Michael Taussig
What Color Is the Sacred?
“Blending fact and fiction, ethnographic observation, archival history, literary theory and memoir, [Taussig’s] books read more like beatnik novels than somber analyses of other cultures.”—New York Times
Read an excerpt.

 

Unni Wikan
In Honor of Fadime: Murder and Shame
“If murder is defined as a wrongful killing, is an honor killing murder? … This brilliant book takes us far beyond the ‘banality of evil’ as we arrive at an eye-opening (even if troubling) comprehension of how a morally decent husband and wife come to feel they have no choice but to kill their daughter.”—Richard A. Shweder, University of Chicago
Read an excerpt.

 

Lisa Wedeen
Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen
“Apart from its clear contributions to the field of comparative politics and the literature on nationalism, Peripheral Visions is a genuinely creative and original intervention into the debates in democratic theory. Wedeen brilliantly shows how in Yemen weak state institutions form not the limit but the condition of vigorous civic deliberation and political participation.”—Linda M. G. Zerilli, Northwestern University

 

David B. Coplan
In Township Tonight!: South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre, Second Edition
“In Township Tonight! was a landmark, appearing in a desert of writing about South African music but rapidly becoming the most quoted source in the literature. This new edition, twenty two years on, is a rich and insightful reimagining of the original, as beautifully written and engaging as the first, but the story it tells is not only of black South African music and its history, but of a writer who speaks unforgettably to the way an entire country and its collective cultures have ‘come of age’ in the early twenty-first century.”—Christine Lucia, Professor of Music, University of the Witwatersrand

 

Gina A. Ulysse
Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica
“In this remarkable, sensitive, and gutsy ethnography of informal commercial importers in urban Jamaica, Haitian American anthropologist Gina Ulysse opens our eyes to the lives of enterprising women who draw on all their resourcefulness to make it in a hostile global economy, and in the process remake markets, their own identities, and the ethnographic relationship.”—Mimi Sheller, author of Consuming the Caribbean

 

Richard Price
Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination
“Price has had a long and torrential romance with the Saramaka Maroons of Suriname, exploring them and himself through a harvest of mythologies that dissolve all boundaries of time and geographical location. With Tooy as guide and mentor, across three centuries of African exile and resettlement in the Americas, we revisit the recent or forgotten spaces of Price’s near forty years of patient, scholarly research. It is an astonishing performance, rendering these treasures of anthropological materials in a narrative style as lucid and cordial as the best contemporary fiction.”—George Lamming, author of The Pleasures of Exile

 

Sally Price
Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly
“Paris Primitive is a delicious combination of art, anthropology, and politics, as well as an intricate dissection of French alliances and institutions. Along the way, in this well-written and fast-paced narrative, Sally Price also illuminates the ethics of acquisition and display and the battle between aesthetics and ethnography. What a tale! Everyone involved in cultural representation should read this book.”—Lucy R. Lippard, author of Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America

 

Nicolas Argenti
The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence, and Belated Histories in the Cameroon Grassfields
“Argenti’s book is a veritable tour de force. No study on the Cameroon Grassfields has ever delved so deeply and with such accurate historical insight and firsthand knowledge of contemporary performative cultures as this outstanding work.”—Filip de Boeck, Africa Research Centre, Catholic University of Leuven

 

Ira Bashkow
The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World
"We are one of the others. Deconstructing the ancient sociology of in-group versus out-group, this finely observed and brilliantly interpreted ethnography of a New Guinea people's conceptions of whitemen fashions a powerful new paradigm for the study of intercultural relations. Incidentally, damn good reading."—Marshall Sahlins

 

Jean and John L. Comaroff, editors
Law and Disorder in the Postcolony
"Offers a feast of empirical insights that bring the anthropology of legality into the very center of postcolonial studies, places the South African experience in a highly original global perspective, and shows that the relationship between law and legality is both contradictory and generative."—Arjun Appadurai, The New School for Social Research

 

Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz
Culture Troubles: Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning
"A major work, thorough, comprehensive, and genuinely groundbreaking: a treatise in the true sense of the word."—Clifford Geertz, Institute for Advanced Study

 

Luke Eric Lassiter
The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography
"A clear, comprehensive, and forceful description of the history, theory, and practice of collaborative ethnography, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography propels anthropological practice into the social and political vortex of twenty-first-century social life."—Paul Stoller
Read an excerpt.

 

John L. Jackson Jr.
Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity
"Jackson's book provides discerning readers with a provocative analysis of contemporary black subcultures: middle class blacks in a gentrifying Harlem who are split between a social justice-minded old guard and a neo-capitalistic new guard, conspiracy theorists, Black Hebrew Israelites of Worldwide Truthful Understanding and hip hop artists as exemplified by Mos Def.…The author's powers of observation are indisputable."—Publishers Weekly