Reddit mentions: The best customs & traditions books

Okay here we go:

Indians of the Pacific Northwest: From the Coming of the White Man to the Present Day. General information!

Looking At Indian Art Of The Northwest Coast by Hilary Stewart, which has a lot of the common symbolism you see in many coastal tribes. Many other useful books by this woman. Here's her Amazon page. Some of her books are kinda pricy but there are other affordable ones out there!

Indian Relics Of The Pacific Northwest by SG Seaman. Some visual information on tools used by indigenous tribes, dry but good info.

Art In The Life of the Northwest Coast Indian by Erna Gunther. This one is a little more in depth!

Totem poles were a distinct and important part of many NW coast tribes. Lots of books out there on their function and purpose, definitely something to research.

The potlatch was another extremely important aspect of PNW indigenous lives. Some info here and here, but also lots of research papers for free on the internet.

Salmon was a vital food resource for hundreds of tribes. They fished along the Columbia, Pacific, and other major waterways. Here and here is more info.


Indians of the North Pacific Coast by Tom McFeat.

Mythology is a must! There might be some online collections but here and here are a couple books.

Tales of the Northwest is a classic!

Please check out the Vancouver Museum of Anthropology website. They have TONS of information on a variety of indigenous tribes, with a focus on NW coastal tribes. If you ever have a reason to go to Vancouver you MUST visit this beautiful, beautiful museum.

The Seattle Public Library (also a must visit, just a gorgeous library) has an extensive local history section.

Once you've read a couple books and have a better understanding of what you want to study, it's actually much easier to pick a certain tribe or area and find more information that way. Tons and tons of books out there on the Haida, Kwakiutl, Salish, Chinook, etc. I would highly recommend contacting people who study or write about these tribes! For the most part professors and authors love to talk about their work, or can direct you to other resources.

My final recommendation is if you want to write a fictional book about a PNW tribe, please read some fiction out there already written by indigenous Americans! This will help you more intimately understand the emotion and history that is part of these ancient cultures.

Anyway, don't feel too bogged down by all the info. Pick a subject or two you want to learn about and do some internet research before you buy a book. I don't know what kind of access your library might have, but maybe you could rent a few books through them.

Lastly, if you ever have a chance to come visit the PNW, please do! It is absolutely beautiful out here and unlike many parts of the world. It's cool and rainy so we have an extraordinary abundance of wild flora. So many must visit places: Vancouver, Mt Hood National Park, Vancouver Island, Olympic National Park, the San Juan Islands, the Columbia Gorge, Gold Coast, Oregon Coast, Haystack Rock, Redwood Forest - look up any of those and you will start to get an understanding of how indigenous peoples connected with their gorgeous natural environment. You may also start to notice that many of the pictures that appear in r/earthporn are from the West Coast. It's damn pretty out here.

Cheers, mate, and hit me up if you ever make it out here!

I was 9 through 19 in the 1980s and unlike many others here, I do get why they are being "romanticized," if we take that word fairly loosely. I think a lot of it has to do with the 80s being perceived at the time as the ultra-modern decade, almost the science fiction decade.

You see, in the 1970s, technology was ramping up but it was more in the background. Some few people may have had computers at their work, but they were mainframes and were sort of in the back warrens, not where Sally the Secretary could see them. But most still used paper files. Almost no one had a computer or computer-like device in their homes.

In the late 70s, that began to topple. Home video games started to show up, like Telstar. Arcade games started to happen, like Pong. The first "kit" computers in the home. But it was slow. At the same time, movies, music, and TV started to get more impressive, "modern" special effects. Some of that had to do with the Moog synth in the 70s, then the first Star Wars. TV was lagging a bit here, though. Music was held back to a good degree by the Disco Era which was very powerful and was its own little island in time (and a fun one).

By 1980, I think people felt like "OK, let's do this! Space Age is on!" and everyone went nuts. Music got ridiculously synthy to the point that the whole band was just a synth. TV jumped in pretty soon after, with a show like original Battlestar Galactica hitting in 1980. So things were very science-fictional on TV, but also that pulled in general fantasy or absurd, unbelievable stuff. You had Buck Rogers, ALF, Manimal, Misfits of Science, Automan, Mr. Wizard, Mr. Smith (an orangutan politician in D.C.), The Phoenix (ancient astronaut with sun powers), Wizards and Warriors, The Powers of Matthew Star, Max Headroom, Knight Rider, The Greatest American Hero, Starman, Ray Bradbury Theater, Twilight Zone 80s reboot, V, Voyagers! and others happening mostly within about five weird years.

But you couldn't have music be all synthy and TV like that and have the clothes drab. They had to look ultra-modern, too. So you had DayGlo everywhere, or more plastic-looking materials like whatever parachute pants were made out of. You had angular looking clothing, like thin ties and shoulder pads and V-cut shapes. Even stirrup pants for girls had this angular, future society feeling, sort of. Then the hair had to be angular for guys, with mousse and gel spiking things up so guys looked like a detective from the future.

Sounds impressive, but we're not done. You have the launch of MTV, which was its own whole crazy phenomenon. They were able to be more experimental back then, so you'd have DEVO doing "We're Through Being Cool" and, even weirder, "Peek A Boo" which had laughing devils heads ("Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!") being circled by dancing Tylenol pills or something. In general, MTV was this bizarre hodgepodge, with total cheesy pop followed by hard-to-categorize stuff. But it was just huge.

Then, all this home tech starts to roll in and hard. The first wave of home video games! Atari 2600 is massive; it has its own magazine. Then you have this war of companies in this domain: Intellivision, Colecovision, others. This is all before the Nintendo even hits. At the same time, arcade games go absolutely bonkers and blow-up to the point that songs like "Pac Man Fever" are getting mass market airplay. Arcades become a "third place" for teens when they really need one. As if this wasn't enough, you get home computers for the first time, and the BBS Era, and, and...it's a lot, trust me, it was life-changing.

Home video watching hits, with the VHS tape and that's beyond massive. Home video recording happens. At the same time, cable TV blows up: HBO hits its stride, and new network competitors do, too. Prior to this, TV was basically three networks and a few affiliates. Now, most people had 50 channels to fill. A lot of that filler was 80s cheese, and you got the modern-looking but still bad feel of chroma-key, genlock, bad green screen, and other video effects.

While this is happening, movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark are hitting in theaters and Spielberg is hitting his stride with cultural steamrollers like E.T. Early 80s, for me, really are a special time for movies. I really don't understand it fully, but the movies were quirky but had heart. That would have to be its own whole post, though. If you want a real 1980s feeling movie, try After Hours; the sense of alienation, cheese, and darkness that only that time could do quite like that.

All this is just the pop-cultural froth, and that's what people are romanticizing. In the background, in the real world, we had the Cold War and we were all afraid we'd be killed by an exploding ICBM. The crack and AIDS epidemics. New York City was filthy and its no wonder Escape From New York came out then. But for those of us lucky to avoid the worst of the 1980s, safe in our suburban bubbles, it was a kind of quirky, innocent-in-its-way time.

Well he actually goes a step further, a good deal of Graeber's anthropological work goes towards examining alternatives to capitalist and state capitalist economic arrangements. Gift economies, markets, etc.

His anthropological work shows that there are different origins for currency but I think you might be interested in stuff like "Towards An Anthropological Theory of Value"

>This innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are in a sense necessarily revolutionary projects: He attempts to synthesize the best insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, arguing that these figures represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical processes, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making, which far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms.

Or some of the work done by his forebears like Mauss' "The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies"

>Since its first publication in English in 1954, The Gift, Marcel Mauss's groundbreaking study of the relation between forms of exchange and social structure, has been acclaimed as a classic among anthropology texts.

>A brilliant example of the comparative method, ?The Gift? presents the first systematic study of the custom—widespread in primitive societies from ancient Rome to present-day Melanesia—of exchanging gifts. The gift is a perfect example of what Mauss calls a total social phenomenon, since it involves legal, economic, moral, religious, aesthetic, and other dimensions. He sees the gift exchange as related to individuals and groups as much as to the objects themselves, and his analysis calls into question the social conventions and economic systems that had been taken for granted for so many years. In a modern translation, introduced by distinguished anthropologist Mary Douglas, ?The Gift ?is essential reading for students of social anthropology and sociology.

> I'll add I'm also single and without dependents

Given that and your location, if you're also a college student, you're basically at the absolute peak of American sociability.

> I'm not so sure about measurements of very personal relationships throughout history.

You could be right. I've read a study or two that show that circles of friendship are shrinking, and books like Bowling Alone and The Great Good Place discuss the issue, but it could just be wrapped up nostalgia in disguise.

> most Americans are urbanized.

That's true and will, I think, ultimately be good news but keep in mind that "urban" here is a pretty broad term that includes the sparse suburbia a lot of Americans live in.

> Besides turning back the clock, do you think that urbanization will continue to worsen or improve our social opportunities

Everything seems to swing back and forth. Since the industrial revolution, we've swung towards depersonalization to some degree. As we move towards an information economy I think we have the opportunity to swing back some.

> or is that question too broad/undetermined/dauntingly huge to broach?

I don't think any question is too huge to broach, you just need to approach it with similarly huge solutions. In this case, honestly, I think the problem might be solved for us. If the energy crisis gets worse, people will start clustering back together for practical reasons, and I think that will lead to more human contact.

Things like new urbanism are positive signs too, but I don't know if it's a fad that will pass. (At the very least, the real estate bubble popping has put a hurt on it. Orlando is full of empty condos right now.)

A bad economy is actually good news for this too: a new TV and a big house in the suburbs is pretty expensive compared to a smaller home and having friends over for Monopoly.

Well, then I absolutely recommend starting to build your library with some of the best works. There is something about turning off all the screens and sitting quietly with only your Self, and the words. You can highlight, mark up, dog-ear etc your own book. Work with it, love it, and begin to live it.

I like to keep a book handy near my bed side; quietly reading a bit before bed each night to a night light. This quiet time right before bed helps the ideas sink more deeply into the subconscious mind.

May I Also Suggest:

Words to the Wise by Manly P Hall.

Self Unfoldment by Manly P Hall

These are a little rarer as hall's books are often out of print. I have found them to be incredibly helpful to building a good foundation to grow from. Study these three books (with the Kybalion) and you will have a comprehensive introduction to occult philosophy, and be ready to venture in most directions with an understanding of the Principles involved.

Thanks, Wizard!

That Bushnell book appears hard to get. The library has an English version, but only for in-library use. Used copies are for sale... a little pricey for a book I don't know much about. I'll consider it for sure. Same for Puyana's book. Found only one possible English version copy on Amazon--looks to be bilingual judging by the cover. What do you think, worth the plunge?

Can't find an English version of Yunis's book.

Found La vendedora de rosas on YouTube - thanks! Very much looking forward to seeing it.

I requested Bolivar y yo from the library. That looks fantastic.

I guess my only outstanding question is whether you think Puyana's book is really worth getting. It's 400 pages, but maybe half is in English, half in Spanish

Wikipedia on Marcel Mauss and 'The Gift':

> Marcel Mauss (10 May 1872 – 10 February 1950) was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology.

> Today, he is perhaps better recognised for his influence on the latter discipline; particularly with respect to his analyses of topics such as magic, sacrifice and gift exchange in different cultures around the world. Mauss had a significant influence upon the founder of structural anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss. His most famous book is The Gift (1923).

> The book is the foundation of social theories of reciprocity and gift exchange. [In it, Mauss] builds a case for a foundation to human society based on collective (vs. individual) exchange practices. In so doing, he refutes the English tradition of liberal thought, such as utilitarianism, as distortions of human exchange practices. He concludes by speculating that social welfare programs may be recovering some aspects of the morality of the gift within modern market economies.

> The Gift has been very influential in anthropology, where there is a large field of study devoted to reciprocity and exchange. It has also influenced philosophers, artists and political activists, including Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida and more recently the work of David Graeber.


More on Amazon

> If you have sources for the things you've posed here, I'd be glad to read those too.

See below on this thread for some examples.

For the history of tea in the West, the authoritative source for a long time was Ukers, All About Tea, which is fabulously expensive but you might be able to get a copy via interlibrary loan. That's how I finally got it.

As to the comment about blends and why they predominate in consumer markets, I don't have anything handy but probably there is some commentary in Ukers.

[EDIT] I see that you have already found one of the Zhang papers, and you link it from his blog. You will find a lot of historical information there: I suspect he is the "expert on tea history" that you have been in contact with, and is a much more credible authority than anyone you are likely to find here when it comes to familiarity with Chinese-language sources on tea history. If you will read his whole blog you will learn a lot more than by asking question here.

As additional support for /u/Selderij's point above, there is a copy there of probably the earliest description of gongfu technique in English, which was written in 1937. It includes the remark

> The above is a strict description of preparing a special kind of tea as I have seen it in my native province, an art generally unknown in North China. In China generally, tea pots used are much larger, and the ideal color of tea is a clear, pale, golden yellow, never dark red like English tea.

John Blofeld was an English traveller in China during the early 20th century: in the 1980s, near the end of his life, he wrote a book on Chinese tea culture that included possibly the next description of gongfu published in English (sorry I can't reproduce it, I don't have a copy anymore). He also makes it clear that this was an obscure regional style. If you want a description of how tea was consumed in various parts of China during the early Republic (which would have been like the late Qing) you could do a lot worse than to read that.

The Great Good Place was a great read on the topic. The first place I remember reading about the Third Place and was fascinated by the topic.

I'll have to pick up Suburban Nation, as it seems to be an interesting take on the subject.

it goes down roughly every labor day weekend. The cost depends on how much you want to make of your journey, but tickets are around $200. You have to consider how you will get to the desert and how you will survive once you're there. radical self-sufficiency is one of the major tenants of the festival. I suggest doing some research before you go. It might look like its all fun and games, but people get critically hurt/die out there. I suggest this book: http://www.amazon.com/This-Burning-Man-American-Underground/dp/1932100865/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310247737&sr=8-1 and their website is inspiring too: http://burningman.org/

Congratulations! I know what a big step that is, as I've been in the same boat. Books are the best way to become informed. Check out books by:

• Christopher Hitchens - God Is Not Great & The Portable Atheist
  
  
• Stephen Hawking - The Grand Design & A Briefer History of Time
  
  
• Richard Dawkins - The Greatest Show on Earth
  
  
• Carl Sagan - The Demon Haunted World
  
  
• Sam Harris - The Moral Landscape & The End of Faith
  
  
• Richard Panek - The 4 Percent Universe
  
  
• Robert Ingersoll - Some Mistakes of Moses
  
  
• Viktor Frankl - Man's Search for Meaning
  
  
• Sean Caroll - The Making of the Fittest
  
  
• Spencer Wells - Deep Ancestry
  
  
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Infidel
  
  
• Alan Watts - The Way of Zen
  
  Also check out the video series Why I am no longer a creationist.
  
  The more you know, the more confident you will be.

No problem, it is a fascinating topic. I don't know what to suggest, there's way way too many books.
Really top of my head, any anthropologist here will probably crucify me for forgetting something, I would suggest the following :

• Mead - Sex and Temperement
  
  
• Levi-Strauss - Savage Mind
  
  
• Descola - Spears of Twilight
  
  
• Mauss- The Gift
  
  
• Malinowski - Argonauts of the Pacific
  
  
• Clastres - Society against the State
  
  
• Levi-Strauss - Tristes Tropiques
  
  Some are more or less technical and harder to read without a background, I remember Malinoswki, Descola and Mead to be fairly easy to read. Tristes Tropiques is also very easy, it's like a novel. Mauss, Clastres and Savage Mind can be a bit more "advanced" but they are very readable.
  
  EDIT : Fun fact about something similar to cargo cult. Some tribes, don't remember if it's in Africa or Oceania, value foreign objects as possessing supernatural powers. As such, they cover their shields (which are absolutely amazing) with stickers, such as beer brands. The anthropoligist that told me this said that he tried to tell them that they are ruining the beautiful shield and they just thought he was an idiot, the shield looked much nicer with the stickers.

The answer you are looking for is either:

Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams by David Graeber

or

Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein

but

The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies by Marcel Mauss is the cornerstone of the field and very enjoyable, though shorter than the other two. It may be helpful to have read Mauss in order to understand the previous two mentioned.

If you want to just get a taste of imperial Japan and some pretty interesting firsthand accounts, check out "inventing Japan" by Ian Buruma.

https://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Japan-1853-1964-Library-Chronicles/dp/0812972864



If you want to get a bigger view of the condition japan was in before beginning their empire building, check out "Peasants, Rebels, Women, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan" by Mikiso Hane


https://www.amazon.com/Peasants-Rebels-Women-Outcastes-Underside/dp/0742525252


If you want an even bigger view of how and why Japan was treated differently from Germany after the war check out, "the wages of guilt" by Ian Buruma


https://www.amazon.com/Wages-Guilt-Memories-Germany-Japan-ebook/dp/B00YLQU0GS

I would recommend these three books if you want to get a better idea of the everyday life of what everyday life was like pre-war, mid-war, post-war.

If you want to get into the psychology of Japanese people, I would recommend "the Japanese self in cultural context" by Takie Sugiyama Lebra

https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Self-Cultural-Logic/dp/0824828402/ref=mp_s_a_1_12?keywords=the+Japanese+self&qid=1571829682&sr=8-12


Another interesting book to add after reading these would be, "multiethnic Japan" by John Lie. It points out the ripples of what Japan's empire building brought.

https://www.amazon.com/Multiethnic-Japan-John-Lie/dp/0674013581/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=multiethnic+Japan&qid=1571829847&sr=8-1


Check em out!

Relevant piggyback: further reading about the Sambia tribe -- friend of mine just read this for an anthro class; I picked it up and found parts of it really interesting. Perfect if you anyone wants a bit more depth than a Wikipedia page. :)

Found at a local thrift shop, I have a copy of the now out-of-print "The Pipe: A Serious Yet Diverting Treatise on the History of the Pipe and All Its Appurtenances, as Well as a Factual Withal Philosophical Discussion of the Pleasurable Art of Selecting Pipes, Smoking, and Caring for Them" by Georges Herment

A review of this book by Steve Laug.

To me, it is a very good book on the basics of pipes and pipe-culture and I recommend that every piper pick up a copy if they can.

Nice ad hominem, dude. Great analytical skills too. Good job.

Also, seeing as you've not had the guts or the class to say what I actually posted, I thought I'd do that myself:

"I somewhat had the same experience when I started my MA in sociology. I was considering dropping out in my first year. Luckily, one of my (Left) professors recommended I read "The Sociological Tradition" by Robert Nisbet. It provided a complete summary of the overall sociological tradition and the three main streams of sociology: radical, liberal, and (yes) conservative written by a strongly conservative sociologist. That book made me remain in the discipline. And, I have to say, that while there much that I disagreed with, there was also a lot of joy to be found in the learning of a discipline that draws on so many disparate areas and looks at so many different things.
https://www.amazon.com/Sociological-Tradition-Robert-Nisbet/dp/1560006676

I do agree with the fact that the teaching can be quite ideological. (There can be few things worse than some first year Sociology students who think they "know stuff".) Some of the faculty were appalling. I often tried to adopt a different approach when I taught my classes as a TA, pushing my students to critique and question not just orthodoxy but the critical tools they were using; and to enjoy the reading and the discussion and the learning for its own sake."

From: https://www.reddit.com/r/sociology/comments/1y8bvz/dont_study_sociology_if_you_want_to_be_happy/?sort=top

"Smoke is often exhaled before most of the THC from the smoke in the lungs can be absorbed by the bloodstream. The smoker might not hold the hit for 20 to 30 seconds, exhaling too soon or coughing. Smokers rarely absorb a majority of the THC that is in a toke"

-Robert Conell Clarke, "Hashish". Pg. 270 under the heading "Smoking Efficiency"

People are weary about having smoke in their lungs for a long period of time due to the byproducts of burning plant matter and resins. The science still doesn't make people totally comfortable with it, especially with the hysteria centered around the tobacco - lung cancer links.

Don't take anyone's word for it. Not mine. Not Clarke's.

Do a test for yourself:

Fast from Ganja for a week to clear your head. Wake up and have a good healthy breakfast. Get baked. Smoke a fixed amount in one sitting (however much you like to smoke in a sitting), holding in your tokes for 5 seconds before exhaling. Note the effects. Be sure to save that amount of the same herb for the second part of the experiment.

Fast from Ganja for a week. Wake up and have the same healthy breakfast. Smoke that same fixed amount of the same strain, holding for >20 seconds. Note the effects.

Be sure you do the same things in both sessions. Eat the same foods. Smoke the same strain. Use the same apparatus to smoke from. Your high is greatly influenced by your overall well being, mentally and physically. If you put some nasty ass food in your stomach and then smoke, you can often trigger a not-so-pleasant high.

IME with this experiment the longer I held the hit, the higher i got.

There are also a lot of other ways to get more out of a toke if you're freaked out about lung damage:

PROTIP: Exhaling through the nose is a fantastic way to incorporate the olfactory bulb into the equation. This will also give you different effects and can often induce a lot of non-cannabinoid related, positive psychological effects.

TIPTWO: Don't torch the fuck out of your bowl. Heat destroys THC. Corner it lightly. A light, airy, lungful of smoke will go much farther than a thick, milky, dense hit will. The latter will give you more of an effect due to lack of oxygen than it will from the THC. The lower the temperature that you can heat the herb at, the more effectively you will transfer the THC without destroying it.

The Headman Was a Woman 1st Edition
by Kirk M. Endicott (Author), Karen L. Endicott (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Headman-Was-Woman-Kirk-Endicott/dp/1577665260

and

Human Culture: Highlights of Cultural Anthropology (3rd Edition) 3rd Edition
by Carol R. Ember (Author), Melvin Ember (Author), Peter N. Peregrine (Author)

and

Ellen Grigsby, Analyzing Politics: An Introduction to Political Science, 6th edition https://www.amazon.com/Cengage-Advantage-Books-Analyzing-Politics/dp/1285465598

please PM me with a price if you have them - I need them ASAP :)

Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:


amazon.co.uk

amazon.ca

amazon.com.au

amazon.in

amazon.de

amazon.it

amazon.es

amazon.com.br

amazon.nl

amazon.co.jp

amazon.fr

Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
I currently look here: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.com.au, amazon.in, amazon.com.mx, amazon.de, amazon.it, amazon.es, amazon.com.br, amazon.nl, amazon.co.jp, amazon.fr, if you would like your local version of Amazon adding please contact my creator.

If you're in China, a good place to start is to actually just ask friends, classmates or coworkers (depending on what you're doing) and see what customs they have or that their families used to have. Some may have peach cakes as a traditional birthday thing, while others might tell you about a tradition that their particular ethnic group or does that others don't (e.g. a Zhuang or Hakka tradition that Beijingers don't do).

If you're not in China, a Google search for "birthdays in China" will give you similar information.

Beyond that, if there's a particular tradition you're interested in you can probably find more about that either through more refined Google searches, or by looking at sites like Google Books.

Unfortunately I don't have a single book to recommend that isn't out of print. What I've read about it is almost entirely in other books on other topics which are making passing references to a birthday celebration.

Still, you might be able to find a copy of this book, but I just did a quick search for it (and the other title it's been published under) and didn't find any copies that weren't quite expensive.

Another great is "The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies" By Marcel Mauss. This book changed my life. It opened the door to a whole new stream of thought dealing with 'ecomonies' or relationships people create and the obligation to reciprocity that bind people not only to other people to create culture but also binds people to objects within a time and space.

http://www.amazon.com/Gift-Reason-Exchange-Archaic-Societies/dp/039332043X#_

Let's not overlook the very first Mutant Vehicle ever on the Playa: Pepper Mouser's Mobile Living Room. I don't think it was on-playa this year, since Pepper is recovering from knee surgery, but it has been a staple from the very beginning. I rode around on it making daiquiris for everyone on-board with a bolted-down blender on burn night 2006...that was the first and only time I met Flash too... Good times. And if you don't know who Flash is, you should go look it up.... Know your history, young burners!

 

• Image of the Mobile Living Room
  
  
• LA Times - BRC art car retrospective
  
   
  

My friend recommended me this one.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VQLF020/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Having just watched the documentary, I felt that it might be the documentary that was fake rather than them, but this is a genuine news broadcast:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgT4otYh88s

And this is his book:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/California-Schemin-Gavin-Bain/dp/1847375553

Both of those were 3 years ago, and the documentary only just came out. And assuming that it's NOT a hoax, it's a really interesting documentary.

You might be interested in what Ray Oldenburg has to say. He is a sociologist who has a lot of negative things to say about suburbia. If you ditch your commute, not only will you be healthier, Oldenburg will bet that you are happier too.

Well this was uploaded in 2010, does it prove anything?

http://youtu.be/zgT4otYh88s

EDIT: This seems to be a plug for this book realeased in 2010 http://www.amazon.co.uk/California-Schemin-Gavin-Bain/dp/1847375553

http://www.amazon.co.uk/California-Schemin-Gavin-Bain/dp/1847375553/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Straight-Outta-Scotland-Betrayal-Industry/dp/1847396526/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1
w
why is he selling his book under two titles on amazon with the exact same description

The problem is that if you're a scientifically minded activist, you probably are working in environment where it pays to keep your mouth shut, and not say anything that could offend some regulatory busybody. That said, here's a few rationally minded psychedelic enthusiasts I enjoy reading:

Sam Harris
https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/drugs-and-the-meaning-of-life

Brian Doherty
https://www.amazon.com/This-Burning-Man-American-Underground/dp/1932100865

David Nichols
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Nichols


Alexander Shulgin, of course:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Shulgin

Dirty Pictures is a nice documentary about him:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1592855/

Rick Doblin, founder of MAPS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Doblin

Also highly recommended: This is Burning Man by Brian Doherty.
Fantastic detailed history of the origins & early days, from the Suicide Club, Cacophany Society, then Burning Man.
https://www.amazon.com/This-Burning-Man-American-Underground/dp/1932100865/ref=la_B001JP4YV6_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1521678685&sr=1-3

Aaron Fisher's The Way of Tea is destined to be a classic.

John Blofeld's The Chinese Art of Tea is a classic.

Gilbert Herdt wrote about the Sambia manhood rituals (read: boys blowing men in Papua New Guinea).

Wikipedia

Buy the book on Amazon

This is Burning Man

https://www.amazon.com/Headman-Was-Woman-Kirk-Endicott/dp/1577665260

Jos ei tykkää Voxista niin tässä kirjassa, joka oli videon lähteenäkin, on samoja pointteja

I'm just gonna leave a link to Marcel Mauss's book about gift-exchange (though you can read the wikipedia entry which will totally give you the gist of it). I know a lot of anthropology can seem pretty effete, but despite the phrase "archaic societies" in the title, even in today's society we see a lot of social ties acted out by acts of reciprocal exchange in the form of gift-giving. I've noticed this in particular with women in tight-knit communities. I used to think it was kind of dumb to give gifts because you have to, or for specific occasions... I'd rather opportunistically buy a gift that fits the recipient as an individual. But now, I think these little rituals do help us bond with one another. The women that I see regularly exchanging seemingly meaningless gifts with my mom (and sometimes me) are the ones who come through if she (or I) gets sick, or moves, or needs help with something serious.