Product Description: Writing in luminous prose, Liza Dalby, acclaimed author of Geisha and The Tale of Murasaki, brings us this elegant and unique year’s journal― a brilliant mosaic that is at once a candid memoir, a gardener’s diary, and an enlightening excursion through cultures east and west...read more

The author recalls his experiences as an anthropologist in Yemen in the late 1970s and early 1980s, explaining the complex social relationships between tribal groups there and the lessons in war and mediation he learned from his experiences with the Yemenis.

Product Description: Relying upon close readings of virtually all of his published and unpublished writings as well as extensive interviews with former colleagues and students,Robert Redfield and the Development of American Anthropology traces the development of Robert Redfield's ideas regarding social change and the role of social science in American society...read more

Product Description: Rolling in Ditches with Shamans charts American anthropology in the 1920s through the life and work of one of the amateur scholars of the time, Jaime de Angulo (1887–1950). Although he earned a medical degree, de Angulo chose to live on an isolated ranch in Big Sur, California, where he participated fully in the lives of the people who were his ethnographic informants...read more

Product Description: Robin Fox, one of the preeminent anthropologists of our time, takes us on an exuberant personal, intellectual and cultural journey through the 1930s to the 1970s. This is a personal, historical, intellectual journey, one that is at once intriguing, hilarious, and moving...read more

A portrait of the cult-like inner circle of Carlos Castaneda, as presented by one of his disciples and lovers, reveals many of the mystical writer's spiritual rituals and magical instructions, the author's denial of her harem-like life, and her quest for the truth. 20,000 first printing.

Product Description: Based on papers delivered at the 1976 meeting of the American Ethnological Society, American Indian Intellectuals of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries offers biographical sketches of major American Indian scholars and historians between 1828 and 1975...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Indian Man examines the life of James Mooney (1861–1921), the son of poor Irish immigrants who became a champion of Native peoples and one of the most influential anthropology fieldworkers of all time. As a staff member of the Smithsonian Institution for over three decades, Mooney conducted fieldwork and gathered invaluable information on rapidly changing Native American cultures across the continent...read more

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The National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Newjack offers a personal account of the author's adventures riding the rails with America's hoboes and presents a factual glimpse into the world of the modern-day hobo. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

Carlos Castaneda burst onto the academic and cultural scene in 1968 when he published the first of four books detailing his supposed apprenticeship with a Yaqui Indian sorcerer named Don Juan. While academic critics contend Castaneda invented Don Juan, believers say the fog surrounding his existence express the very ideals that Castaneda attributed to his apprenticeship.Little is known of the Peruvian claiming to be Don Juan's apprentice, but in addition to leading a generation into a mystical otherworld, Carlos Castaneda was also a man. Married to him for thirteen years was Margaret Runyan Castaneda.A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda reads partly like a love story, partly like a tell-all account of a celebrity writer. Margaret Castaneda concentrates on the years leading up to her marriage in 1960. It was then Margaret and Carlos explored many of the ideas -- from controlling dreams to using hallucinogenic mushrooms -- that he claims to have learned from Don Juan.Nevertheless, Margaret Castenada believes her husband was indeed a sorcerer, and she still loves him. She insists Castaneda's academic critics miss the point. "I'm willing to accept Don Juan as a spiritual teacher, and it really doesn't matter if he's not real." But the role she claims -- in developing the ideas Carlos purports to be Don Juan's -- ought to be recognized, she says, so she wrote this book. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Carlos Castaneda was a brilliant scholar but legitimacy bored him. At UCLA he got a Ph.D. in anthropology by turning the latest social science theories into conversations with a mushroom-smoking hermit and feeding them back to his professors as ancient Indian wisdom.

Presents a biography of the naturalist and writer, describing how his work stems from his loveless childhood with a mentally ill mother and traveling salesman father and his determination to succeed. (view table of contents)

The distinguished scientist, naturalist, and essayist recounts the key events and discoveries of his life, from his early, formative years, through his creative years as thinker and writer, to the anxious hours of approaching death (view table of contents)

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Product Description: "Gary Wright offers a humorous and insightful study of growing up in small-town Michigan. The village of Berrien Springs offered a boy all the usual challenges--school, fishing, cars and girls. But like most youngsters, he never thought about his town's history...read more

"Suppose," Clifford Geertz suggests, "having entangled yourself every now and again over four decades or so in the goings-on in two provincial towns, one a Southeast Asian bend in the road, one a North African outpost and passage point, you wished to say something about how those goings-on had changed." A narrative presents itself, a tour of indices and trends, perhaps a memoir? None, however, will suffice, because in forty years more has changed than those two towns--the anthropologist, for instance, anthropology itself, even the intellectual and moral world in which the discipline exists. And so, in looking back on four decades of anthropology in the field, Geertz has created a work that is characteristically unclassifiable, a personal history that is also a retrospective reflection on developments in the human sciences amid political, social, and cultural changes in the world. An elegant summation of one of the most remarkable careers in anthropology, it is at the same time an eloquent statement of the purposes and possibilities of anthropology's interpretive powers. To view his two towns in time, Pare in Indonesia and Sefrou in Morocco, Geertz adopts various perspectives on anthropological research and analysis during the post-colonial period, the Cold War, and the emergence of the new states of Asia and Africa. Throughout, he clarifies his own position on a broad series of issues at once empirical, methodological, theoretical, and personal. The result is a truly original book, one that displays a particular way of practicing the human sciences and thus a particular--and particularly efficacious--view of what these sciences are, have been, and should become. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Book by Smith, Harry

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Product Description: In this thought-provoking reexamination of the history of "racial science" Vernon J. Williams argues that all current theories of race and race relations can be understood as extensions of or reactions to the theories formulated during the first half of the twentieth century...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

To listen to David M. Schneider is to hear the voice of American anthropology. To listen at length is to hear much of the discipline’s history, from the realities of postwar practice and theory to Schneider’s own influence on the development of symbolic and interpretive anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. Schneider on Schneider offers readers this rare opportunity, and with it an engrossing introduction into a world of intellectual rigor, personal charm, and wit.In this work, based on conversations with Richard Handler, Schneider tells the story of his days devoted to anthropology—as a student of Clyde Kluckhohn and Talcott Parsons and as a writer and teacher whose work on kinship and culture theory revolutionized the discipline. With a master’s sense of the telling anecdote, he describes his education at Cornell, Yale, and Harvard, his fieldwork on the Micronesian island of Yap and among the Mescalero Apache, and his years teaching at the London School of Economics, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. Musing on the current state and the future of anthropology, Schneider’s cast of characters reads like a who’s who of postwar social science. His reflections on anthropological field research and academic politics address some of the most pressing ethical and epistemological issues facing scholars today, while yielding tales of unexpected amusement.With its humor and irony, its wealth of information and searching questions about the state of anthropology, Schneider on Schneider not only provides an important resource for the history of twentieth-century social science, but also brings to life the entertaining voice of an engaging storyteller.