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Hugh Raffles Named 2023 Winner of J.I. Staley Prize

SAR is pleased to announce that Hugh Raffles, Professor and Anthropology Department Chair at the New School for Social Research, has been named winner of the 2023 J. I. Staley Prize for The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time (New York: Verse Chorus...

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Ethnographic Refusals, Unruly Latinidades

2022. Edited by Alex E. Chávez and Gina M. Pérez, with a foreword by Arlene M. Dávila

The contributors to this volume highlight the value of radical inclusion in their research and explore how Latinx ethnographers and interlocutors work together in contexts of refusal, as well as the extraordinary possibilities offered by ethnography and its role in ongoing social transformation.

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The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-First Century

2022. Edited by Shannon Lee Dawdy and Tamara Kneese

This book brings together scholars who are intrigued by today’s rapidly changing death practices and attitudes. What are the beliefs, values, and ontologies entwined with these emergent death practices? Are we witnessing a shifting relationship between the living and the dead?

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Archaeologies of Empire

2020. Edited by Anna L. Boozer, Bleda S. Düring, and Bradley J. Parker

This book demonstrates how archaeological research can contribute to our conceptualization of empires across disciplinary boundaries.

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Afro-Atlantic Dialogues

2006. Edited by Kevin A. Yelvington

This book breaks new theoretical and methodological ground in the study of the African diaspora in the Atlantic world. Leading scholars of archaeology, linguistics, and socio-cultural anthropology draw upon extensive field experiences and archival investigations of black communities in North America, the Caribbean, South America, and Africa to challenge received paradigms in Afro-American anthropology.

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Aztec, Salmon, and the Puebloan Heartland of the Middle San Juan

2018. Edited by Paul F. Reed and Gary M. Brown

Often overshadowed by the Ancestral Pueblo centers at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde, the Middle San Juan is one of the most dynamic territories in the pre-Hispanic Southwest, interacting with Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde as well as the surrounding regions.

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Becoming Indian

2011. Circe Sturm

Becoming Indian explores the social and cultural values that lie behind this phenomenon and delves into the motivations of these Americans—from so many different walks of life—to reinscribe their autobiographies and find deep personal and collective meaning in reclaiming their Indianness.

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Chiefdoms

1991. Edited by Timothy Earle

The study of chiefdoms has moved from preoccupation with their formal characteristics to a concern with their dynamics as political institutions. The contributors to this volume are interested in how ruling elites retain power through control over production and exchange, and then legitimize that control through an elaborate ideology.

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Childhood

2016. Edited by Courtney L. Meehan and Alyssa N. Crittenden

This collection is the first to specifically address our current understanding of the evolution of human childhood, which in turn significantly affects our interpretations of the evolution of family formation, social organization, cultural transmission, cognition, ontogeny, and the physical and socioemotional needs of children.

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Classic Maya Political History

1991. Edited by T. Patrick Culbert

This volume is the first to present in detail the results of decipherment and to consider the implications of a Classic Maya written history. Contributors examine the way in which the Maya elite created the kinship, alliance, warfare, and ceremonial networks on which the civilization was founded.

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Critical Anthropology Now

1999. Edited by George E. Marcus

Building on the legacy of Writing Culture, Critical Anthropology Now vividly represents the changing nature of anthropological research practice, demonstrating how new and more complicated locations of research – from the boardrooms of multinational corporations to the chat rooms of the Internet – are giving rise to shifts in the character of fieldwork and fieldworker.

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Cyborgs & Citadels

1998. Edited by Gary Lee Downey and Joseph Dumit

The authors explore such questions as how science gains authority to direct truth practices, the boundaries between humans and machines, and how science, technology, and medicine contribute to the fashioning of selves.

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Designs and Anthropologies: Frictions and Affinities

2021. Edited by Keith M. Murphy and Eitan Y. Wilf

This volume demonstrates the importance and power of design and its ubiquitous effects on human life. Collectively, the contributors argue that bringing design and anthropology together can transform both fields and that to tease out the implications of using design to reimagine ethnography—and of using ethnography to reimagine design—we need to consider the historical specificity of their entanglements.

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Disturbing Bodies

2015. Edited by Zoë Crossland and Rosemary A. Joyce
As bodies are revealed, so are hidden and often incommensurate understandings of the body after death. The theme of “disturbing bodies” has a double valence, evoking both the work that anthropologists do and also the ways in which the dead can, in turn, disturb the living through their material qualities, through dreams and other forms of presence, and through the political claims often articulated around them.

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Entrepreneurs in Cultural Context

1979. Edited by Sidney M. Greenfield, Arnold Strickon, and Robert T. Aubey

This book is a collection of essays on business behavior that examine the relationships between business enterprises and family networks. The essays deal with universal subjects that describe the effects of marriage, death, and birth upon the individual and corporate enterprise.

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Exchanging Words

2018. Christopher Ball

Showing ritual as a contributing factor to relationships of development and the politics of indigeneity, Exchanging Words asks how discourse, ritual, and exchange come together to mediate social relations close to home and on a global scale.

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Explanation of Prehistoric Change

1977. Edited by James N. Hill

What is change? What is stability? How and why does each occur? Can they be predicted? The contributors discuss these questions and others about the nature of change through diverse case studies from Hawaii, Midwestern America, the American Southwest, Iran, and the Teotihuacan Valley in Mexico.

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The Fabric of Indigeneity

2016. ann-elise lewallen

The author synthesizes ethnographic field research, museum and archival research, and participation in cultural-revival and rights-based organizing to show how women craft Ainu and indigenous identities through clothwork and how they also fashion lived connections to ancestral values and lifestyles.

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First Coastal Californians

2015. Edited by Lynn H. Gamble

Some of the most complex hunter-gatherer societies on earth flourished along California’s rugged coastline, and this volume brings together an impressive group of experts to tell a story wrought in shell mounds, ancient fishhooks, buried villages, and rock paintings.

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Governing Gifts

2019. Edited by Erica Caple James

The contributors trace the connections among piety, philanthropy, policy, and policing and seek to understand how faith and organized religious charity can be mobilized to govern populations and their practices.

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Historical Ecology

1994. Edited by Carole L. Crumley

In this volume, the authors take a critical step toward establishing a new environmental science by deconstructing the traditional culture/nature dichotomy and placing human/environmental interaction at the center of any new attempts to deal with global environmental change.

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How Nature Works

2019. Edited by Sarah Besky and Alex Blanchette

The authors of this volume push ethnographic inquiry beyond the anthropocentric documentation of human work on nature in order to develop a language for thinking about how all labor is a collective ecological act.

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Kenneth Chapman’s Santa Fe

2008. Edited, annotated, and introduced by Marit K. Munson

Archaeologist and rock art specialist Marit K. Munson presents a carefully edited and annotated edition of Chapman’s memoirs. Written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Chapman’s side of the story is an intimate insider’s portrait of the personalities and events that shaped Santa Fe.

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Linking the Histories of Slavery

2015. Edited by Bonnie Martin and James F. Brooks

This volume has brought together scholars from anthropology, history, psychology, and ethnic studies to share their original research into the lesser known stories of slavery in North America and reveal surprising parallels among slave cultures across the continent.

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Más Que un Indio (More Than an Indian)

2006. Charles R. Hale

This deeply researched and sensitively rendered study raises troubling questions about the contradictions of anti-racist politics and the limits of multiculturalism in Guatemala and, by implication, other countries in the midst of similar reform projects.

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Morleyana

1950.

This collection of vignettes written by colleagues, friends, and family of Sylvanus Morley provides an intimate look at a man who devoted his life to the study and understanding of the ancient Maya.

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Negotiating Structural Vulnerability in Cancer Control

2019. Edited by Julie Armin, Nancy J. Burke, and Laura Eichelberger

The contributors in this volume explore what it means to be structurally vulnerable; how structural vulnerabilities intersect with cancer risk, diagnosis, care seeking, caregiving, clinical-trial participation, and survivorship; and how differing local, national, and global political contexts and histories inform vulnerability.

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Other Intentions

1995. Edited by Lawrence Rosen

The authors argue that although intentionality might appear to be a wholly abstract phenomenon, it is deeply entwined with the nature and distribution of power, the portrayal of events, the assessment of personhood, the interplay of trust and deception, and the assessment of moral and legal responsibility.

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Otros Saberes

2014. Edited by Charles R. Hale and Lynn Stephen

The six research projects that form the core of the Otros Saberes initiative bring together a diverse group of Afro-descendant and indigenous collaborations with academics. The focus of each research project is driven by a strategic priority in the life of the community, organization, or social movement concerned.

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A Peculiar Alchemy

2007. Nancy Owen Lewis and Kay Leigh Hagan; Preface by James F. Brooks

This book brings to life the people, debates, conflicts, and creativity that make the School for Advanced Research an exciting and thought-provoking place to study, work, and create. It serves at once as the story of an exceptional institution and a fascinating history of anthropology and anthropology’s diverse cast of characters.

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A Pueblo Social History

2014. John A. Ware; foreword by Timothy Earle

This volume offers new perspectives on the pithouse to pueblo transition, Chaco phenomenon, evolution of Rio Grande moieties, Western Pueblo lineages and clans, Katsina cult, great kivas, dynamics of village aggregation in the late prehistoric period, and much more.

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Pluralizing Ethnography

2004. Edited by John M.Watanabe and Edward F. Fischer

This volume brings together eight Maya specialists and a prominent anthropological theorist to assess the contrasting historical circumstances and emerging cultural futures of Maya in Mexico and Guatemala.

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Puebloan Societies

2018. Edited by Peter M. Whitely

The contributors draw upon the insights of archaeology, ethnology, and linguistic anthropology to examine social history and practice, including kinship groups, ritual sodalities, architectural forms, economic exchange, environmental adaptation, and political order, as well as their patterns of transmission over time and space.

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The Promise of Infrastructure

2018. Edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel

While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory.

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The Psychology of Women under Patriarchy

2019. Edited by Holly F. Mathews and Adriana M. Manago

The contributors to this volume draw upon field research and in-depth qualitative data from different parts of the world to explore the reasons for women’s varied psychological responses to patriarchy.

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Reassembling the Collection

2013. Edited by Rodney Harrison, Sarah Byrne, and Anne Clarke

This volume considers the material networks and affective qualities of “things” alongside their representational role within the museum and explores the ways in which concepts of agency and indigeneity need to be reconfigured in light of the study of these concepts within the museum context.

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Recapturing Anthropology

1991. Edited by Richard G. Fox

The ten papers in this volume offer different versions of how and where anthropologists might work usefully in today’s world, converging on the issue of how anthropology can best recapture the progressive character its basic concepts, such as “culture,” once had.

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Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala

2021. Edited by John P. Hawkins

Drawing on over fifty years of research and data, the book argues that two factors—cultural collapse and systematic social and economic exclusion—explain the recent religious transformation of Maya Guatemala and the style and emotional intensity through which that transformation is expressed.

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Roots of Conflict

2011. Edited by Patrick V. Kirch

This book presents the efforts of a team of social and natural scientists to understand the complex, systemic linkages between land, climate, crops, human populations, and their cultural structures. The research group has focused on what might seem to some an unlikely locale to investigate a set of problems with worldwide significance: the Hawaiian Islands.

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Seduced and Betrayed

2017. Edited by Milford Bateman and Kate Maclean, foreword by James K. Galbraith

The contributors to this multidisciplinary volume consider the origins, evolution, and outcomes of microfinance from a variety of perspectives and contend that it has been an unsuccessful approach to development.

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Senses of Place

1996. Edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso

In this compelling new volume, eight respected ethnographers explore and lyrically evoke the ways in which people experience, express, imagine, and know the places in which they live. Case studies range from the Apaches of Arizona’s White Mountains to the residents of backwoods “hollers” in Appalachia and the Kaluli people of New Guinea’s rainforests.

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The Shape of Script

2012. Edited by Stephen D. Houston

This book builds on earlier projects about the origins and extinctions of script traditions throughout the world in an effort to address the fundamental questions of how and why writing systems change.

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Things in Motion

2015. Edited by Rosemary A. Joyce and Susan D. Gillespie

Complementing the concept of object biography, the contributors to this volume use the complex construct of “itineraries” to trace the places in which objects come to rest or are active, the routes through which things circulate, and the means by which they are moved.

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Walling In and Walling Out

2020. Edited by Laura McAtackney and Randall H. McGuire

The contributors to this volume illuminate the roles and uses of walls around the world—in contexts ranging from historic neighborhoods to contemporary national borders.

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