Ethnography Reading Guide

This book is about the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China.

Morten Axel Pedersen explores how the Darhad people of Northern Mongolia's remote Shishged Valley have understood and responded to the disruptive transition to postsocialism by engaging with shamanic beliefs and practices associated with the past.

Cultural anthropologist Bilinda Straight, who has lived with the Samburu for extended periods since the 1990s, bears witness to Samburu life and death in Miracles and Extraordinary Experience in Northern Kenya.

Desjarlais provides an intimate, philosophical account of death and mourning practices among Hyolmo Buddhists, an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people from Nepal.

On the Run in Siberia is a pulse-pounding tale of idealism, political corruption, starvation, and survival (with a timely assist from Vladimir Putin) as well as a striking portrait of the Yukaghirs' shamanistic tradition and their threatened way of life.

Lila Abu-Lughod lived with a community of Bedouins in the Western Desert of Egypt for nearly two years, studying gender relations and the oral lyric poetry through which women and young men express personal feelings.

The 1937 anthropological study of the Azande of the southern Sudan

When Men Are Women examines the unique world of the nomadic Gabra people, a camel-herding society in northern Kenya. Gabra men denigrate women and feminine things, yet regard their most prestigious men as women.

This suspenseful and moving memoir of Africa recounts the experiences of Alma Gottlieb, an anthropologist, and Philip Graham, a fiction writer, as they lived in two remote villages in the rain forest of Cote d'Ivoire.

In this bestselling book, Colin Turnbull, a British cultural anthropologist, details the incredible Mbuti pygmy people and their love of the forest, and each other.

Explores the beer drinking rituals of the rural, Xhosa-speaking people of South Africa's Eastern Cape province.

This memoir reveals, for the first time, what life is really like among the Romany Gypsies. It is a culture apart, one that is equally more criminal and more puritanical than our own.

From 1966 to 2000 Carol Miller lived among the Machvaia gypsies during their Heyday.

Combining the various roles and expectations involved in working with Gypsies and local government at the same time as conducting anthropological research, provides the overall perspective of this study.

The life story of Ishi, the Yahi Indian, lone survivor of a doomed tribe, is unique in the annals of North American anthropology.

In the summer of 1933 in Lawton, Oklahoma, a team of six anthropologists met with eighteen Comanche elders to record the latter's reminiscences of traditional Comanche culture.

This book investigates how Navajos navigate their medically and religiously pluralistic world while coping with illness.

Jessica R. Cattelino tells the story of Seminoles' complex efforts to maintain politically and culturally distinct values in a time of new prosperity.

Margaret Mead wrote this comprehensive sketch of the culture of the United States - the first since de Tocqueville - in 1942 at the beginning of the Second World War, when Americans were confronted by foreign powers from both Europe and Asia in a particularly challenging manner.

By the end of the millennium, thousands of homeless people roamed the streets of Manhattan. A small group of them went underground. Invisible to society, they managed to start a new life in the tunnel systems of the city.

From Gustavo Politis, one of the most renowned South American archaeologists, comes the first in-depth study in English of the last "undiscovered" people of the Amazon.

In the best tradition of participant observation, anthropologist David Graeber undertakes the first detailed ethnographic study of the global justice movement.

The Peoples of Southeast Asia Today offers an anthropological treatment of the ethnography and ethnology of Southeast Asia, covering both the mainland and the insular regions.

This personal account by a biocultural anthropologist illuminates important messages involving the sobering aspects of conducting fieldwork among malnourished children in West Africa.

A 2004 travelogue by author J. Maarten Troost describing the two years he and his girlfriend spent living on the Tarawa atoll in the Pacific island nation of Kiribati.

Highly illustrated and accessibly written, this book offers a fascinating exploration of material culture in the Japanese house and home.

Journeying around the globe, through past and present, Emma Tarlo unravels the intriguing story of human hair and what it tells us about ourselves and society.

This detailed ethnography explores the effects of globalization on two Sardinian festivals over the course of the twentieth century, reflecting the double pull of tradition and modernity on the popular imagination and their sometimes devastating effects on local cultures.

One of the more problematic sport spectacles in American history took place at the 1904 World?s Fair in St. Louis, which included the third modern Olympic Games. Associated with the Games was a curious event known as Anthropology Days organized by William J. McGee and James Sullivan, at that time the leading figures in American anthropology and sports, respectively. McGee recruited Natives who were participating in the fair?s ethnic displays to compete in sports events, with the "scientific" goal of measuring the physical prowess of "savages" as compared with "civilized" men.

In this classic book, Michael Taussig explores the social significance of the devil in the folklore of contemporary plantation workers and miners in South America.

This classic of urban anthropology, offers vivid, literary descriptions of Fontana del Re, an impoverished Neapolitan neighborhood.

Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops grapples with the implications of globalization and neoliberalism for urban youth in Africa today.

Based on two years of fieldwork conducted in the city of Fes, Rachel Newcomb's Women of Fes offers valuable insights into the everyday lives of Moroccan women.

Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and death that centres on the lives of the women and children of a hillside "favela".

An account of the experiences of men who are repeatedly arrested for public drunkenness.

For over a decade Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg followed a social network of two dozen heroin injectors and crack smokers on the streets of San Francisco, accompanying them as they scrambled to generate income through burglary, panhandling, recycling, and day labor.

William Foote Whyte's account of the Italian American slum he called "Cornerville" - Boston's North End - has been the model for urban ethnography for fifty years.

The story of the young sociologist who studied a Chicago crack-dealing gang from the inside

Hunter S. Thompson's vivid account of his experiences with California's most notorious motorcycle gang, the Hell's Angels.

A widely-praised piece of investigative reporting examining the journey of 26 men who in May 2001 attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of Southern Arizona through the region known as the Devil's Highway.

By interviewing a group of Paris residents in the summer of 1960, Rouch and Morin reveal the hopes and dreams of a wide array of people and give us a document of a time and place with extraordinary depth.

Drawing on years of fieldwork with Tamil filmmakers, artists, musicians, and craftsmen in the south Indian movie studios of "Kollywood," Anand Pandian examines how ordinary moments become elements of a cinematic world.