Are humans by nature hierarchical or egalitarian? Hierarchy in the Forest addresses this question by examining the evolutionary origins of social and political behavior.

Christopher Boehm combines historical research with anthropological field research to illustrate how the blood-feud system works in Montenegro and how Montenegrins were able to engage constantly in lethal feuds between clans—and even between tribes—while at the same time maintain enough poliitcal unity to resist the constant threat of domination from the Turkish Empire.

This book is a personal saga of woe and intrigue. It recounts a seemingly endless succession of false starts, missteps, detours, dead ends, and disappointments, endured over five years, in the ultimately successful pursuit of a sponsoring unit in the People's Republic of China, for a research project on the rural industrial and artisanal enterprises of Dongyang county, Zhejiang Province.

The book represents a continuation of research begun by Cooper in Hong Kong in the early 1970s among expatriate artisan furniture makers and woodcarvers from Dongyang County, Zhejiang Province. He now sets out to investigate the fate of the same craft in the hands of the same folk under totally different socio-economic conditions in their native county in communist People's Republic of China. Such a focus makes possible the isolation of systemic features of the socio-economic environment that influenced the evolution of the mode of production, with technical requirements of production and regional/ethnic variability held more or less constant.

Contemporary veiling is more often than not about resistance. By voluntarily removing themselves from the male gaze, these women assert their allegiance to a rich and varied tradition, and at the same time preserve their sexual identity. Beyond this, however, the veil also communicates exclusivity of rank and nuances in social status and social relations that provide telling insights into how Arab culture is constituted. Further, veiling is intimately connected with notions of the self, the body and community, as well as with the cultural construction of identity, privacy and space.

In 1976 Gelya Frank began writing about the life of Diane DeVries, a woman born with all the physical and mental equipment she would need to live in our society--except arms and legs. Frank was 28 years old, DeVries 26. This remarkable book--by turns moving, funny, and revelatory--records the relationship that developed between the women over the next twenty years. By addressing the dynamics of power in ethnographic representation, Frank--anthropology's leading expert on life history and life story methods--lays the critical groundwork for a new genre, "cultural biography."

Through A Window is the dramatic saga of thirty years in the life of a community, of birth and death, sex and love, power and war. It reads like a novel, but it is one of the most important scientific works ever published. The community is Gombe, on the shores of Lake Tangganyika, where the principal residents are chimpanzees and one extraordinary woman who is their student, protector, and historian.

This best-selling classic tells the story of one of the world's greatest scientific adventures. Jane Goodall was a young secretarial school graduate when the legendary Louis Leakey chose her to undertake a landmark study of chimpanzees in the wild. In the Shadow of Man is an absorbing account of her early years at Gombe Stream Reserve, telling us of the remarkable discoveries she made as she got to know the chimps and they got to know her.

Africa in My Blood is an extraordinary self-portrait in letters of Jane Goodall's early years, from childhood to the publication of In the Shadow of Man, revealing this remarkable woman more vividly than anything published before, by her or about her.

Janet Hoskins provides both an ethnographic study of the organization of time in an Eastern Indonesian society and a theoretical argument about alternate temporalities in the modern world. Based on more than three years of field work with the Kodi people of the island of Sumba, her book focuses on Kodi calendrical rituals, exchange transactions, and confrontations with the historical forces of the colonial and postcolonial world. Hoskins explores the contingent, contested, and often contradictory precedent of the past to show how local systems of knowledge are in dialogue with wider historical forces.

In this innovative study, six women and men from Eastern Indonesia narrate their own lives by talking about their possessions--domestic objects used to construct a coherent identity through a process of identification and "self-historicizing." Janet Hoskins explores how things are given biographical significance and entangled in sexual politics, expressed in dualistic metaphors where the familiar distinctions between person and object and female and male are drawn in unfamiliar ways.

J.I. Stanley Prize Winner 1999

Crafting Selves is a vivid account of everyday life on the shop floor of a small family-owned confectionery factory in Tokyo. As Dr. Schwartz points out, "much of our perception of Japanese work life is drawn from discussions of male middle class managers in large corporations, which portray a society of harmony, homogeneity, and lifetime employment." Kondo's work, he notes, shatters this notion by focusing on a small factory, where she also worked.

From the runways of Paris to the casting controversies over Miss Saigon, from a local demonstration at the Claremont Colleges in California to the gender-blending of M. Butterfly, About Face examines representations of Asia and their reverberations in both Asia and Asian American lives. Japanese high fashion and Asian American theater become points of entry into the politics of pleasure, the performance of racial identities, and the possibility of political intervention in commodity capitalism.

Anthropology is the study of all human beings at all times and places. Human beings everywhere live in communities, basic units of cultural transmission and survival, which orchestrate human activities according to their own particular values. Anthropologist distinguish at least four levels of social and cultural complexity among human communities: the hunting and gathering band, the horticultural tribe, the agricultural traditional civilization, and modern metropolitan civilization. social and cultural complexity at each level expresses itself diversely along a number of human institutions, namely: community--the master system, family, ritual, economics and exchange, language and communication, politics, technology, justice, learning, and social organization.

Theft, poisoning, affairs, flights home, refusals to work, eat or have sex, threats to divide the joint household, and sly acts of sabotage are some of the domestic warfare tactics employed by Muslim women attempting to resist patriarchy. Gender, Law, and Resistance in India dramatically illustrates how a patriarchal ideology is upheld and reinforced through male-governed social and legal institutions and how women defy that control. Based on anthropological fieldwork in rural Rajasthan in northern India, Erin Moore's book details the life of an extended Muslim family she has known for twenty years. In many ways the plight of the central character, Hunni, is representative of dilemmas experienced by the majority of north Indian peasant women.

What makes humans unique? What makes us the most successful animal species inhabiting the Earth today? Most scientists agree that the key to our success is the unusually large size of our brains. Our large brains gave us our exceptional thinking capacity and led to humans' other distinctive characteristics, including advanced communication, tool use, and walking on two legs. Or was it the other way around? Did the challenges faced by early humans push the species toward communication, tool use, and walking and, in doing so, drive the evolutionary engine toward a large brain? In this provocative new book, Craig Stanford presents an intriguing alternative to this puzzling question--an alternative grounded in recent, groundbreaking scientific observation. According to Stanford, what made humans unique was meat. Or, rather, the desire for meat, the eating of meat, the hunting of meat, and the sharing of meat.

Unlike the larger American society, Native Americans historically have respected, and in many tribal nations venerated, homosexuals. Williams explains the berdache as a custom, its social roles, and the berdache history, including its introduction to the European concept of sin and intolerance of sexual diversity. The word berdache applies almost exclusively to males, mainly because historical records only relate dealings with aboriginal males, but Williams also includes a chapter on female sexual diversity, using the word amazon to describe these often warriorlike women.

The author presents twenty-seven autobiographical interviews with Indonesian informants. The interviews were conducted by Williams and eleven collaborators and have been translated and edited for publication. The life stories are divided into three parts: Paths to the Present: Village Life and Urban Development; Holding Onto the Past: The Artistic and Spiritual Traditions; and Looking Toward the Future: Development, Education, and Youth. The subjects include: a market woman, a cake seller, a feminist psychologist, a trance dancer, a Buddhist temple caretaker, a Muslim convert, a Catholic teacher and a homosexual principal.