Adam Kuper’s iconoclastic intellectual history argues that the idea of “primitive society” is a western myth. The “primitive” is imagined as the opposite of the “civilised”. But this is a protean myth. As ideas about civilisation change, so the image of primitive society must be adjusted. By way of fascinating account of classic texts in anthropology, ancient history and law, Kuper reveals how this myth underpinned academic research and inspired political programmes. Its ancestry is traced back to classical western beliefs about barbarians and savages, and Kuper also tackles the latest version of the myth, the idea of a global identity of “indigenous peoples”. The Reinvention of Primitive Society is a key text in the history of anthropology, and will interest anyone who has puzzled about the very idea of “primitive society” – and so, by implication, about “civilisation”.

The Reinvention of Primitive Society critiques ideas about the origins of society and religion that have been hotly debated since Darwin. Tracing interpretations of the barbarian, savage and primitive back through the centuries to ancient Greece, Kuper challenges the myth of primitive society, a concept revived in its current form by the modern indigenous peoples’ movement: tapping into widespread popular beliefs regarding the noble savage and reflecting a romantic reaction against ‘civilisation’ and ‘science’. Through a fascinating analysis of seminal works in anthropology, classical studies and law, this book reveals how wholly mistaken theories can become the basis for academic research and political programmes. Lucidly written and highly influential since first publication, it is a must-have text for those interested in anthropological theory and post-colonial debates.

Both a critical history of anthropological theory and methods and a challenging essay in the sociology of science, The Invention of Primitive Society shows how anthropologists have tried to define the original form of human society.

2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award From an award-winning historian comes a dazzling history of the birth of cultural anthropology and the adventurous scientists who pioneered it—a sweeping chronicle of discovery and the fascinating origin story of our multicultural world. A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced." What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature. In Gods of the Upper Air, a masterful narrative history of radical ideas and passionate lives, Charles King shows how these intuitions led to a fundamental reimagining of human diversity. Boas's students were some of the century's most colorful figures and unsung visionaries: Margaret Mead, the outspoken field researcher whose Coming of Age in Samoa is among the most widely read works of social science of all time; Ruth Benedict, the great love of Mead's life, whose research shaped post-Second World War Japan; Ella Deloria, the Dakota Sioux activist who preserved the traditions of Native Americans on the Great Plains; and Zora Neale Hurston, whose studies under Boas fed directly into her now classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Together, they mapped civilizations from the American South to the South Pacific and from Caribbean islands to Manhattan's city streets, and unearthed an essential fact buried by centuries of prejudice: that humanity is an undivided whole. Their revolutionary findings would go on to inspire the fluid conceptions of identity we know today. Rich in drama, conflict, friendship, and love, Gods of the Upper Air is a brilliant and groundbreaking history of American progress and the opening of the modern mind.

Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is generally acclaimed as being among the most influential works of economic history in the twentieth century, and remains as vital in the current historical conjuncture as it was in his own. In its critique of nineteenth-century ‘market fundamentalism’ it reads as a warning to our own neoliberal age, and is widely touted as a prophetic guidebook for those who aspire to understand the causes and dynamics of global economic turbulence at the end of the 2000s. Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is the first comprehensive introduction to Polanyi’s ideas and legacy. It assesses not only the texts for which he is famous – prepared during his spells in American academia – but also his journalistic articles written in his first exile in Vienna, and lectures and pamphlets from his second exile, in Britain. It provides a detailed critical analysis of The Great Transformation, but also surveys Polanyi’s seminal writings in economic anthropology, the economic history of ancient and archaic societies, and political and economic theory. Its primary source base includes interviews with Polanyi’s daughter, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, as well as the entire compass of his own published and unpublished writings in English and German. This engaging and accessible introduction to Polanyi’s thinking will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences, providing a refreshing perspective on the roots of our current economic crisis.

Challenging the idea that fieldwork is the only way to gather data, and that standard methods are the sole route to fruitful analysis, Serendipity in Anthropological Research explores the role of fortune and happenstance in anthropology. It conceives of anthropological research as a lifelong nomadic journey of discovery in which the world yields an infinite number of unexplored issues and innumerable ways of studying them, each study producing its own questions and demanding its own methodologies. Drawing together the latest research from a team of senior scholars from around the world to reflect on the experience of research, Serendipity in Anthropological Research presents rich new case studies from Europe and the Middle East to examine both new and old questions in novel and enriching ways. An engaging examination of methodology and anthropological fieldwork, this book will appeal to all those concerned with writing ethnography.

A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel's future.