, and I’m not ready to quit. Why do...

Most New Year's resolutions are gone by February—and Jobert E. Abueva argues the problem is the approach, not the goals. The Janus Plan, named for the two-faced Roman god of thresholds, insists you cannot design a meaningful future without first taking an honest look at your past. Built around a six-step framework and the metaphor of weaving, it is a book meant to be read slowly.

The book is located, in its theory and methods, at the intersections of linguistic and economic anthropology. Inverting the classic concept of “moral economy,” Selective Solidarity...

Another big reason is that people underestimate how positively the other person will respond when we reach out to connect with them. People are reluctant to engage a stranger in conversation. If they think the other person doesn't want to talk to them, they often underestimate how interested the other person is in talking to them. We're reluctant to engage in deep conversation ...

A starting premise for our work was that camps, like Slab City, accommodate conditions that might otherwise remain without space. Camps are also bellwethers—early indicators of change and registers of...

Exemplary Things investigates the history of a Japanese cultural keyword, meibutsu, and the pervasive influence it has had in shaping consumption practices in Japan. It's a term that has no exact anglophone equivalent. Japanese commodity culture developed in the 15th century, and in Exemplary Things, I show how

So the argument that pickiness is natural and inevitable doesn’t hold up. That’s extremely hard for parents to hear. I try to understand mass pickiness as a historical phenomenon that has shaped...

But it was not until after World War II that pet cats became common. In this sense, pet cats on a mass scale occupy only one per cent of the time that cats and humans have had relationships. That's why it's so important for a history of cats to cover not only pet cats, but also the more numerous feral and street cats. They have longer histories.

I was a graduate student at Rice University in Houston Texas when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated overhead as it was returning to Earth. I watched communities in and around...

How do anthropologists describe their own practices? Their working concepts would have to be part of it. Nothing could be more diffuse or ubiquitous than the English-language use of relation,...

Newlyweds on Tour is the first historical study to trace the origins and growth of the American honeymoon from 1820 to 1900. Rather than treating the honeymoon as a simple...

Let's get something straight right at the outset; I am not an Indigenous person. My ancestors arrived in America in the late nineteenth century, fleeing poverty and oppression in Europe....

The topic of this book is connected to everything! (Okay, maybe not directly to geology or health insurance. But to a gazillion other things that matter.) It’s connected to the...

My book examines the tricks of the trade and forms of collective support for crafting our largely unconscious practices of hearing. As we live our daily lives, our hearing generally...

America’s poorest citizens are among its most patriotic. Their love of country – and indeed, their sense that the United States is superior to other countries in the world –...

Multitasking isn’t something new to the twenty-first century: our species was designed for it! On the cognitive, linguistic, and social level, humans are highly adapted to doing and thinking about...

I would like a “just browsing” reader to turn to one of the personal stories that open some of the chapters, such as my childhood fascination with nature shows and...

Throughout my career, I wrote books and articles about intimate relationships. When I made a move from New York City to Northampton, Massachusetts in 1990, I left all my everyday...

I set out to write a book not so much about the varieties and comparative deficiencies of cars in the Soviet Union as what these objects meant to Soviet citizens....

Made in America asks whether, how, and in what ways Americans of today are culturally and psychologically different from Americans of the past. The book reaches back to the nation’s colonial...

Privacy—I probably need convince no one—looms large in the United States today, sparked by concerns about NSA spying as well as social media profiling, facial recognition software as well as...

Fire Craft is a story about the meaning of making, of glassblowing, which is simultaneously a more general story about the human condition. It documents my experience learning to blow...

Throughout history people have taken their dreams very seriously. Dreams themselves, and the way we interpret them, take us into the deepest part of our individual as well as cultural...

In researching and writing this book I did not set out to test any particular theory or promote any particular historical interpretation. The project began with the accidental discovery of...

This is not just a political story, because that only tells part of what is fascinating about France in this period. What are the images we have of France in...

Weather Matters is a history of all these phenomena. It explores the questions why and how we talk about the weather in science, the media, popular culture, and the arts....

Archaeologists notice what survives: brooches, cups, beads. Four graves in northern Poland kept something softer, and it changes the picture of a richly furnished burial.

Human bodies were dismembered, defleshed and eaten in three caves near Granada. The radiocarbon dates and the marks on the bones point to different moments and different behaviours, from a violent episode to the ritual treatment of the dead.

Camera makers told parents for a century that children longed to take pictures, yet almost nobody had asked what children actually did with their cameras. The story starts with unruly schoolboy photographic societies, where assignments went undone, teachers were snapped unawares and one darkroom burned down.

A folk opera imagines a kitchen table where neighboring is a verb, empathy is not a bad word, and money does not decide who gets care. Everyone gets a seat.

In this book I grapple with a problem: Is human development directional? Does human evolution move in a particular direction? In recent decades the dominant view in the various sciences...

I have always been interested in applying the techniques of archaeology to understand peoples who were described by others but who left no written record themselves. Julius Caesar’s descriptions of...

The discussion and arguments are generally easy to follow. Even so, my guess is that the casual reader will most likely turn first to the graphics, which were chosen to...

From the Iliad onwards, via Aristophanes and the gospel of Matthew, to Augustine and beyond, Greek and Latin texts in many genres are constellated with dream-descriptions. The best ancient minds,...

Calexico takes the reader to a border unlike the stereotypes. The lawlessness of some border flashpoints dominates border news. The bulk of Americans, those of us living far from the 2,000...

Animal Ethos is framed by efforts to unearth and decipher moral thought and action in experimental forms of laboratory science. More specifically, as an ethnographic project, it attends to the...

This is a book about how we experience and imagine time. Although treatments of that subject often focus on the clock, modern time consciousness is organized around calendars as well....

My book, Timepass, examines the lives of middle class young men in India who have spent long periods in education but cannot find secure salaried work. Joblessness growth is a major...

The Alchemy of Meth, to me, is really about the second part of the title, A Decomposition. It is steeped in the materials of meth making, but it is also...

My book reconsiders the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1949 from a novel perspective: the spread of consumerism in a self-proclaimed communist country. The book title, Unending...

We humans are so proud of our big brains because it "feels" like brain size must be an advantage, but is it? As some of the essays in this book suggest, a lot of bad behavior and negative thoughts come out of those big brains as well. We feel superior to other animals who are doing just fine in their particular habitat, and we often feel it is our "right" to rule everything on the planet. Our big brains might, in the end, be our downfall

Each of the chapters begins with a case study, the first-person story of an individual who held, or discovered, a family secret. A close friend of mine browsed through the...

This book is about how surveillance functioned in communist Romania from 1973 to 1988, the period during which I was one of its subjects. The text contains many verbatim quotations...

The Cuban Hustle documents the myriad ways in which ordinary Cubans have sought to survive, hustle, and invent alternative cultures in the twenty-year period following the collapse of the Soviet...

The Man in the Dog Park describes the experience of homelessness from a homeless point of view. Co-authored with a homeless man, the book is based on scores of interviews...

It is early May 2009, only a few days before the impending school inspection by the provincial delegate. The Dong village of Longxing has been selected as one of the...

A Future in Ruins tells the story of UNESCO and its efforts to save the cultural wonders of the world, largely through its famous World Heritage program. I wanted to...

Household Gods is a history of the British love-affair with the domestic interior from the age of mass manufacture to modernism. In no other country was domesticity so celebrated and...

For a book that touts the power of storytelling, I would be remiss not to recommend that casual readers flip to pages of aid recipients telling stories from their own...

Remaking the Heartland examines the profound social transformation that has taken place in the middle of the United States during the past half century. This is a region known for...

I’m what is known in my field as a “dirt archaeologist.” I’ve been excavating archaeological sites in various places for 43 years, and I’m not ready to quit. Why do...

Most New Year's resolutions are gone by February—and Jobert E. Abueva argues the problem is the approach, not the goals. The Janus Plan, named for the two-faced Roman god of thresholds, insists you cannot design a meaningful future without first taking an honest look at your past. Built around a six-step framework and the metaphor of weaving, it is a book meant to be read slowly.

The book is located, in its theory and methods, at the intersections of linguistic and economic anthropology. Inverting the classic concept of “moral economy,” Selective Solidarity...

Another big reason is that people underestimate how positively the other person will respond when we reach out to connect with them. People are reluctant to engage a stranger in conversation. If they think the other person doesn't want to talk to them, they often underestimate how interested the other person is in talking to them. We're reluctant to engage in deep conversation ...

A starting premise for our work was that camps, like Slab City, accommodate conditions that might otherwise remain without space. Camps are also bellwethers—early indicators of change and registers of...

Exemplary Things investigates the history of a Japanese cultural keyword, meibutsu, and the pervasive influence it has had in shaping consumption practices in Japan. It's a term that has no exact anglophone equivalent. Japanese commodity culture developed in the 15th century, and in Exemplary Things, I show how

So the argument that pickiness is natural and inevitable doesn’t hold up. That’s extremely hard for parents to hear. I try to understand mass pickiness as a historical phenomenon that has shaped...

But it was not until after World War II that pet cats became common. In this sense, pet cats on a mass scale occupy only one per cent of the time that cats and humans have had relationships. That's why it's so important for a history of cats to cover not only pet cats, but also the more numerous feral and street cats. They have longer histories.

I was a graduate student at Rice University in Houston Texas when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated overhead as it was returning to Earth. I watched communities in and around...

How do anthropologists describe their own practices? Their working concepts would have to be part of it. Nothing could be more diffuse or ubiquitous than the English-language use of relation,...

Newlyweds on Tour is the first historical study to trace the origins and growth of the American honeymoon from 1820 to 1900. Rather than treating the honeymoon as a simple...

Let's get something straight right at the outset; I am not an Indigenous person. My ancestors arrived in America in the late nineteenth century, fleeing poverty and oppression in Europe....

The topic of this book is connected to everything! (Okay, maybe not directly to geology or health insurance. But to a gazillion other things that matter.) It’s connected to the...

My book examines the tricks of the trade and forms of collective support for crafting our largely unconscious practices of hearing. As we live our daily lives, our hearing generally...

America’s poorest citizens are among its most patriotic. Their love of country – and indeed, their sense that the United States is superior to other countries in the world –...

Multitasking isn’t something new to the twenty-first century: our species was designed for it! On the cognitive, linguistic, and social level, humans are highly adapted to doing and thinking about...

I would like a “just browsing” reader to turn to one of the personal stories that open some of the chapters, such as my childhood fascination with nature shows and...

Throughout my career, I wrote books and articles about intimate relationships. When I made a move from New York City to Northampton, Massachusetts in 1990, I left all my everyday...

I set out to write a book not so much about the varieties and comparative deficiencies of cars in the Soviet Union as what these objects meant to Soviet citizens....

Made in America asks whether, how, and in what ways Americans of today are culturally and psychologically different from Americans of the past. The book reaches back to the nation’s colonial...

Privacy—I probably need convince no one—looms large in the United States today, sparked by concerns about NSA spying as well as social media profiling, facial recognition software as well as...

Fire Craft is a story about the meaning of making, of glassblowing, which is simultaneously a more general story about the human condition. It documents my experience learning to blow...

Throughout history people have taken their dreams very seriously. Dreams themselves, and the way we interpret them, take us into the deepest part of our individual as well as cultural...

In researching and writing this book I did not set out to test any particular theory or promote any particular historical interpretation. The project began with the accidental discovery of...

This is not just a political story, because that only tells part of what is fascinating about France in this period. What are the images we have of France in...

Weather Matters is a history of all these phenomena. It explores the questions why and how we talk about the weather in science, the media, popular culture, and the arts....