Reddit mentions: The best anthropology books

Disapponting. You once again make random assumptions, respond to a post with empirical data (and links to the source given) with a lot of rhetoric.

Also maybe you didn't read what I posted (or the links) or you are not familiar with history (I say this in a non insulting manner)

>Japan and Germany are good examples to show that colonialism isn't the universal answer to the wealth of nations.

If anything Japan is a classic case that proves the wealth transfer theory.

India's GDP per capita in 1885 was $ 567, Japan's was $ 836. A 30% difference at best. Around this time the Japanese consolidation of the home islands is over and it's colonisation is starting. Around 1900 the conquest of Korea begins and is complete by 1905. Japan's GDP in 1906 is @ 1,200 (80% increase). India's GDP is static so the gap widens. The transfer of wealth begins and by 1915 Japan's GDP is $ 1,700 (it has doubled in 30 years). It expands again after Manchuria is conquered in 1930. By 1943 (the peak) Japan's GDP was at $ 2,822 ( an increase of close to 3.5 times in just 60 years).

Tell me how Japan was not a colonising state and how it did not transfer massive amounts of wealth from China and Korea.

Germany also had a decent sized colonial empire (Google "Scramble for Africa"), but yes, this is one of the major countries that did not create using wealth transfer. It did make up for it in WW2 though.

>Are you trying to suggest that America's wealth is built on the 'genocide' of native Americans in the 1500s and 1600s ?

Selective reading again.

>>America is an exception in the sense that it was a vast untapped land with massive resources for the taking and hence did not necessitate a wealth transfer to a mother country. The wealth transfer was internal.

You can take from this what you will. Though wholesale genocide of Native Americans is a reality. Are you denying this?

>On the flip side there are countries like Spain and Portugal that had extensive colonies but aren't doing very well.

Your point? I kind of buffers my point. That this wealth transfer boosted the wealth of nations by crazy proportions. Not all of them could hold onto it and make the transition into the modern era very well.

>India didn't really have anything comparable to the Medici banks in a similar time-frame and there definitely wasn't anything comparable to publicly traded companies like the Dutch East India Company at any point of time, or bond markets and stock markets in general.

Different markets, different evolution. That being said according to The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade (sorry I only have a physical copy, can't find an online source), banks in the Mughal empire (after the Adesha system) functioned exactly like the Medici banks you seem to so admire (and I do too, the evolution of Renaissance banks and their power is fascinating to read). Jagat Seth was a well known banker who bankrolled Mughal empires.

You talk about bankers funding kings - that is precisely what Shantidas Jhaveri did. He and a consortium of bankers in Surat loaned the money that enabled Aurangazeb to win his war against Murad. Interestingly Murad himself borrowed money from the exact same bankers and when he was beheaded by Aurangazeb, the bankers made Aurangazeb pay up on behalf of Murad.

You should learn more about Indian history - it is fascinating and you will find that we weren't as backward at any point in our history till we are now (or after 1800). Another source I have also talks extensively about Hindu (Gujarati) banking houses dominating trade during the Mughal era. They all used the same Hundi system to conduct trade.

Interestingly - the system here was free from government interference. You could say pure play capitalism at work. While later banks and public companies in Europe had state banking but I digress and will stick to the topic at hand.

About Scandinavian countries or Argentina, I really cannot say. I have next to zero knowledge about these.

>The Mauryan Empire was indeed great but that was a very very long time ago. What's important is that after the Guptas, India was on a steady gradual decline, accentuated by the Muslim and British invasions.

Are you a 'v invanted zero' brain dead right wing? This is literally the most absurd thing to say.

The South of India had the Chola's reign supreme till 1400 (ok the Pandyas took over sometime after 1200). After this you had the Viajayanagara empire (famed for it's wealth and advancement...the city of Hampi even overawed the first European to visit it). In the north after a brief period of chaos from 1200 to 1500 when you had the 5 Delhi dynasties, the Mughals took over.

India really prospered under the Mughals. It hardly went through some 'dark period'. Sure, you had the tyrannical despots like Aurangazeb, but even they left things well alone when it came to commerce & trade. They ruled very well and India went through a period of peace & prosperity till the reign of Bahadur Shah I. The wealth of India under the Moghuls is famed world over and this is in fact what attracted the European traders in the first place. We had some really gifted Emperors (Humayun, Akbar the Great, Empress Noor Jahan, Shah Jahan).

>The Cholas went to South East Asia. This happened in 1025 AD, you can't really compare something so long ago with the age of discovery and exploration.

My point is we were advanced enough to launch seaborne invasions using upto 25 ships a 1000 years ago. Sea navigation clearly was not unknown to us.

I still cannot get over the fact that you think Muslim invasions accentuated the decline - fuck man, after the Gupta's India had it's pan India empire under the Mughals and one of history's finest emperors- Akbar! India's decline was actually arrested by the Mughals. They stopped the invasions from across the Khyber. Stopped internecine war in the country and set up a huge, prosperous, wealthy empire in which science, architecture, art all grew.

>Having access to guns doesn't really put you on par with the full might of European invaders. It seems very unlikely that Indian kings had access to the same kind of economic resources Europeans did (bond markets for instance)

Even as late as 1947- the very minor Nizam of Hyderabad was the amongst the top 5 richest men in the world. A temple in the tiny province of Travancore unearthed a billion dollars worth of assets.

Also your assertion is very very incorrect. According to Angus Maddison (and a lot of other sources on medieval India) India had 1/3rd of the global GDP as late as in the 1700's. All that wealth quite literally belonged to one dynasty. Unless you have some source to back your claim up, I am going to go with what peer reviewed, published sources say. That India was enormously wealthy till the 1700 at the latest.

>We had whimsical kings with very little devolution of power that constantly fought amongst themselves. After the dissolution of the Gupta empire, even the concept of India did not exist, there were just small warring kingdoms. They weren't helpless "peace loving" hindu kings that were unfairly exploited by muslim invaders. After the Guptas there was very little progress in science, technology, engineering and even economics.

You really need to read up on Indian history.

After the fall of the Gupta's you did have a period of flux that lasted about 300 years (disregarding Harsha's brief empire). By the way this flux was only in the North of India. The Cholas dominated and held huge parts of South and East India. In the north (centre) the Chalukyas took over. The Pala's of Bengal controlled most of East India and parts of North India.

If anything these rulers showed great unity when a South Indian empire allied with a Rajastani empire and fought against the Arabs in the Battle of Rajasthan.

If anything till 1600, Europe was in shambles and what you just said would describe Europe more accurately. Italy was...a bunch of 4-5 city states warring against each other. Byzantium was on the decline. Germany was a bunch of 10 major duchies fighting each other. Iberia was being conquered by the Moors and then reconquered by the Catholics.

>After the Guptas there was very little progress in science, technology, engineering and even economics.

This seriously needs to go on /r/badhistory. I am not being insulting - seriously read up on Indian history. I have referred a few books, but if you want I could make more recommendations specific to any period you might want.


>The main problem with your reading of history is that you completely ignore everything after the Guptas, or everything after roughly around the 1st millennium AD. And a failure to acknowledge the inherent rot in Indian civilization for almost 1000 years

Am sorry, but you don't seem to have even a basic understanding of Indian history and you might have to seriously fix that lacuna if you are interested in History that is.

Recommended reading.

• History of India by Hermann Kulke.
  
• Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa: Reflections on the Chola Naval Expeditions
  
• A History of India by Romilla Thapar
  
• The Cholas by Nilakanta Sastri (outdated but good read nonetheless)
  
• Economic History of Medieval India by Irfan Habib
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

>I think I'm relatively well-liked, but I find that I can add/drop friendships on a days notice and not be particularly affected.

This. A thousand times this. By making and breaking social connections so frequently I've gotten really good at the likable and social 'me' I present to people, but I've had so much pain as a result of breaking deep connections that I just don't make them anymore. I feel like I could move today, away from all the friends I've made over the past several years and be just fine starting over. It's refreshing, actually. You get to perfect your persona and meet friends more akin to who you are or are trying to be.

There's a really good book about the psychology of military children which covers this phenomenon and more.

I feel relatively detached from the traditional sub-culture oriented society around where I live. If I like a particular trait of a certain group I pluck it and add it to my own collection, but I feel being a part of a particular group comes with particular stigmas. In high school I wasn't in a particular clique, but migrated freely between them. I try to make friends based on the merit of their character, not because we like the same __.

Sidenote: That book claims we would be happiest in a profession in which we help people on a day to day basis, but don't see the same people repeatedly.

And a face to go with the thoughts.

I'm glad this was interesting! Foucault was pretty aware of religion and what was in the Bible, hence why my account is a bit inaccurate for the sake of simplicity. But Christianity actually plays a pretty prominent role in most of his books. In Sexuality, for example, he is especially interested in the "confession" and how it transforms from a religious idea to an everyday one. I'm not sure what my personal thoughts are on Foucault and whether or not I agree. But if you wanna give him a fair shake I recommend reading one of his books, maybe Discipline and Punishment, because my summary doesn't do him justice.

I'm an outsider to the field also (an enthusiast), but so was Foucault. And I'm doing research in an entirely unrelated field. That said, Foucault has been applied to many other fields. Some are obvious: Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, Gay/Lesbian Studies, etc. But, here are a few examples of fairly recent books that either use him directly or gently draw on him:

The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics by Tania Murray Li: an interesting in-depth study on Indonesia

Only Hope: Coming of Age Under China’s One-Child Policy by Vanessa Fong: another study focusing on a particular state, this type how China's One-Child Policy shapes children and families. She probably draws more on Bourdieu than Foucault, but both are in there.

Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity by Ann Ferguson: for those in the education field, Ferguson analyzes how schools are part of the system creating and reinforcing the idea of the Black, male criminal. Note, it's not that schools perpetuate stereotypes, nor that school policies are discriminatory because of the image black males have in American society. She argues that schools CREATE this identity, straight from Foucault.

Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott: This one is pretty well known (relative to the others) and it's a pretty fun read. He doesn't draw exclusively on Foucault, but it is a big part.

>So is subjugating females, waging wars, genocide, inventing blatantly fictive deities to explain shit, slavery, and what-not.

What I meant to say is that traditions and rituals are universal in human behaviour and are found within all human cultures. With the exception of war and deities, none of the things that you listed above are universal in human behaviour or culture. And even then, the amount and focus of those two things varies greatly across cultures.

>We would've been better.

Define "better". Our emergence of intelligence and sentience is what inevitably gave rise to the things that you're trying to tell everyone is bad for some ungodly reason. Without these things we would have still been wild animals roaming around and struggling to survive. Sure, one could make the argument that humans would be better off stupid and not damaging the planet, but would it really be better? What if another animal became intelligent enough to form sentience and form traditions and cultures? Would they be better or worse than humans? Who knows really.

>It's to argue against one of the many human flaws; humans aren't the embodiment of perfection and have much to improve upon you know?

This is getting into a deeper argument of whether or not humans are inherently good or not. Although I do agree that humans do have flaws, as do all other species on the planet, I do not believe that traditions are one of them. Let's look at how traditions have affected humans throughout the years shall we?

First off, the things that I keep repeating over again (traditions and culture) most likely arrived millions of years ago with the emergence of the first stone tools found 2.5-3 mya, most likely made by Australopithecus, commonly referred to as the Oldowan stone tool culture. Even though these stone tools were extremely simplistic, they spread rather quickly throughout the groups, the knowledge being passed down through generations via parents teaching their children what these are for and how to use them. This doubles as a survival tactic as well as a tradition. Australopithecines most likely lived in small, band-like groups and this knowledge, and tradition, was passed down with the enforcement from members of that band. Already in the Oldowan culture, one can see regional variants beginning to emerge. The reason that this happens is most often to form a sense of community and belonging to the group (referred to as "communitas"), which strengthens social bonds and positive feelings within the group. This trend of making stone tools because other people make them, having regional variants of stone tools because other people do them, continued for millions of years. These traditions then extended into clothing, art, buildings, food, etc. Then with the spread of worship and humans looking to a higher power to explain the world, things like holidays and celebrations came around. These also had the positive effect of bringing a sense of community and closeness with the people around you. Hell, I'm willing to bet that you celebrate things like your birthday, Christmas/Hanukkah, New Years Eve, or any other holidays. True, traditions do occasionally lead to conflict and clashes in opinion, but please tell me what doesn't. It is an accepted risk that hominins took when they decided to live in groups. It has its positives and negatives, just like the opposite situation (living alone and without traditions).

Looking at the evidence found throughout millions of years, the benefits of traditions FAR outweigh any negative repercussions, so I have no idea what you mean when you say that it's a flaw. In that logic everything is a flaw. If that were the case, it wouldn't be a thing today. These things exist for a reason. They help us to survive and thrive. Even with this giant wall of text, you might still think that traditions are useless and have no benefit, for some reason. In that case, fucking practice what you preach. Take all your clothes off, don't celebrate any holidays, go live in a cave, forget English, use no tools, and see how far you get.

Sources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3049103/

Some of my textbooks for my Anthropology major:

https://www.amazon.ca/Anthropology-What-Does-Human-Canadian/dp/0199012865

https://www.amazon.ca/Human-Voyage-Exploring-Biological-Anthropology/dp/0176531912

https://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Humanity-Introduction-Cultural-Anthropology/dp/125981842X

you may want to check out The Anthropology of Freedom if this topic interests you.
are you free if you are born in a giant pit in the ground in which you can do anything you want to, but with no ladder to get out?
true freedom requires the scaffolding necessary to climb to your highest aspirations.
If you love playing the violin and want to become the world's best violin player, you will need someone who wants to make violins, someone who wants to chop wood to provide the violin maker with material, and a violin teacher to give you lessons. without that scaffolding you cannot be free to become the best violin player you can be. not to mention the things everyone needs to be free--freedom from violence or abuse, socialization and social relationships, food, shelter, water, etc... all of which are necessary for you to be alive and psychologically healthy enough to be able to pursue your passions and desires.
like lil wayne says:
"But they talked that freedom at us
And didn't even leave a ladder, damn"

>can you please clarify your ideological position

Sure.

I'm a paleoconservative deep ecologist. This means I adhere to the oldest values of American conservatism and pair them with an interest in environmentalism through a more wholesome design of society.

I moderate /r/new_right because the new right ideas are closest to paleoconservatism in some ways. I tried to write a description of new_right that encompassed all of the ideas that the movement has tossed around.

Beyond that, I think politics is a matter of strategies and not collectivist moral decisions, am fond of libertarian-style free market strategies, and take interest in many things, hence the wide diversity of stuff that I post.

I've learned that on Reddit it's important to ask for people to clarify definitions before ever addressing any question using those terms. If you want me to answer any specific questions, we need a clear definition first agreed on by all parties.

I recommend the following books for anyone interesting in post-1970s conservatism beyond the neoconservative sphere:

• Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue
  
• Pat Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower
  
• Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies
  
• Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot
  
• Jared Diamond, Collapse
  
• Mark Steyn, America Alone
  
• Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
  
• Bruce Charlton, Thought Prison: The Fundamentalist Nature of Political Correctness
  
  Other than that, I'm pretty much a mainstream Republican. Not all links I post constitute endorsement, such as this fascinating article.

In addition to the photos from the TED talk OP shared, there is an older TED talk by Robert Neuwirth on squatter cities.

http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_neuwirth_on_our_shadow_cities

His book, Shadow Cities, is pretty interesting. Not heavily academic and he does miss a lot, though his observations and stories on the cities he goes to are the best part. One of my favorite ones to read about was the Turkish community of Sultanbeyli. A small squatter area that transformed and if I remember right, created it's own infrastructure.

Edit: Link to book. http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Cities-Billion-Squatters-Urban/dp/0415933196

Edit 2: Because I get too excited about the subject and go off on others, a really great book to dig deeper into the subject of urban studies is Urban Life: Readings in the Anthropology of the City by Gmelch, Kemper, and Zenner. Read it for one of my graduate courses recently and loved it. Looks at life in cites on different levels, so it's not just squatter cities. One of my favorite parts was on migration and Mexican communities in the United States.
http://www.amazon.com/Urban-Life-Readings-Anthropology-City/dp/1577666348/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397186036&sr=1-1&keywords=Urban+Life

Check out this book. It covers a lot of basic topics (ranging from vegetarianism to reincarnation to meditation to oneness and inner divinity) about Hinduism, and might help get you pointed in the right direction.

As for my attempt at answering your questions:
>Is it required to believe in a supernatural force/God?

No! I sure don't. I do believe in the the atman, the inner divinity held and shared by all people and things, which exists as the brahman, the oneness shared by the universe. I am not truly different from you; we share the same broad hopes, fears, and struggles in our quest to answer life's questions. So deities like Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva (and the hundreds of other little-g gods in traditional Hinduism) are simply manifestations of ideals of this common atman we worship to remind ourselves of our duties and morals. I don't believe in a big-g God that created everything. The scientific method answers those questions for me. Hinduism is a method I follow to answer the types of questions that may fall outside the scope of science.

> Do most followers believe in the stories as a literal interpretation? Was it originally intended to be?

Depends on who you talk to. My mother does, my father might, and I don't. If you go to a village in rural India you'll probably find most of them believe the stories literally. Can we ever really know for sure, given the millennium-spanning history of Hinduism? Probably not. They do contain excellent, generally timeless examples of what is considered good human behavior, though. Obviously times, morals, and cultures change, but I think characters like Rama or Arjuna or Krishna are still examples of ideals to look to.

>What is the purpose of prayer?

I think this is a question best suited for you to answer yourself. If/when you pray, why do (or don't) you do it?

The fourth question I'm not going to answer, because I honestly can't help you there. I have a rudimentary understanding, but considering I don't meditate regularly, if at all, I'm just as ignorant on the subject as you.

Alright, I'll expand. Hope you bear with me, this might be long and slightly tangential.

Basically, most of our strong beliefs are not something that we inspect regularly in our conscious mind. They are rather part of a general worldview that seems natural to us and are not given much thought ever. These beliefs more or less fit the worldview of our surrounding social environment, and that makes them relatively invisible to us. Not only that, but they often get boxed with what we perceive to be an objective perspective on reality. It's not a belief if it's reality, right? The beliefs that we do notice tend to be marginal beliefs that are more centered around our own experience of reality versus that of those surrounding us.

So for example, an American (typing with broad strokes here) middle manager may have a very different view of how one should build a career in a productive manner than an American retail worker playing music with his band on the weekends. This perspective on careers will appear to be a strong belief they both have because it may clash when they interact with each other, and the intense interactions may end up crystallizing these beliefs into what you'd call "strong beliefs", which then become an important part of a person's ideas when evaluating potential social relationships. But these beliefs about professional undertakings are actually very marginal compared to topics such as whether or not everyone can or should be happy, or whether or not people are generally trustworthy due to their nature. Human nature is perceived (wrongly) as something static by many, many people (especially in the US) and it affects policy-making, charity-giving, business practices, etc. The idea that human nature is static will change how we see redemption, how we see economic policies, how we even see intimate relationships. The belief that people hold free will will affect how we judge criminals, how we judge people who wronged us (I won't start on the topic of betrayal but god that word irks me), etc.

Now how we build our personal worldview and beliefs (strong or otherwise) is complex, so might as well take the time to suggest further reading on the matter:

Conrad Phillip Kottak's introductory book on Anthropology is well-respected, and I would recommend it to have a better overview of how different societies view the world quite differently, and how the local culture's worldview easily becomes one's own without actually realizing that it's happening. It's called enculturation - the learning of one's culture by living through it and interacting with others in it - and tends to be invisible to most people, despite its impact on a large amount of our beliefs.

As a small example of this but one I find rather valuable, there is a documentary on India's Ladakh region, called Ancient Futures - Learning from Ladakh, in which you can see the anthropologist interacting with women from the local communiy, and talking about how she can't really sew. And the women are just surprised because to them, you learn by practice, simply. There's no acceptance that someone can't learn to use the techniques they're using because they literally don't know anyone who can't sew. As long as you practice and sit with someone who knows how, you'll learn. And it's fascinating because in our culture, there is a prevalent belief that some people just can't learn functional understanding of certain things. Seems obvious, right? Not everyone can be an astrophysicist, not everyone can be a competent engineer. But what if that was wrong? And there's actually ridiculously interesting research on how this worldview can affect women in math classes, as well as young blacks in academic grading. People take all of this for granted but it is a massive component in how we view social policies.

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's researches in social epidemiology have done wonders in exploring the impacts of socioeconomic inequality on a massive amount of social factors, such as criminality, self-esteem, academic performance, etc. And this is only for one (albeit an important) factor in societies; how unequal the distribution of income is. 400 scientific articles later, one finds a clear trend; socioeconomic inequality has massive impact on things that you would never think of. They affect how people trust each other within a given society, because larger differences in socioeconomic circumstances lead to more conflict and different subcultures having trouble interacting with each other because their reality is so different. This seems beside the point but it really isn't; it strongly affects how the average person thinks others around him/her are worthy of trust. It has consequences on how we relate to each other and how we see the average stranger. This is not something we can inspect easily without knowing about it firsthand, so it's a "hidden" belief that is crazy in its impact on our lives.

And these factors all relate to general beliefs about others and the world, in an external manner. We also have trouble understanding a lot of what goes on inside our own decision-making process, which most people think does belong to them. Some researches have shown that you can impact someone's perspective on a stranger they just met by priming them with negative words or unpleasant experiences prior to the meeting, or by making them suffer through prolonged mental problem-solving. A paper studying the chances of getting paroled by parole judges observed that you had the most chance right after they had eaten, and the least before noon because they became more impatient towards inmates when their blood sugar was low. Other studies have shown that if you test cognitive reflexes for racism, most people who do not think that they are indeed racist will find that they have a ton more prejudice than they originally thought. This doesn't register as much when thinking about how you consciously view the world but it shows when writing or interacting with others without being focused on your own thoughts. This is probably one of the biggest reasons why you see minorities struggling so much to be represented in mainstream culture, except for the token black guy or the "faire-valoir" woman.

I'm written too much already but I strongly recommend Daniel Kahnemann's book Thinking, Fast and Slow to better understand what cognitive sciences have taught us about how our thoughts are affected by our brain's physiology and our prior experiences. I am serious in saying this; there is no way this book will not be useful to you in some way, no matter what kind of life you lead. If you have limited time or money, he gives this lecture which is kind of alright to summarize his book. I stress this man particularly because he is a legend. The man is reasonable, intelligent, and has more than three decades of solid research to back what he says.

I wanted to mention questions of free will more because they kinda relate to this whole thing but I'm gonna stop here and just recommend you check out Sam Harris' lecture on Free Will on youtube. I don't agree with much of what the guy says on other topics but he summarizes things well in that specific lecture.

Sorry again for writing such a wall of text. I hope that was worth the time to read it.

My advice, bar the obvious morally correct advice others have given:

• Talk about the weather too much. If you live in LA this may be hard to vary the conversation but if you are wanting to be truly British then you need to talk about the weather. Preferably wish for colder weather when it is hot and vice versa.
  
• Ensure you queue up correctly. A queue is a line in your terms. Never call it a line if you are British. A British person knows the exact order of who arrived at a queue (whether an actual 'line' like a bus stop or an informal queue like a bar). Never disobey the order. If someone jumps in front of you then you should be planning revenge.
  
• Recognise these accents (there is no such thing as a normal British accent): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dABo_DCIdpM
  
• Consider purchasing this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-be-British-Collection/dp/0952287013
  
• Argue about the definition of dinner and tea.
  
• Know how to make a good fry up.
  
  Please let us know how this goes. Maybe over tea sometime.
  
  EDIT: To remain convincing you should also be out of bed by now. :)

A great book is People of the Rainbow: A Nomadic Utopia. Rainbow Gatherings have been happening since 1972 after a spiritual calling for a community of people wanting to shift the societal paradigm was felt after the Vortex I Festival (inadvertently created by Nixon!)

I've been to the Rainbow Gathering a couple times and was attracted to it initially because of its egalitarian philosophy based on interconnected wholeness of all living systems and likewise reflecting this in their actions. Of course, there are takers, so-called "drainbows" that are basically street kids that had messed up childhoods and ran away from home or became vagabonds for some other reason who are not living the Rainbow ideals (there are exceptions though and I've actually camped with the so-called "dirty kids" that weren't bad people and they definitely weren't hippies).

Overall, they're a really nice group of people. Note that if you want to come, alcohol is forbidden inside the Gathering but at the Front Gate there is a camp called A-camp where you can drink to your heart's content if that's what you like to do.

Everyone is welcome, as long as they're not harming others which is a pretty basic rule for being a functioning human being, which is why the Rainbow Family says anyone with a bellybutton is welcome.

Also, if you see a white person that has dreads and is wearing tribal-esque clothes it doesn't necessarily mean they're a hippy...they could also be a pirate. you'll know what I mean when you see it.

NOTE: You'll have to come by my dorm to pick any of these up (its on campus, and isn't inconveniently located, but I don't want to share where I live unnecessarily. I'll be on campus starting on the 5th of September. Please pay in cash, and no bills larger than twenties.

• Selling: The Call to Write (John Trimbur), Brief Fifth Edition
  
  ISBN-13: 978-0-495-89753-8
  
  ISBN-10: 0-495-89753-1
  
  2010 Paperback Version
  
  Amazon Link- It is the Second Paperback Version on the list(http://www.amazon.com/Call-Write-Brief-John-Trimbur/dp/0495897531/ref=tmm_pap_img_popover?ie=UTF8&qid=1314814988&sr=1-1)
  
  Price Range:$30-$50
  
  Class: ENGL 3301- I'm pretty sure this is the textbook for all Advanced Writing in the Discipline Courses (or at the very least, for the ones that are not for a specific discipline.
  
  
  
• Mirror for Humanity: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Conrad Phillip Kottak) Seventh Edition
  
  ISBN-13: 978-0-07-353104-5
  
  ISBN-10: 0-07-353104-9
  
  2009 Paperback Version
  
  Amazon Link-(http://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Humanity-seventh-Text-Only/dp/B005GAF4IC/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314816064&sr=1-2)
  
  Price Range:$30-$50
  
  Class: ANTH 1101-The course was an Honors course titled People and Cultures. A new edition of this book appears to be about to release on the 16th of September- I doubt the differences will be major, and given that classes begin on the 7th, its possible any courses using this text will use the current edition.
  
  
  
• Animal behavior (John Alcock) 9th Edition
  
  ISBN-13: 978-0-87893-225-2
  
  ISBN-10: NA
  
  2009 Paperback Version
  
  Amazon Link-(http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Behavior-Evolutionary-Approach-Ninth/dp/0878932259/ref=tmm_pap_img_popover?ie=UTF8&qid=1314816336&sr=1-1)
  
  Price Range:$20-$40
  
  Class: BIOL 2297
  
  *Notes: On purchasing this book, I was informed that unlike other texts, I could not return it to the University bookstore. I have kept it in good condition, but it is not designed as sturdily as most textbooks.
  
  
  
• Living Ethics: An Introduction (Michael Minch & Christine Weigel)
  
  ISBN-13: 978-0-495-09023-6
  
  ISBN-10: 0-495-09023-9
  
  2009 Paperback Version
  
  Amazon Link-(http://www.amazon.com/Living-Ethics-Michael-Minch/dp/0495090239/ref=tmm_pap_title_popover?ie=UTF8&qid=1314816795&sr=1-1)
  
  Price Range:$10-$30
  
  Class: PHIL 1102
  
  *Notes: A newer edition has been released. The Professor I had this class with does not seem like the type to demand the newest edition, and I wouldn't be surprised if he intentionally requested that students have the older edition. However, it may not be what you're looking for. If another Professor is teaching it, or this book is required for another course, good luck to you.

/u/nagCopaleen does a great job answering this but I thought I would add some additional insight. I have a personal theory that science-oriented anthropologists feel threatened when some of their colleagues begin to present work in more humanities or arts-based delivery systems. I feel that Taussig falls in this latter category. I personally love the guy but I can also see how anthropologists who are far more scientific in how they publish would be soured by how he presents his research.

Personally, I have run into some Old Guard anthropologists who feel that Visual Anthropology is "nonsense" and that without published ethnographic tomes, you are not a true anthropologist. This isn't to say that I'm against writing (because I'm not); I just don't think that it is the only way to present anthropological research. Much like Taussig's writing style, film and photography seem to hold non-academics attention a lot more than traditional ethnography. As was already said, I think that ethnography is sometimes pursued as a strictly scientific endeavor which is a sentiment I whole-heartedly disagree with.

In terms of gonzo anthropology (a term I love since I am also a big fan of HST), you should check out this article: Towards Gonzo Anthropology: Ethnography as Cultural Performance. I think you'll dig it.

I'm not sure if you've heard of David Graeber but you should definitely check out his work. He takes a very gonzo approach to his research. Forgive me if you are already familiar with him but you should check out Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and Direct Action: An Ethnography. Those two publications really influenced me as an undergraduate.

I really liked The Hadza: Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania by Frank Marlowe. It's about the modern day Hadza, who are, as you might have guessed by the title, hunter gatherers. The author tries to gain insight into what early humans might have been like by studying the Hadza, while still being very clear that the Hadza are not early humans. It mainly focuses on physical anthropology and spends a lot of time on details, like caloric intake per day, the specific species of berries they eat, and average skull size in the population. But you also get an in-depth look at the everyday lives of this modern hunter gatherer society. The author also analyzes their behavior through the lens of evolution, so you also get a good introduction to human evolution.

I can't really delve into any detail, but basically archaeology didn't really become a thing until the mid-19th century. Antiquarianism was around for about 100 years before that, but it was really just about collecting interesting things as historical relics, and not about scientific inquiry or trying to understand the past through archaeological sites and artifacts. It's not that people did not care about archaeological sites, but rather that they just saw them as ruins or old buildings and did not really see them as important places for learning about who and what came before. They may not have even recognized them as ancient places at all.

The case in Italy must surely be different because the history of the Roman empire was well known by 1700 and people must have known that these ruins were built during the Roman Empire, but I don't know much about Italian archaeology or its history. In other parts of the world places that are now considered archaeological sites probably were not seen as anything special and were not recognized as the ruins and artifacts of societies that came thousands of years before. At least not in Western thought; I can't speak for how non-Western people viewed such ruins.

I've also heard that until the 19th century there was no true concept of the passage of time in Western thought. There was the Biblical age, the Classical age, and the modern age; that was it, the world would then end. People of course experienced lifetimes and knew that time passed, but there was no sense of any real change or that a stone celt was actually made by a pre-Biblical culture 8,000 years ago. That concept of long-term change and abandonment just didn't exist, and certainly the concept of deep time did not exist (until the 19th century people knew that the Earth was ~6000 years old). I find this concept very hard to wrap my head around, but that's because I've grown up in a world where deep time exists and things are always changing.

A great source for all this is Bruce Trigger's "A History of Archaeological Thought". The first two or three chapters go over the early development of antiquarianism and archaeology, and how Western thought changed to allow for deep time and the recognition of non-Western pasts (the rest of the book is about how thought within the discipline has changed over the 20th century). Trigger was a true master of archaeology and although this book is long and kind of dense, it is also very accessible to a non-specialist.

You might also find Barbara Bender's "Stonehenge: Making Space (Materializing Culture)" interesting. It is about Stonehenge, obviously, and about how the public perceives and uses Stonehenge. She talks about the history of Stonehenge as a monument, too, including some descriptions of it in the 12th or 13th century A.D. I can't remember exactly what she said about how it was viewed then, but I remember it being very interesting and pretty different from how it is perceived today.

That sounds glorious, and I feel like I need to get this book for her. And yeah, I can imagine it'll throw you off-kilter a bit, but they do blend pretty well

Edit: Is it this one? http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-be-British-Collection/dp/0952287013/ref=sr_1_2/280-8945991-2670000?ie=UTF8&qid=1449418516&sr=8-2&keywords=how+to+be+british

So for my undergrad thesis, I studied the correlates between hemochromatosis and multiple sclerosis from an anthropological lens, and basically spent two semesters writing a 50 page literature review on the topic. I think undergrad theses should stick to a literature review, as if you want to carry that research on into your masters you have a strong base to work with, and if not you have done serious research into a topic, giving you a plethora of skills that can be transferred into any masters, regardless if that masters is thesis or course based.

Also, based on what you're interested in, check this book out. I read it for a class, and I think it would connect really well with what you are looking to do.

Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Approach https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0199797080/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_uqNAyb0JRT5N4

This gets asked every so often, and these are the books I usually recommend for someone wanting to know what's up with archaeology. Start at the top, and keep going down if you're interested. There are many more, but I like these.

• Rathje's Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage
  
• Deetz's In Small Things Forgotten
  
• Trigger's A History of Archaeological Thought
  
• Johnson's Archaeological Theory

In general, the concept of communal property is pervasive among egalitarian societies. Most mobile foragers or hunter-gatherers are or were egalitarian, as are many horticultural societies. However, there's a lot of variation. Typically there are complex social leveling mechanisms in place that prevent any individual from collecting too much wealth (including material and social). For example, when a hunter gets a kill, depending on the tool and method used and present company, there may be different culturally proscribed methods for distribution. Egalitarianism, putatively characterized the majority of human evolution but is hardly representative of all human culture. Robert Kelly's new edition of The Foraging Spectrum provides a nice review. Also, Boehm's Hierarchy in the Forest is a good introduction to theories on egalitarianism.

Hi, reddit! I'm pleased to hear about those tingles!

If you liked my video, perhaps try my new book: Memetics: Memes and the Science of Cultural Evolution.

...or my Memetics web site.

...or my Memetics blog.

I'm not sure of anything like what you're looking for, but Trigger's History of Archaeological Thought is a pretty decent all around guide to the development of archaeological theory, though it tends to be more US-focused. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0521600499

Here's another good one: http://www.amazon.ca/History-Archaeological-Thought-Bruce-Trigger/dp/0521600499

It has a large section on post-processualism in reference to other paradigms of archaeological thought. Good book to own for archaeologists in general.

You have to see the consequences.

If the division of labour is universally across all world societies sex-determined (e.g., men predominantly hunt, men predominantly fish, while females predominantly wave), then you have either very deep cultural roots for this that is shared by all human societies, but then it doesn't explain why the division of labour is such even when societies were significantly transformed and also why something like this wasn't changed by some disruptor. Another explanation might be that it is something formed by pressure in certain environments/conditions and the traditional society is inhabited predominantly such environment/conditions. But again, this doesn't explain the range of different conditions and you would have to explain this universal thing. Lastly, you can say that there is some sexual determinant, as suggested in paper and in other literature, this can be pregnancy and associated risk aversion, hormone levels and thus different behaviour and so on. Lastly, you can compare it with other organisms where you can clearly see different sex strategies and sexually determined type of behaviour, which often stems from the simple fact that female is the macrogametic sex and male microgametic sex and from this, you have different reproduction and parenting strategies.

Also, unless you have some new information that disprove old, the age of research is inconsequential. And this field didn't dramatically changed. No new information was added to ethnographic atlas so if you did the analysis now, you would get the same result.

For more "up to date" information, you can look at https://www.amazon.com/Lifeways-Hunter-Gatherers-Foraging-Spectrum/dp/1107607612

If you are interested in Archaeology, a History of Archaeological Thought by Brice Trigger is a good go-to.

The Hadza are a pretty good example of this. They are a hunter-gatherer group in Tanzania. There were multiple attempts by the government throughout the 1960s and 1970s to resettle them and instate a formal education system. These attempts failed, to say the least. They are mostly living the same way as before, hunting and gathering, though now they wear more clothing and use aluminum pots.

For more info about them (their society is beyond interesting), I'd highly recommend "The Hadza: Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania" by Frank Marlowe, who is the undisputed expert scholar on this group.

The best anthropology book ever written uses the term.

https://www.amazon.com/Yanomamo-Fierce-Studies-Cultural-Anthropology/dp/0030623286

This looks like it might be promising:

https://www.amazon.com/Memetics-Memes-Science-Cultural-Evolution/dp/1461035260

You can download a free sample if you have the Kindle app.

Alternately, there's a newer book with a similar title by the same author (A Flag Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of National Symbols), for which you can download a free sample on Google Play.

https://www.amazon.com/Worth-Dying-Power-Politics-Flags-ebook/dp/B01G43GEA6

It's an engaging read, if perhaps a little simplistic, that very gives a whilstle stop tour of how flags around the world have come to represent ideas to unite under or against. It goes a little into the technical aspects of flags but primarily focuses on their cultural importance.

This is kind of half correct. Or half wrong depending on how you look at it. The Classic example is Napoleon Chagnon's description of the Yanomamo

Hunter Gatherer societies generally do have considerably more leisure and social/gender equality. It is important to understand while there is significantly more gender equality, that doesn't mean that there are not strict gender roles. The !Kung Live together peacefully, and equally without formal hierarchy. Violence is generally hit or miss.

Interestingly, women in Japan also do not get many menopausal symptoms that we recognize in the West. Many menopausal symptoms could also be a hysterical thing.

Source

I would suggest The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum. It is very comprehensive, informative, and readable.

http://www.amazon.com/Direct-Action-Ethnography-David-Graeber/dp/1904859798/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323468158&sr=8-1

When it comes to archaeological theory, Bruce Trigger is your man.

https://www.amazon.com/Yanomamo-Fierce-Studies-Cultural-Anthropology/dp/0030623286