What is ethics? Is it a system of transcendent moral imperatives or can it be produced by ordinary people in everyday life? Do the daily rules of interaction constitute a code of ethics? In The Culture of Ethics, renowned anthropologists Franco La Cecla and Piero Zanini address these questions in a series of thought-provoking reflections that draw their inspiration from diverse sources, ranging from fieldwork in Papua New Guinea to cinematic depictions of the Ten Commandments....

For decades, Israel and Palestine have been locked in ongoing conflict over land that each claims as its own. The conflict is often considered a calculated landgrab, but this characterization does little to take into account the myriad motivations that have shaped it in ways that make it seem intractable, from powerful nationalist and theological ideologies to the more practical concerns of...

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the division between nature and culture has been fundamental to Western thought. In this groundbreaking work, renowned anthropologist Philippe Descola seeks to break down this divide, arguing for a departure from the anthropocentric model and its rigid dualistic conception of nature and culture as distinct phenomena. In its stead, Descola proposes a...

In this lucid and insightful essay, renowned linguist Roy Harris reflects on the early nineteenth-century doctrine of “art for art’s sake.” This was attacked by Proudhon and Nietzsche, but defended by Théophile Gautier and E. M. Forster. It influenced movements as diverse as futurism and Dada. Over the past two centuries, three main positions have emerged. The “institutional” view declares art...

How can we make economics genuinely quantitative? This is the question that Gabriel Tarde tackled at the end of his career. His solution was in total contradiction to the dominant views of his time: to quantify the connections between people and goods, you need to grasp “passionate interests.” Capitalism is not a system of cold calculations, but, rather, a constant amplification in the...

At a moment when the U.S. military decided it needed cultural expertise as much as smart bombs to prevail in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon's Counterinsurgency Manual offered a blueprint for mobilizing anthropologists for war. The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual critiques that strategy and offers a blueprint for resistance.

What can you say after you say that the world-or at least human life on it-looks like it's nearing its end? How about starting with wonder at the possibility that dialogue and subjectivity-the bases of human language-are possible now? In Time and Human Language Now two lifelong friends share, in the form of a long-distance e-mail correspondence, a conversation about the relation between cosmos...

Pasta and pizza, in all their infinitely delicious and universally appealing varieties, are inextricably connected to Italian identity. These familiar foods not only represent Italy’s culinary traditions, according to anthropologist Franco La Cecla, they have unified the Italian people and spread Italian culture worldwide. Pasta and Pizza tells the story of how cuisine born in the south of...

Far from an unfortunate cliché, medievalism has become a dominant paradigm for comprehending the identity and motivations of America’s perceived enemy in the War on Terror. Yet as Bruce Holsinger argues here, this cloying post-9/11 rhetoric has served to obscure the more intricate ideological machinations of neomedievalism, the global idiom of the non-state actor: NGOs, transnational corporate...

Increasingly today, intellectual rights over traditional knowledge are fiercely contested. But how should we make sense of the politics and meaning of tradition? As the Brazilian anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha highlights in this pamphlet, it is no easy task. The indigenous rights movement seems beset by contradictions and impossible demands of cultural purity. Consider, for example,...

It is easy to mistake the United States for an empire. But as John D. Kelly explains here, the American approach to global relations is best understood as a competition—one in which the United States, through the reshaping of economic theory and the global economy itself, imposes its own rules on a game played to win. How and where the United States implements these rules can be tracked...

Evolutionary psychology claims to be the authoritative science of "human nature." Its chief architects, including Stephen Pinker and David Buss, have managed to reach well beyond the ivory tower to win large audiences and influence public discourse. But do the answers that evolutionary psychologists provide about language, sex, and social relations add up? Susan McKinnon thinks not. 

A majority of Americans tell pollsters they want more government intervention to reduce the gap between high- and lower-income citizens, and less than one-third consider high taxes to be a problem. Yet conservative Republicanism currently controls the political discourse. Why?

"It's not personal; it's just business," says the professional killer to his victim. But business is always personal, and even though modern business corporations have been granted the legal status of persons, they are still part of the impersonal engines of society that operate far beyond human reach.

Why should books drive the academic hierarchy? This controversial question posed by Lindsay Waters ignited fierce debate in the academy and its presses, as he warned that the "publish or perish" dictum was breaking down the academic system in the United States. Waters hones his argument in this pamphlet with a new set of questions that challenge the previously unassailable link between...

Art criticism was once passionate, polemical, and judgmental; now critics are more often interested in ambiguity, neutrality, and nuanced description. And while art criticism is ubiquitous in newspapers, magazines, and exhibition brochures, it is also virtually absent from academic writing. How is it that even as criticism drifts away from academia, it becomes more academic? How is it that...

Each Thanksgiving, the president of the United States symbolically pardons one turkey from the fate of serving as a holiday dinner. In this pamphlet, anthropologist Magnus Fiskesjö uncovers the hidden horrors of such rituals connected with the power of pardon, from the annual turkey to the pardoning of the original Teddy Bear. It is through these ritualized and perpetually remembered acts of...

In a series of snapshots after the attack on the World Trade Center—from a day, to a week, up to a year and beyond—Eliot Weinberger offers thoughtful and provocative reflections on his city, the country, and the state of the world. Originally published only outside the United States, these essays are now available together, and for the first time in English. Taken as a whole, they constitute a...

We live in an age of "popular culture"—another term, to some, for an organic mess of marketing strategies aimed at giving us the illusion of choice. From Oprah Winfrey's Book Club to presidential politics, however, distinctions of taste are more accurately understood to be "blunt instruments of antidemocratic elitism." So argues Chris Lehmann, in a discussion that ranges over the work of...

Thomas Frank has been sending wake-up calls to just about everyone within reach over the past decade, in venues from The Village Voice to Harper's. His takes on labor politics, advertising, the virtues of the Midwest, and how un-cool you really are have won him a wide audience, and in this piece, Frank gives us a reading of cultural studies—viewed by some as an...

Nystrom and Puckett's pamphlet gives us the most comprehensive picture available of Richard Rorty's political views. This is Rorty being avuncular, cranky, and straightforward: his arguments on patriotism, the political left, and philosophy—as usual, unusual—are worth pondering. This pamphlet will appeal to all those interested in Rorty's distinct brand of pragmatism and leftist politics in...