Henrietta L Moore: The Subject of Anthropology:Gender, Symbolism and Psychoanalysis

‘This book is invaluable – there is nothing else like it. Well-organized and beautifully written, it is also clear as a bell, which is no mean feat when dealing with these complex and abstruse issues.’

Emily Martin, New York University

Irving M. Zeitlin:The Historical Muhammad

In his quest for the historical Muhammad, Zeitlin’s chief aim is to catch a few reliable glimpses of the birth of Islam and the role played by its extraordinary founder. Islam, as its Prophet came to conceive it, was a strict and absolute monotheism. Zeitlin tries to assess the extent to which these other religious influences shaped the emergence of Islam and the development of the Prophet’s beliefs.

Massimo Livi Bacci:Conquest:The Destruction of the American Indios

The arrival of Europeans in the American continent brought with them a demographic catastrophe of vast proportions for the native populations. What were the causes? The surviving documentation is extraordinarily rich: conquistadors, religious figures, administrators, officials, and merchants kept records, carried out inquiries, and issued edicts. The native world, for its part, has also left eloquent traces of events as well as direct testimony of its harsh subjugation at the hands of the Europeans. Through these sources, this book demonstrates how not only the ‘imported’ diseases but also a series of economic and social factors played a role in the disastrous decline of the Indios.

Wolfgang Behringer:Witches and Witch-Hunts: A global History

‘Wolfgang Behringer establishes the importance of a truly global history of witchcraft. Setting aside familiar Western notions, he deploys a more comprehensive definition of witchcraft as the malicious use of evil magic. He brilliantly sketches the history of European witch-hunting and uses this to illuminate the twentieth-century struggle against witches in many parts of the post-colonial world such as South America, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. This book marks a real advance in our understanding of witchcraft, and a remarkable and astute blending of anthropology with history.’

H. C. Erik Midelfort, C. Julian Bishko Professor of History and Religious Studies, University of Virginia

Fred Inglis:Clifford Geertz

'Fred Inglis's biography is useful and charming. It is useful because it contains so many facts, and because it is perhaps the most detailed intellectual analysis of Geertz's work now available.'

Times Literary Supplement

Moore : Feminism and Anthropology

'I do not know of any other work which gives one such a sense of the scope and substance of feminist scholarship within anthropology. This is no abstract debate about possibilities: with rare intelligence Moore sanely and superbly charts what has already been done and consequently what lies ahead. The book's breadth of vision is generous, its approach authoritative, and its final critique of the limitations as well as the promises of feminist anthropology resounding'

Marilyn Strathern, University of Manchester

Hodder: Archaeological Theory Today

This volume provides an authoritative account of the current status of archaeological theory, as presented by some of its major exponents and innovators over the last decade. It summarizes recent developments and looks to the future, exploring some of the cutting-edge ideas at the forefront of the discipline.

Sørensen: Gender Archaeology

'For a penetrating analysis of the state of gender archaeology today, and an extended discussion of the ways in which archaeology can best contribute to understanding gender, this book is extremely important ... Clear and cogent, this book will be of interest to all archaeologists because of its emphasis on the materiality of gender.'

Journal of Anthropological Research

This major new textbook explores the relations between gender and archaeology, providing an innovative and important account of how material culture is used in the construction of gender.