Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Browse subjects
  3. Anthropology
  4. Social and cultural anthropology
  5. Content listing

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

917 results in Social and cultural anthropology

Page 1 of 46

How Data Need People
  • The Social and Epistemic Practice of a Data-rich Science
  • Götz Hoeppe
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026

Altered Minds
  • The Interface of Substances, Virtual Simulations and AI Consciousness
  • Sheldon Lee Gosline
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • This book presents a groundbreaking exploration of humanity's quest for altered states, from ancient psychoactive rituals to immersive AI and virtual reality, and examines their continued impact on cognition, culture, governance, and identity. Drawing on decades of global fieldwork and interdisciplinary research, Dr Sheldon Lee Gosline traces compelling connections between the regulation of controlled substances and the addictive dynamics of emerging technologies. Readers are challenged to move beyond binaries of legality and pathology and discover how symbols, rituals, and imagination have long mediated our understanding of self and reality. Bridging anthropology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the history of medicine, chapters introduce innovative concepts such as symbolic entropy and recursive regulation to interpret present crises and anticipate future transformations. A must-read for scholars, policymakers, and curious readers alike, the volume offers a powerful lens through which to understand the evolving future of consciousness in the digital age.

Iran's Minorities
  • Social Diversity and State Power
  • Lois Beck
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • In the wake of Iran's revolution in 1978–79, a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy took control of the country. These dramatic changes impacted all sectors of society including a vast array of diverse peoples and cultures. In this book, Lois Beck provides an anthropological and historical account of Iran's many minorities. She focuses on the aftermath of the revolution, declaration of an Islamic republic, and Iraq-Iran war. Drawing on six decades of anthropological research, Beck provides frameworks for understanding how each of Iran's linguistic, religious, ethnic, ethno-national, and tribal minorities fashioned unique identities. These identities stem from factors relating to history, location, socioeconomic patterns, and sociocultural traits. They reflect the people's interactions with Iran's rulers and governments as they changed over time. A modern nation-state cannot be fully understood without knowing the extent of its reach in the peripheries and border regions and among its diverse peoples. This landmark study challenges existing scholarly accounts by offering broad and detailed perspectives on Iran's many distinct languages, religions, ethnicities, ethno-nations, and tribes.

Disability and Distribution
  • Becoming a Valuable Person in Kinshasa
  • Clara Devlieger
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • Set in the postcolonial city of Kinshasa (DR Congo), this ethnography explores how people with disabilities navigate debates about the just distribution of resources where there is little state organised welfare, and public perception of disability swings between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving'. Tracing a historic increase of disability due to polio and its long-term effects, this book examines two controversial livelihood activities that serve as informal alternatives to state support: a specialized form of international border brokerage across the Congo River, and a unique practice of bureaucratized begging that imitates state tax collection and humanitarian fundraising. Clara Devlieger examines how such activities shape ways that disabled people conceive the idea of becoming 'valuable people' in local terms: by supporting loved ones, many achieve high esteem against expectations, while adapting exclusionary models of urban personhood to include disability. Devlieger offers a new understanding of the complex dynamic between the imagined role of the state, international discourses of rights, and local experiences of disability.

Critical Friendship in the Modern World
  • Edited by Laura Eramian, Peter Mallory
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • Friendship is a critically important aspect of our lives, but is it always an unassailably 'good thing'? This book begins with the innovative premise that friendship is inherently complex and characterized by opposing qualities: it is both pleasurable and fraught, private and public, and inclusive and exclusionary. Rather than simply celebrating friendship as universally beneficial or worrying about its decline amid rising social disconnection, Laura Eramian and Peter Mallory offer a comprehensive conceptualization of 'critical friendship' across its diverse meanings. Drawing on contemporary insights and cross-cultural examples from interdisciplinary contributors, the chapters examine the ambivalence of friendship, its entanglements with other relations or institutions, the quest for selfhood and recognition, and how friendship finds meaning across private and public life. Through an empirically rich evaluation of the multiple ways that friendship is practiced, valued, or interpreted, this volume advances critical debates on friendship across social psychology, anthropology, sociology and beyond.

The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity
  • Edited by Jemima Pierre
  • Jean Muteba Rahier
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • What is race and how does it structure our contemporary world? This Handbook offers a groundbreaking exploration of these urgent questions, providing a critical, global perspective on the anthropology of race and ethnicity. Drawing together cutting-edge research across subdisciplines such as physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, archaeology and linguistics, it emphasizes the key roles of colonialism and the discipline of anthropology in shaping our understanding of race, and demonstrates the instrumentality of race/ethnicity in the reproduction of local and global inequality. The chapters show how a variety of issues are deeply rooted in global structures of race and power — from the rising popularity of genomics to police brutality and the rise of the far right in the West. Providing new theoretical frameworks and innovative methodologies reshaping the discipline of anthropology, this Handbook is a vital resource for anyone interested in the complexities of race in the 21st century.

The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Death
  • Edited by Sarah L. Richardson, Sarah E. Wagner, Ruth E. Toulson
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • Shaped by important shifts in the field and a global pandemic, this Handbook provides a fresh look at the anthropology of death. It is split into five parts, with chapters examining how deathcare happens and the kinds of relationships that arise between the living, the dying, and the dead; how rituals change and also endure; and how societies make sense of and live with death – both everyday and catastrophic. It draws on theories of social death and necropolitics, as well as death's materiality and more-than-human experiences of death and grief, inviting a broader understanding of the subject itself. With contributors from within and beyond the fields of anthropology and death studies, it bridges gaps in scholarly dialogues around life from death and death's afterlife of mourning and memory. The ethnographically grounded individual studies combine to underscore why death matters in new and urgent ways beyond concerns of just human life.

Fashioning Futures
  • Uncertainty and Young Women's Livelihoods in Urban Nigeria
  • Juliet Gilbert
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • Through vibrant ethnographic storytelling, this study reveals how young women capitalise on uncertainty in Calabar, southeastern Nigeria, to realise respectable futures. Exploring young women's daily activities across different sites from the house to church, sewing shops and beauty salons, Fashioning Futures examines the complex ways in which various forms of uncertainty permeate life in a city shaped by Pentecostal fervour and patriarchal conservatism. Juliet Gilbert demonstrates how young women actively engage with forms of uncertainty such as illusion, dissimulation and fakery to present themselves as respectable urbanites and work towards marriage. Revealing young women's centrality in the construction of urban lifeworlds in contemporary Nigeria, Gilbert re-casts youthhood in Africa, both as an analytical category and as a time of experience.

An Unholy Pedagogy
  • Visions of Learning from Mesoamerica, 1300-1650
  • Joshua Jacob Fitzgerald
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 March 2026
  • The traumatic Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica, and the Ibero-Catholic colonialism that followed, truly transformed Indigenous political, economic, and socio-cultural practices. Confronted by dogmatic European literary regimes, strident indoctrination, and acts of structural violence, how could 'Aztec' education have survived in colonial times? An Unholy Pedagogy rethinks education studies by centering discussions on Indigenous visions of learning that shaped schooling throughout the sixteenth century. Joshua Jacob Fitzgerald tracks education systems before the Spanish-Catholic invasion, examining the writings, art, and architecture of Nahua communities. He analyses Nahuatl primary sources and historical art and archaeological sources, focusing especially on materials produced by Indigenous and Indigenous-Christian artists and scribes. This fascinating interdisciplinary study reveals the ways that Nahua students transformed pedagogy, shaped learning, and preserved local knowledge.

How Transparency Works
  • Ethnographies of a Global Value
  • Edited by Filipe Calvão, Matthieu Bolay, Elizabeth Ferry
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2026
    Print publication:
    28 February 2026
  • Transparency has become a ubiquitous presence in seemingly every sphere of social, economic, and political life. Yet, for all the claims that transparency works, little attention has been paid to how it works – even when it fails to achieve its goals. Instead of assuming that transparency is itself transparent, this book questions the technological practices, material qualities, and institutional standards producing transparency in extractive, commodity trading, and agricultural sites. Furthermore, it asks: how is transparency certified and standardized? How is it regimented by 'ethical' and 'responsible' businesses, or valued by traders and investors, from auction rooms to sustainability reports? The contributions bring nuanced answers to these questions, approaching transparency through four key organizing concepts, namely disclosure, immediacy, trust, and truth. These are concepts that anchor the making of transparency across the lifespan of global commodities. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Nuer Messianic Judaism
  • Truth and Mediation in the Ethiopia-South Sudan Borderlands
  • Yotam Gidron
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2026
    Print publication:
    28 February 2026
  • The Messianic Jews of Ethiopia's Gambella region are Evangelical Christian Zionists who adhere to various Jewish practices and understand their faith as authentically emulating the faith of the first followers of Jesus Christ. Drawing on over a year of ethnographic research in this region, Yotam Gidron traces here the rise and evolution of Christian Zionist and Messianic Jewish faiths amongst Nuer communities in the Ethiopia-South Sudan borderlands. This study approaches processes of religious change from the perspective of believers, examining their pursuits of knowledge and transnational connectivity. In doing so, Gidron considers everyday dilemmas concerning spiritual mediation and truth, as they emerged in relation to church genealogies, Christian literacy, modes of prayer and praise, bloodlines, cattle, and the constitution of various human and divine relationships. As a result, he offers timely insights on spiritual and political life at the global margins, and on contemporary African attitudes towards Israel and the Middle East.

Peasants to Paupers
  • Land, Class, and Kinship in Central Kenya
  • Peter Lockwood
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2026
    Print publication:
    31 January 2026
  • On the northern periphery of Nairobi, in southern Kiambu County, the city's expansion into a landscape of poor smallholders is bringing new opportunities, dilemmas, and conflicts. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Peter Lockwood examines how Kiambu's 'workers with patches of land' struggle to sustain their households as the skyrocketing price of land ratchets up gendered and generational tensions within families. The sale of ancestral land by senior men turns would-be inheritors, their young adult sons, into landless and land-poor paupers, heightening their exposure to economic precarity. Peasants to Paupers illuminates how these dynamics are lived at the site of kinship, how moral principles of patrilineal obligation and land retention fail in the face of market opportunity. Caught between joblessness, land poverty and the breakdown of kinship, the book shows how Kiambu's young men struggle to sustain hopes for middle-class lifestyles as the economic ground shifts beneath their feet.This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Marriage and the Moral Imagination
  • Janet Carsten
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2026
    Print publication:
    31 December 2025
  • This fresh and engaging book opens up new terrain in the exploration of marriage and kinship. While anthropologists and sociologists have often interpreted marriage, and kinship more broadly, in conservative terms, Carsten highlights their transformative possibilities. The book argues that marriage is a close encounter with difference on the most intimate scale, carrying the seeds of social transformation alongside the trappings of conformity. Grounded in rich ethnography and the author's many decades of familiarity with Malaysia, it asks a central question: what does marriage do, and how? Exploring the implications of the everyday imaginative labour of marriage for kinship relations and wider politics, this work offers an important and highly original contribution to anthropology, family and kinship studies, sociology and Southeast Asian studies.

Religion, Dissonance, and Systems Theory
  • Comparing Spiritual Traditions
  • Ariel Glucklich
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 December 2025
  • Religious belief systems are often marked by internal dissonance. Mitigating this dissonance can lead to surprising religious phenomena, including blood libels, scapegoating, religious violence, the worship of saints and martyrs, asceticism, austerities, as well as processions, fasting, and clowning. In this study, Ariel Glucklich provides a new approach to understanding how religious actions emerge in the context of belief systems. Providing an innovative psychological and social understanding of the causes that stimulate believers to action, he examines a range of religious phenomena in India, Israel, Austria, Italy, and the United States. Glucklich's new theory enables recognition of the patterns that account for the full complexity of actions inspired by religious beliefs and systems.  His systematic comparison of actions across traditional boundaries offers a novel approach to cause and effect in comparative religion and religious studies more broadly. Glucklich's book also generates new questions regarding a universal phenomenon that has escaped notice up to now.

Alter-Native Constitutionalism
  • Common-ing ‘Common' Law, Transforming Property in South Africa
  • Sindiso Mnisi
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 December 2025
  • South Africa presents the perplexing paradox of arguably having the most progressive Constitution in the world, marked by full-throated socio-economic rights protection, while also being one of the most unequal countries in the world. This book takes seriously increasing sociopolitical challenges to the legitimacy of South Africa's post-apartheid legal order and scorching critiques of the constitutional settlement, against which many in the legal establishment bristle. Sindiso Mnisi develops 'Alter-Native Constitutionalism,' which is distinguished by equitable amalgamation of customary and common law with vernacular (or 'living') law, as a more compelling and just model for South Africa to adopt in its future than the legal pluralism that largely represents the afterlives of colonialism. This book draws on and contributes to international debates about the role of law in decolonising post-colonial orders and economic redistribution, addressing issues of poverty and inequality, gender, race, indigeneity, and customary vs vernacular law.

Representing Relationships
  • Modes of Cognition and Connection
  • Alan Page Fiske
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    11 December 2025
  • The four fundamental forms of sociality structure our relationships. By comparing hundreds of cultures across more than 5,000 years, this book builds on relational models theory to reveal how each of the four basic types of relationship is conceived in their own distinctive cognitive medium. The text demonstrates how people use their food and bodies to foster affiliation, spatial dimensions to form hierarchy, concrete operations of one-to-one matching to create equality, and employ arbitrary, conventional symbols for proportion-based relationships. Originating from the author's ethnographic fieldwork in a West African village, this innovative social theory integrates findings from social, cognitive, and developmental psychology, linguistics and semiotics, anthropology, archeology, art history, religious studies, and ancient texts. The chapters offer compelling insights into readers' everyday social relations by showing what humans think their social relationships actually are.

Homesick Nation
  • Development, Migration and Yearning in Rural China
  • Linda Qian
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    18 December 2025
  • This innovative study introduces the concept of xiangchou – homesickness and rural nostalgia – to English-language scholarship, using it as a lens through which to explore rural development in contemporary China. Using hometown ethnography, Linda Qian takes a village in Zhejiang province as her primary case study to demonstrate the emotional, social and political forces shaping rural return migration and development policies. Through personal narratives and state-led initiatives, she reveals how xiangchou functions as both a 'structure of feeling' and a tool of affective governance. By intertwining lived experiences with broader social and political contexts, this study highlights the overlapping desires projected onto the countryside and underscores the significance of the 'rural' in the traditional concept of the 'hometown'.

The Making of Brazilian Amazonian Societies
  • A Study in Ethnographic and Spatial History
  • Mark Harris
  • Published online:
    14 November 2025
    Print publication:
    20 November 2025
  • Amazonia presents the contemporary scholar with myriad challenges. What does it consist of, and what are its limits? In this interdisciplinary book, Mark Harris examines the formation of Brazilian Amazonian societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing predominantly on the Eastern Amazon, what is today the states of Pará and Amapá in Brazil. His aim is to demonstrate how the region emerged through the activities and movements of Indigenous societies with diverse languages, cultures, individuals of mixed heritage, and impoverished European and African people from various nations. Rarely are these approaches and people examined together, but this comprehensive history insightfully illustrates that the Brazilian Amazon consists of all these communities and their struggles and highlights the ways the Amazon has been defended through partnership and alliance across ethnic identities.

Shapes in Revolution
  • The Political Morphology of Cuban Life
  • Martin Holbraad
  • Published online:
    07 November 2025
    Print publication:
    20 November 2025
  • Revolutions are cosmogonic. More than any other modern political form, their deliberate goal is to precipitate change as a total, all-embracing project: not just a radically new political order but one that reaches deep into the fabric of social relationships, seeking to transform people at their very core, recasting the horizons that give their lives shape and meaning. Combining ethnographic and historiographic research, Shapes in Revolution tells the story of this radical process of life-formation, with all of its rugged contradictions and ambiguities, as it has unfolded in Cuba. As well as a novel anthropological perspective on revolutions, the upshot is a fresh approach to the study of political forms and their power to format people and their relationships into particular shapes. Articulating politics through the shapes it gives to people and their lives, the work proposes relational morphology as a new departure for political anthropology.

The Cambridge Handbook of Psychological Anthropology
  • Edited by Edward Lowe
  • Published online:
    22 October 2025
    Print publication:
    25 September 2025
  • Bringing together contributions from a global team of renowned scholars, this Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the dynamic field of psychological anthropology. It is divided into five parts and includes a critical updating of the theoretical foundations for psychological anthropology, covering cognitive, psychodynamic, linguistic, and phenomenological views. It provides the first-ever lifespan perspective on human development in culture from the perspective of anthropology and also contains sections that connect the biological dynamics involved in human experience through to social, cultural, and historical perspectives. It considers important political-economic concerns for psychocultural studies, including Indigenous perspectives and expert voices from the global south. By showing how researchers can break out of the disciplinary silos that separate important fields in the human sciences, like anthropology and psychology, it emphasizes the importance of working collaboratively together in order to enrich our understanding of the human condition.

Page 1 of 46