In this book, James Boon ranges through history and around the globe in a series of provocative reflections on the limitations, attractions, and ambiguities of cultural interpretation. The book reflects the unusual keyword of its title, extra-vagance, a term Thoreau used to refer to thought that skirts traditional boundaries. Boon follows Thoreau's lead by broaching subjects as diverse as Balinese ritual, Montaigne, Chaucer, Tarzan, Perry Mason, opera, and the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Ruth Benedict, Kenneth Burke, and Mary Douglas. He makes creative and often playful leaps among eclectic texts and rituals that do not hold single, fixed meanings, but numerous, changing, and exceedingly specific ones. Boon opens by exploring links between ritual and reading, focusing on commentaries about the seclusion of menstruating women in Native American culture, trance dances in Bali, and circumcision (or lack of it) in contrasting religions. He considers the ironies of "first-person ethnography" by telling stories from his own fieldwork, reflecting on ethnological museums, and making seriocomic connections between Mark Twain and Marcel Mauss. In expansive discussions that touch on Manhattan and Sri Lanka, the Louvre and the "World of Coca-Cola" museum, willfully obscure academic theory and shamelessly commercial show business, Boon underlines the inadequacies of simple ideologies and pat generalizations. The book is a profound and eloquent exploration of cultural comparison by one of America's most original and innovative anthropologists.

"The earliest biography of Sojourner Truth, the Black abolitionist and women's rights activist. Blockson calls this work "one of the earliest narratives of an American black slave woman." Indeed, it is one of the most remarkable books of the period and almost certainly the first work dedicated to supporting the credibility of the testimony of a black woman in a period of very weak legal protections, when accusations and prejudice triumphed over evidence. The work, written by British-born newspaper editor Gilbert Vale, consists of a narrative of Isabella Baumfree, before she changed her name to Sojourner Truth. Based on careful interviews he made with her, it was written in response to the sensationalist murder of Elijah Pierson in the religious cult under the patriarchal dominance of a misogynist white male "prophet" called Matthias. Isabella was officially a servant in the homes of two of the cult's members. The work was intended as a full-throated public rebuke of William Stone's 1835 work Matthias and His Impostures; or the Progress of Fanatacism Illustrated in the Extraordinary Case of Robert Matthews. He accuses Stone of "transferring the sins he has taken under his protection to others not guilty of the crimes, but unfortunately poor, uneducated, and coloured. He could expect no defence from a woman, formally a slave incapable of reading or writing." This work supplied Truth with the necessary legal defence: she successfully sued her accusers for slander, becoming the first black person to win such a suit. Ref: Humez, Jean M. "Reading 'The Narrative of Sojourner Truth' as a Collaborative Text." Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, University of Nebraska Press, 1996, pp. 29-52."--

The Social Science Encyclopedia, first published in 1985 to acclaim from social scientists, librarians and students, was thoroughly revised in 1996, when reviewers began to describe it as a classic. This third edition has been radically recast. Over half the entries are new or have been entirely rewritten, and most of the balance have been substantially revised. Written by an international team of contributors, the Encyclopedia offers a global perspective on key issues within the social sciences. Some 500 entries cover a variety of enduring and newly vital areas of study and research methods. Experts review theoretical debates from neo-evolutionism and rational choice theory to poststructuralism, and address the great questions that cut across the social sciences. What is the influence of genes on behaviour? What is the nature of consciousness and cognition? What are the causes of poverty and wealth? What are the roots of conflict, wars, revolutions and genocidal violence? This authoritative reference work is aimed at anyone with a serious interest in contemporary academic thinking about the individual in society.