Imperial frontiers are a fascinating stage for studying the interactions of people, institutions, and their environments. In one of the first books to explore the Inka frontier through archaeology, Sonia Alconini examines part of present-day Bolivia that was once a territory at the edge of the Inka empire. Along this frontier, one of the New World's most powerful polities came into repeated conflict with tropical lowland groups that it could never subject to its rule. Using extensive field research, Alconini explores the multifaceted socioeconomic processes that transpired in the frontier region. Her unprecedented study shows how the Inka empire exercised control over vast expanses of land and peoples in a territory located hundreds of miles away from the capital city of Cusco, and how people on the frontier navigated the cultural and environmental divide that separated the Andes and the Amazon.

Taste is recognized as one of the most evocative senses. The flavors of food play an important role in identity, memory, emotion, desire, and aversion, as well as social, religious and other occasions. Yet despite its fundamental role, taste is often mysteriously absent from discussions about food. Now in its second edition, The Taste Culture Reader examines the sensuous dimensions of eating and drinking and highlights the centrality of taste in human experience. Combining both classic and contemporary sources from anthropology, philosophy, sociology, history, science, and beyond, the book features excerpts from texts by David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Pierre Bourdieu, Brillat-Savarin, Marcel Proust, Sidney Mintz, and M.F.K. Fisher as well as original essays by authors such as David Sutton, Lisa Heldke, David Howes, Constance Classen, and Amy Trubek. This edition has been revised substantially throughout to include the latest scholarship on the senses and features new introductions from the editor as well as 10 new chapters. The perfect introduction to the study of taste, this is essential reading for students in food studies, anthropology, sensory studies, philosophy, and culinary arts.

The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. At a moment in which basic rights are once again imperilled, Olivia Laing conducts an ambitious investigation into the body and its discontents, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to chart a daring course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, from gay rights and sexual liberation to feminism and the civil rights movement.

Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and travelling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, she grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century, among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X.

Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Everybody is an examination of the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.

This is the first collection of essays devoted specifically to the nature and significance of Aristotle's anthropological philosophy, covering the full range of his ethical, metaphysical and biological works. The book is organised into four parts, two of which deal with the metaphysics and biology of human nature and two of which discuss the anthropological foundations and implications of Aristotle's ethico-political works. The essay topics range from human nature and morality to friendship and politics, including original discussion and fresh perspectives on rationalism, the intellect, perception, virtue, the faculty of speech and the differences and similarities between human and non-human animals. Wide-ranging and innovative, the volume will be highly relevant for readers studying Aristotle as well as for anyone working on either ancient or contemporary philosophical anthropology.

George Pitt-Rivers began his career as one of Britain's most promising young anthropologists, conducting research in the South Pacific and publishing articles in the country's leading academic journals. With a museum in Oxford bearing his family name, Pitt-Rivers appeared to be on track for a sterling academic career that might even have matched that of his grandfather, one of the most prominent archaeologists of his day. By the early 1930s, however, Pitt-Rivers had turned from his academic work to politics. Writing a series of books attacking international communism and praising the ideas of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, Pitt-Rivers fell into the circles of the anti-Semitic far right. In 1937 he attended the Nuremberg Rally and personally met Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazis. With the outbreak of war in 1940 Pitt-Rivers was arrested and interned by the British government on the suspicion that he might harm the war effort by publicly sharing his views, effectively ending his academic career. This book traces the remarkable career of a man who might have been remembered as one of Britain's leading 20th century anthropologists but instead became involved in a far-right milieu that would result in his professional ruin and the relegation of most of his research to margins of scientific history. At the same time, his wider legacy would persist far beyond the academic sphere and can be found to the present day.

How would our understanding of museums change if we used the Vintage Wireless Museum or the Museum of Witchcraft as examples - rather than the British Museum or the Louvre? Although there are thousands of small, independent, single-subject museums in the UK, Europe and North America, the field of museum studies remains focused almost exclusively on major institutions. In this ground-breaking new book, Fiona Candlin reveals how micromuseums challenge preconceived ideas about what museums are and how they operate. Based on extensive fieldwork and analysis of more than fifty micromuseums, she shows how they offer dramatically different models of curation, interpretation and visitor experience, and how their analysis generates new perspectives on subjects such as display, objects, collections, architecture, and the public sphere. The first-ever book dedicated to the subject, Micromuseology provides a platform for radically rethinking key debates within museum studies. Destined to transform the field, it is essential reading for students and researchers in museum studies, anthropology, material culture studies, and visual culture.

This unique ethnographic investigation examines the role that fashion plays in the production of the contemporary Indian luxury aesthetic. Tracking luxury Indian fashion from its production in village craft workshops via upmarket design studios to fashion soirees, Kuldova investigates the Indian luxury fashion market's dependence on the production of thousands of artisans all over India, revealing a complex system of hierarchies and exploitation. In recent years, contemporary Indian design has dismissed the influence of the West and has focused on the opulent heritage luxury of the maharajas, Gulf monarchies and the Mughal Empire. Luxury Indian Fashion argues that the desire for a luxury aesthetic has become a significant force in the attempt to define contemporary Indian society. From the cultivation of erotic capital in businesswomen's dress to a discussion of masculinity and muscular neo-royals to staged designer funerals, Luxury Indian Fashion analyzes the production, consumption and aesthetics of luxury and power in India. Luxury Indian Fashion is essential reading for students of fashion history and theory, anthropology and visual culture.

Home cooking is a multibillion-dollar industry that includes cookbooks, kitchen gadgets, high-end appliances, specialty ingredients, and more. Cooking-themed programming flourishes on television, inspiring a wide array of celebrity chef-branded goods even as self-described ""foodies"" seek authenticity by pickling, preserving, and canning foods in their own home kitchens. Despite this, claims that ""no one has time to cook anymore"" are common, lamenting the slow extinction of traditional American home cooking in the twenty-first century. In Look Who's Cooking: The Rhetoric of American Home Cooking Traditions in the Twenty-First Century, author Jennifer Rachel Dutch explores the death of home cooking, revealing how modern changes transformed cooking at home from an odious chore into a concept imbued with deep meanings associated with home, family, and community. Drawing on a wide array of texts-cookbooks, advertising, YouTube videos, and more-Dutch analyzes the many manifestations of traditional cooking in America today. She argues that what is missing from the discourse around home cooking is an understanding of skills and recipes as a form of folklore. Dutch's research reveals that home cooking is a powerful vessel that Americans fill with meaning because it represents both the continuity of the past and adaptability to the present. Home cooking is about much more than what is for dinner; it's about forging a connection to the past, displaying the self in the present, and leaving a lasting legacy for the future.

This book argues that neither theories of secularisation nor theories of lived religion offer satisfactory accounts of religion and social change. Drawing from Deleuze and Gauttari's idea of the assemblage, Paul-Francois Tremlett outlines an alternative. Informed by classical and contemporary theories of religion as well as empirical case studies and ethnography conducted in Manila and London, this book re-frames religion as spatially organised flows. Foregrounding the agency of hon-human actors, it offers a compelling and original account of religion and social change.

This book provides students and researchers with clear guidance through this tricky, but fundamental aspect of qualitative, ethnographic research. The chapters provide a concise overview that clarifies, illustrates and develops a highly popular methodological principle. To some extent, the book is critical of some contemporary approaches, particularly those that portray reflexivity as an optional, virtuous extra. Drawing on a broad range of anthropological, sociological and other sources, it illuminates through example as well as by precept.

This exciting book brings the often-overlooked southern Maya region of Guatemala into the spotlight by closely examining the ""lost city"" of Chocola. Jonathan Kaplan and Federico Paredes Umana prove that Chocola was a major Maya polity and reveal exactly why it was so influential. In their fieldwork at the site, Kaplan and Paredes Umana discovered an extraordinarily sophisticated underground water-control system. They also discovered cacao residues in ceramic vessels. Based on these and other findings, the authors believe that cacao was consumed and grown intensively at Chocola and that the city was the center of a large cacao trade. They contend that the city's wealth and power were built on its abundant supply of water and its command of cacao, which was significant not just to cuisine and trade but also to Maya ideology and cosmology. Moreover, Kaplan and Paredes Umana detail the ancient city's ceramics and add over thirty stone sculptures to the site's inventory. Because the southern Maya region was likely the origin of Maya hieroglyphic writing and the Long Count calendar, scholars have long suspected the area to be important. This pioneering field research at Chocola helps explain how and why the region played a leading role in the rise of the Maya civilization.

Systems of belonging, including ethnicity, are not static, automatic, or free of contest. Historical contexts shape the ways which we are included in or excluded from specific classifications. Building on an amazing array of sources, David L. Schoenbrun examines groupwork-the imaginative labor that people do to constitute themselves as communities-in an iconic and influential region in East Africa. His study traces the roots of nationhood in the Ganda state over the course of a millennia, demonstrating that the earliest clans were based not on political identity or language but on shared investments, knowledges, and practices. Grounded in Schoenbrun's skillful mastery of historical linguistics and vernacular texts, The Names of the Python supplements and redirects current debates about ethnicity in ex-colonial Africa and beyond. This timely volume carefully distinguishes past from present and shows the many possibilities that still exist for the creative cultural imagination.