(Part 2) Best products from r/AskAnthropology

Sorry for the wait, delivering!

I recently moved, so most of my books are still in boxes. However, I've already unboxed the best ones, so I'll list them here (note that most of them are not written by anthropologists per se, but are good books nonetheless):

1. Mechademia. Technically, it's not a book (it's a journal), but it's by far the best publication in the area. There are lots of articles on the most diverse subjects, and even reviews of related publications. (If you haven't got JSTOR access, come see us on /r/Scholar!);
   
2. Frederik Schodt's Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics is THE classic on manga. 10/10, will definitely read again. (there's a sequel, Dreamland Japan, but I haven't read this one yet);
   
3. Paul Gravett's Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics is a good overview on the history of manga;
   
4. Roland Kelts' Japanamerica: How the Japanese Pop Culture has invaded the U.S. is fairly good, specially the chapter on hentai. But beware: it's a little less academic than I would like it to be;
   
5. Patrick Galbraith's [The Otaku Encyclopedia: An Insider's Guide to The Subculture of Cool Japan] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Otaku-Encyclopedia-Insiders-Subculture/dp/4770031017/ref=pd_sim_b_6) is an amazing book, a fast read and full of awesomeness. I can't recommend it enough. (He has another book called Otaku Spaces and has recently edited a book about idols, but I have yet to read these two);
   
6. Last but not least, Hiroki Azuma's Otaku: Japan Database Animals is an excellent book on otaku culture. Azuma's overwhelming knowledge is well conveyed by the translation, IMO.
   
   OK, I'll stop here. If you want more recommendations (specially stuff on other languages, like Portuguese, French or Japanese, that I didn't bother listing here), feel free to PM me ;)

Hey cool question! I remember an old supervisor of mine used to say, "if you want to be a good anthropologist then you need to read philosophy".

For anthropology some required reading is going to be Foucault. Anthropologist Paul Rabinow put out a pretty useful reader with much of Foucault's key essays and ideas. Here's the whole PDF. Through Foucault you'll learn about the concept of Power, and will also become somewhat acquainted with Neitzsche.

Another thing you might want to do is familiarize yourself with Kant. Kant is often noted as being one of the starting points of anthropology - the questioning of our human ideas and concepts and how they relate to the world around us (I'm simplifying hugely). I don't have a suggestion for this other than doing some light reading on even Wikipedia and then going from there. Kant is likewise important because he tends to represent the point where philosophy split into what is now refered to as "continental" and "analytic" philosophy. Anthropology for the most part engages with continental philosophy (like Foucault). This also tends to be the space where most feminist philosophy is located (with the likes of thinkers like Judith Butler), which anthropologists are also quite involved in.

The thing about anthropology is that many ethnographies and theory papers engage with philosophy quite a bit, and they also tend to use a huge range of philosophical thinkers and concepts. So if you don't know a lot of about philosophy, you'll actually learn quite a bit just through studying anthropology. However, you don't really get into the thick of things until graduate school.

The next key thinker to look into is Marx. Reading Marx is absolutely necessary for many reasons that I won't get into. But understaning what capital is and how capitalism works is so extremely important to making sense of human beings and the kinds of societies that we live in today. Marx is also critical for providing a materialist lens to our theorizing and analysis in anthropology, thinking about how human groups and societies relate and interact with their material surroundings.

This book is going to be fairly advanced however I also reccommend The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy edited by Veena Das et al. as a pretty up to date survey of how anthropology and philosophy speak with one another.

Again, you are going to learn plenty of philosophy throughout your education, as many anthropologists consider themselves philosophers as well, using anthropological methods to ask philosophical questions. Anthropologists love to talk about ethics, morality, politics, etc. And don't worry too much about not being knowledgeable about other areas - you can only know so much! Besides, if you are in a humanities or social sciences program, you will have plenty of opportunities to jump into electives in political science, sociology, and philosophy.

Philosophy is huge, and there is plenty that will complement your studies, but don't get too bogged down with anything until you're more familiarized with what area of anthropology interests you most.

Another final area to consider are the classical liberal political philosophers like Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Hobbes, and that whole crew. Much of the 'West' is rooted in their ideas about property and the individual, and so it can help you think about our current cultural worlds (assuming you are in the West). It also doesn't hurt to understand some of the foundational Western philosophers like Aristotle and Plato.

If you have more specific interests let me know and I can point you to some key anthropologists, and then also expand on what kind of philosophy they think with.

In a contemporary sense, Deleuze is a super hot and trendy philosopher right now to be thinking with in anthropology. Moreover, thinking about indigenous and non-Western, non-colonial ways of knowing and thinking are key topics of interest as well as we move as a discipline (and academia more generally) to 'decolonize' our canon.

By the way, welcome to anthropology. Not many people choose it as their major upon entry into university. It's often something people stumble upon later.

If your university only offers anthro as a graduate degree, then the department is prepared - and expects - students from other disciplines. You should be good to go into anthro, given the situation.

Sociology could be a good minor to assist you in a springboard into anthro - it depends on how it is taught and on your own inclinations. At the time, our Sociology Department was strictly Marxist theory - which is fine if you like it and not so good if you don't. That department has since changed to address other social theories. As it was, I had a hard time getting exited about much of sociology theory, methods and questions - but I knew people who loved it and one of my best friends taught in the department. It's like eating chocolate - it's fine if you like it, but not so good if you don't. Go with what you like - you'll get more out of it and you'll do better at it.

There was some overlap in history and anthro, but there are also significant differences, both in what questions are asked but also how ideas are presented. Anthro tends to present lengthy descriptions of information followed by a concise, discrete section that offers the conclusion. Historians tend to weave their conclusion, subtly, through the entire description of the evidence. It means that the reader has to work harder to understand how the historian as slipped the argument/point of view into the text - or the reader can simply take the history text as the enjoyable telling of the story. Anthropology is a lot easier to break down: the description is there if you want it, the argument is presented at the end and is available for all to see without going through the entire text. That's too simplistic, of course, but that, in general, is how I would differentiate between the two.

I wrote a book dealing with the differences that present themselves, separating historians and archaeologists. I pitched it for the undergraduate-level reader. Perhaps your university library has an inter-library loan program and you could pick it up. It's blessedly short!

So ... on the one hand, there are books like Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior or Cultural Misunderstandings: The French-American Experience that try to tell you about all the tiny indicators of 'politeness' or 'propriety' within the scope of a particular class, register, or social scene believed to be typical and what those interactional differences look like from the point of view of an outsider or careful observer.

If those are the quirks you have in mind, I think the most important thing to say is that you shouldn't read too much into them. They're worth knowing for practical reasons, because understanding them is part of communicating effectively and getting along with others, but they're probably not coherent configurations of behavior that impart distinctive psychologies. I think that kind of thing comes from everywhere that language change also comes from: accidental drifts in collective behaviors, intentional signification of a subcultural style that gradually becomes the norm, mimicry of both individuals and groups that happen to have high status for some reason, etc.

On the other hand, you do still hear anthropologists say things like "the Pirahã do this" or "the Yanomami do that" and actually mean something about an overall cultural pattern--typically but not always in some small-scale society. And to be totally honest about it, you should doubt them. Alcida Ramos wrote a great article about how three different anthropologists have represented the Yanomami: "Reflecting on the Yanomami: Ethnographic Images and the Pursuit of the Exotic." The things that a particular society become known for have a lot to do with who is writing about them. Making an argument like "many things the Pirahã do are explained by a 'principle of the immediacy of experience'" ought to be based on a ton of verifiable evidence, and even if you believe it, you should still treat it as a shorthand theoretical construct, relevant to an extremely restricted context (in this case, around 420 people in Brazil).

Probably your question most relevant to the history of anthropology is this one: "Why are we even able to make broad based claims such as 'culture A is this' or 'culture B is that'?"

Anthropologists in the 30s-50s didn't doubt that we could, and they produced a good number of "national character studies" that tried to state something essential about the shared value orientations of large-scale societies. They were provocative but problematic. A few that you can try out for free on the internet archive are Geoffrey Gorer's Exploring English Character, G. Morris Carstairs's The Twice-Born: A Study of a Community of High-Caste Hindus, and Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

Just as an aside, Benedict's is probably the most famous national character study, first because of its impact/readership but perhaps more importantly because it raises fundamental questions about anthropological practice. Just googling a bit, this article by C. Douglas Lummis seems to cover issues I was aware of (e.g. that Benedict's informants were drawn from Japanese-American internment camps in the US), and it also includes a re-interview of one of Benedict's informants. And I recall this article by Joy Rohde as one that discusses the ethical dilemmas of doing work that shapes foreign policy (Benedict was writing for the Office of War Information).

Getting back to your question about making broad claims, national character studies have been challenged frequently and on numerous grounds. "Anthropology and Politics in Studies of National Character" by Federico Neiburg, Marcio Goldman, and Peter Gow includes a summary of Dante Moreira Leite's doctoral thesis that's worth quoting:
>In the book, Leite describes in detail the origins of the notion of national character, from Romanticism to the culture and personality school, analyzes the various authors who have tried to apply it to Brazilian society, and also develops a critique with three main aspects. First, from an epistemological point of view, culture and personality studies and theories of national character fail to escape from a vicious circle. Starting from empirically observed behavior in a given society, they go on to deduce what is identified as
the general pattern for that society, claiming also that this pattern is reproduced in the personalities of the society's members. This pattern is then used to explain any behavior observed among them.

>Second, from a methodological point of view, these theories and studies are inevitably marked by a confusion between the supposed deep character of a society being analyzed and the observable behavior of a small section of that society. Thus, they offer accounts of German national character when in fact they are talking only about Nazis; they imagine that they are getting at the deepest parts of being Japanese when in fact they refer only to the military who dominated Japanese politics for a certain period; they believe they have grasped the Brazilian when they only have described some rural elite.

>Finally-and this is the most important point for Leite-from a political point of view, theories of national character are no more than ideologies, in the traditional Marxist sense of the word: discourses destined to disguise reality, whether through ethnocentrism, fully compatible with the replacement of European colonialism by U.S. imperialism, or through the omission of politics, economics, or history as the genuine reasons for the differences and inequalities between societies. The result of this process is a kind of substantialization of differences, located in a tradition and at a psychological level so deep that they become almost indistinguishable from the biological rootedness of diversity which racism promoted, and from which culturalism is supposed to have distinguished itself so clearly

And Wikipedia tells me that, more recently, Terracciano A, Abdel-Khalek AM, Adám N, et al. got this published in Science:

>Most people hold beliefs about personality characteristics typical of members of their own and others' cultures. These perceptions of national character may be generalizations from personal experience, stereotypes with a “kernel of truth,” or inaccurate stereotypes. We obtained national character ratings (N = 3,989) from 49 cultures and compared them to the average personality scores of culture members assessed by observer ratings and self-reports. National character ratings were reliable, but did not converge with assessed traits (Mdn r = .04). Perceptions of national character thus appear to be unfounded stereotypes that may serve the function of maintaining a national identity.

Basically, everyone believes in stereotypes, both about other groups and about their own. A fairly common way to deal with that is to treat stereotypes as insight not into the groups they misrepresent but into how the folks who believe them think the world works. Another way to deal with it is to be really, really specific about your observations and the contexts in which you think they occur.

I've used "This Land Was Theirs" by Wendell Oswalt for a number of references. While it does not delve into a number of tribes or bands, it does focus on twelve that seem to represent the major areas of Native inhabitance within North America.

"The American Heritage Book of Indians" by William Brandon is a decent read if you want an abbreviated history of many tribes, as well as illustrations depicting said tribes. It is not the greatest resource, but it certainly can be a good read on the subject.

A.L. Kroeber's "Handbook of the Indians of California" is another great resource. In fact, Kroeber was a good friend of Ishi, the last of the Yana people.

Look up these texts and peruse through Amazon or your local library. I'm sure you'll find something that will satiate your desire to learn about the great Native nations.

First thing's first, "primitive psychology" isn't a thing and is actually pretty racist. I would use "traditional societies" although I understand that means something different in sociology. Anyway.

For cross-cultural variation in spatial language and cognition, Levinson 2003 (pdf) is the go-to book. There is also a book by Mishra and Dasen which I've only recently started, but so far seems good. It's less of an overview and more advanced than the Levinson book. Those books will probably give you all the citations you need but if you have more specific requests, I can give you more.

For perceptions of time, Rafael Nuñez and others at the cogsci department in UCSD are a good place to start. You can see his publications list here. You'd also do well to read about grammaticalization of temporal categories such as tense and aspect markers from spatial categories such as locative adposition (which also segues into your next question). This book is probably the best for that, but be warned that grammaticalization is an advanced linguistic concept which you will have trouble understanding without at least an into class's worth of knowledge of linguistics.

Other than grammaticalization, you will want to look at linguistic typology. Again, this can require a fairly advanced knowledge of linguistics to properly understand. With anything typology, the first place to start is the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS). The stuff you're interested in will be here under "verbal categories". It sounds like you might also be interested in the "Lexicon" section as well. Here on WALS you can find maps which show you what languages across the world do things in what ways. You might be interested in 65-78 and 129-143. There's more on typology, but I'm not really sure what the best works are. I can throw out some names though: Bernard Comrie, Greville Corbett, Martin Haspelmath, Johanna Nichols, Balthasar Bickel and Anna Siewierska.

For more poppy books which talk about cross-linguistic diversity, try When Languages Die by David Harrison and Dying Words by Nick Evans.

The only thing we know about the beaker folk is what they left in the ground and a rough idea of which groups today are descended from them.

It's probable that they had some kind of indo-european type religion but they morph into other cultures centuries before the first culture recognised as Celtic comes along. Beaker culture in Britain ends around the late 19th century bc. It ended in Europe almost 500 years earlier.
Urnfield, the first culture considered to be closely linked to Celts, begins around the 14 century bc, that's 500 years after beaker culture ends in Britain and a thousand years after it ends in Europe.
These are some long time frames so beakers don't really have anything to do with the Celts other than being distant ancestors.

Urnfield isn't Celtic per se either, it's the culture that precedes Halstatt and based on cemetery locations it's considered to represent a natural transition rather than an imposed one by invaders. There is no writing from this era so no way to know what was being spoken and that goes doubly for what myths and histories were known back then. We barely know about Gallo-Roman religion other than names on statues that being linked to Roman deities may give an indication to their attributes and links to each other. A handful of vague quotes by Romans and Greeks covers our sum total of knowledge of the pre-Roman religion.

It is the mediæval Irish and Welsh who really give us something to look at. Christianised though much of it is and warped by the way the tales were passed down, we can make sense of much of the stories and see that many of the heroes are actually the old gods, sometimes only in fragmentary and seemingly random form.

For instance in the Ulster Cycle, there is an odd bit in a story about the hero Fraoch whose wife and cattle have been abducted. He seeks the help of the hero Conall Cernach. The castle that the wife is being held in is guarded by a serpent but when Conall Cernach appears the serpent simply wraps itself around his waist like a belt and they're free to enter. There is obviously a lot missing in this part of the story.
There is a Gallo-Roman seated deity statue from Etang sur Arroux in France. It has two ram horned snakes circling its waist. It's possible that these two disparate examples from Celtic mythology are related and that the story about the Irish heroes rescuing the wife and cattle contain the remnants of older stories involving the gods.

There are a few good books written by people like Miranda Green but your first look if you haven't already is read the mediæval tales in the Mabinogion, the Ulster Cycle, the Fenian Cycle, the Book of Invasions. It's also worth acquainting yourself with the Historia Britonum and Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain. Monmouth is considered to have largely made his book up but he was also writing in the 12th century ad and so likely had access to books no longer in existence which could have contained some actual fact-emphasis on the could.

If you want to know more, then work out some specific questions because the question here is very broadstrokes.

I'd also suggest reading the primer by Barry Cunliffe, [The Ancient Celts 2nd Ed.(2018).]
(https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Celts-Barry-Cunliffe/dp/0198752938/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_0/145-7744108-5355657?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0198752938&pd_rd_r=77004b13-aeda-4ae7-a99d-b611e0144ae6&pd_rd_w=4PIuW&pd_rd_wg=XxrE3&pf_rd_p=5cfcfe89-300f-47d2-b1ad-a4e27203a02a&pf_rd_r=ER4B229KP8Y3A74593PH&psc=1&refRID=ER4B229KP8Y3A74593PH)

http://www.amazon.com/Pretty-Modern-Beauty-Plastic-Surgery/dp/0822348012 - Less about medicine, more of an ethanography, there was a huge brazilian population where I used to live.

>http://www.amazon.com/Improvising-Medicine-Oncology-Emerging-Epidemic/dp/0822353423 - your call, I've read others that are similar in the past (dark african hospitals, mom was a doctor, it came up) but this is apparently more popular now. 10 years ago it was the horror of aids, those books are almost unreadable, if it were any other subject you'd simply have trouble suspending disbelief. http://www.amazon.com/The-Paradox-Hope-Journeys-Borderland/dp/0520267354 is another similar book.

http://www.amazon.com/Tales-Shamans-Apprentice-Ethnobotanist-Medicines/dp/0670831379 - Is probably better if you don't want all the doom/gloom view of african medicine.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10235.Mountains_Beyond_Mountains - Figure you've read this, it's highly recommended and extremely popular now, part of the whole 're-imagining medicine' movement.

>http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/161121.My_Own_Country - Speaking of my mom, she was a doctor near here, it's definitely a different world.

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949 - Read it because of the neuroscience aspect, but I suppose you could consider it a very specialized ethanography of sorts.

Honestly the most popular nowadays is probably the one about the Hmong girl in my first post. I'd recommend it more because I've known a few Hmong and the cultural differences are fascinating.

The best books in my experience have been overviews of Aegean prehistory. There's an incredible amount of scholarship, so it's really just about finding a good overview and drilling down on specific topics/sites that interest you.

For advanced undergrads/early grads the standards are typically the Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age, the Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean, and Aegean Art and Architecture.

All of these can get a bit technical, especially with regards to chronology and such. Of those three Aegean Art and Architecture is probably the most readable. There are older monographs devoted to Crete specifically, but they tend to be older (like 1960's) and quite out of date.

Are you interested in a particular phase, site, or facet of the civilization? Because that would help narrow it down. Keep in mind that there are huge gaps in our understanding of the Minoans and their culture. You aren't going to find many specifics about their culture unless you go down the road of very shaky scholarship.

If your interested in the late Bronze Age collapse (which came some time after the peak of the Minoan civilization), check out the book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. It's new and I haven't read it myself, but it's by Eric Cline, who wrote the Oxford Handbook, so it's bound to be well researched. Might be a nice overview of part of the Bronze Age in a more digestible format.

Anyway let me know a bit more about your interests and maybe I can help a bit more. I can also dig out my old syllabi for more suggestions.