Showing titles in Anthropology

Korea was one of the last countries in Asia to be visited by Westerners, and its borders have remained largely unchanged since it was unified in the seventh century. Though it is one of the world's oldest and most ethnically homogeneous states, Korea was not born in a vacuum. Geographically isolated, the country was heavily influenced by powerful China and was often used as a bridge to the mainland by Japan. Calling themselves as "a shrimp among whales", Koreans borrowed elements of government, culture, and religion, all the while fiercely fighting to maintain independence.

Listeners of this book will gain a clear understanding of what makes the Japanese, and their society, tick.

Cette "Brève histoire de l'humanité" déroule notre histoire globale, des premiers hominidés à aujourd'hui et interroge l'avenir qui nous attend. Comment l'"Homo Sapiens" a-t-il réussi à dominer la Terre ? Quelle singularité nous a permis de s'unir pour créer villes et empires, l'idée de religion, les concepts politiques de nation ou plus récemment des droits de l'homme ? Pourquoi cette dépendance et cette croyance que notre bonheur dépend de l'argent et de la possibilité de consommer ?

Is your workplace riven by tribal conflict? Are your meetings governed by dozens of unspoken rituals? Is there something faintly religious about the way your colleagues worship the CEO? If so, then you might need a lesson in business anthropology. For a century, anthropologists have had an unusual method: immersing themselves deep inside 'alien' tribes and uncovering, from the inside, how they tick. Today, a new generation of anthropologists are using this approach to explain modern businesses - revealing the hidden rituals that define what we buy, who we sell to and how we work.

Insightful, witty and fascinating, The Invisible Gorilla closely examines the false impressions that most profoundly influence our lives and gives practical advice on how we can minimise their negative impact.

In his ground-breaking book, Gary Younge argues that we have recoiled into refuges of race or class, religion or national identity to survive in a state seemingly indifferent to our lives. Ranging from his Stevenage childhood to present day America, from the borders of Europe to division in South Africa, Younge explores the issues that bind the powerful elite and the poor immigrant, the fundamentalist and the conservative.

Ancient Futures is a lyrical and moving portrait of tradition and change in Ladakh, or “Little Tibet", as it was once known. The book is also an engaging critique of the global economy and a call for economic localization. When author Helena Norberg-Hodge first arrived in Ladakh in the 1970s, she found a pristine environment and a people who exhibited remarkable vitality and joy. Not long after, came economic growth and development, and Norberg-Hodge watched how a whole range of problems began to appear for the first time.

Dear Listener, I know what you're thinking, is it some kind of macabre joke? How can Ruby Wax write a book about good news when the world is facing the worst disaster since the Plague? Let me explain. I began writing in 2018, back when the world's worries were somewhat different. Climate change, greedy bankers, exam results, crap politicians, mental health: these are still huge issues, but even the ancient soothsayers reading pig entrails couldn't have predicted this. This is my new mission: to share the green shoots of hope peeping through the soil of civilisation.

From best-selling social commentator and cultural historian Barbara Ehrenreich comes this fascinating exploration of one of humanity's oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture, showing that such mass festivities have been indigenous to the West since the ancient Greeks.

In The Social Leap, William von Hippel lays out a revolutionary hypothesis, tracing human development through three critical evolutionary inflection points to explain how events in our distant past shape our lives today. From the mundane, such as why we exaggerate, to the surprising, such as why we believe our own lies and why fame and fortune are as likely to bring misery as happiness, the implications are far-reaching and extraordinary.

The thesis of Human Diversity is that advances in genetics and neuroscience are overthrowing an intellectual orthodoxy that has ruled the social sciences for decades. The core of the orthodoxy consists of three dogmas: Gender is a social construct. Race is a social construct. Class is a function of privilege. The problem is that all three dogmas are half-truths. They have stifled progress in understanding the rich texture that biology adds to our understanding of the social, political, and economic worlds we live in. It is not a story to be feared. But it is a story that needs telling.

We human beings share 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. Yet humans are the dominant species on the planet - having founded civilizations and religions, developed intricate and diverse forms of communication, learned science, built cities, and created breathtaking works of art - while chimps remain animals concerned primarily with the basic necessities of survival. What is it about that two percent difference in DNA that has created such a divergence between evolutionary cousins?

Religion is both unique—as far as we can judge—and universal to humans. Our species diverged from the great apes about six to eight million years ago, and since then, along with language, our propensity towards spiritual thinking and ritual emerged. How, when and why did this occur, and how did the earliest informal shamanic practices evolve into the world religions familiar to us today? Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, explores this and other key questions.

Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battleground is the Internet. On one side the alt-right ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, struggle sessions and virtue signaling lurk behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures.

Revolutionary retail guru Paco Underhill is back with a completely revised edition of his classic, witty, best-selling book on our ever-evolving consumer culture—full of fresh observations and important lessons from the cutting edge of retail, which is taking place in the world’s emerging markets.

In A Story of Us, they present this rich narrative and explain how the evolution of our genes relates to the evolution of our cultures. Newson and Richerson take listeners through seven stages of human evolution, beginning seven million years ago with the apes that were the ancestors of humans and today's chimps and bonobos. The story ends in the present day and offers a glimpse into the future.

The story of the world's second-largest continent is as intricate as it is vast. Starting with prehistory and the fossils left behind in Ethiopia by the earliest humans, this book captures a narrative that traverses great ancient civilizations, from the Kingdom of Aksum to the empires of West Africa and sultanates of the East, and explores history-defining events such as the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the liberation of Nelson Mandela.

Enter a grave new world of fascination and delight as award-winning journalist Peter Ross uncovers the stories and glories of Britain's best graveyards. Who are London's outcast dead and why is David Bowie their guardian angel? How did a thousand skulls come to be stacked beneath a church in Kent? Why is the music hall star who sang "I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside" buried on a hillside in Glasgow far from the sound of the silvery sea?

Fuelled by a childhood fascination with death, journalist Hayley Campbell searches for answers in the people who make a living by working with the dead. Along the way, she encounters mass fatality investigators, embalmers and a former executioner who is responsible for ending 62 lives. She meets gravediggers who have already dug their own graves, visits a cryonics facility in Michigan, goes for late-night Chinese with a detective and questions a man whose job it is to make crime scenes disappear.

Haunted doesn't just thrill with the tales of the inexplicable, but also asks why are we so fascinated by ghost stories and what do they tell us about the community and people who cultivate them. Why are some tropes universal, while others are very much unique to the place they haunt? Do we actually care about the identity of the ghost? Or are we more concerned about how the alleged sighting made us feel?