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The Way of the Barbarians

Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China

By Shao-yun Yang

Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that...

Roses from Kenya

Labor, Environment, and the Global Trade in Cut Flowers

By Megan A. Styles. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Kenya supplies more than 35 percent of the fresh-cut roses and other flowers sold annually in the European Union. This industry—which employs at least 90,000 workers, most of whom are women—is lucrative but enduringly controversial....

The Shaman's Wages

Trading in Ritual on Cheju Island

By Kyoim Yun

Breaking from previous scholarship on Korean shamanism, which focuses on mansin of mainland Korea, The Shaman’s Wages offers the first in-depth study of simbang, hereditary shamans on Cheju Island off the peninsula’s southwest coast. In...

The Kongs of Qufu

The Descendants of Confucius in Late Imperial China

By Christopher S. Agnew

The city of Qufu, in north China’s Shandong Province, is famous as the hometown of Kong Qiu (551–479 BCE)—known as Confucius in English and as Kongzi or Kong Fuzi in Chinese. In The Kongs of...

The Gift of Knowledge / Ttnúwit Átawish Nch'inch'imamí

Reflections on Sahaptin Ways

By Virginia R. Beavert and Janne L. Underriner

The Gift of Knowledge / Ttnuwit Atawish Nch’inch’imamí is a treasure trove of material for those interested in Native American culture. Author Virginia Beavert grew up in a traditional, Indian-speaking household. Both her parents and...

Striking Iron

The Art of African Blacksmiths

By Allen F. Roberts, Tom Joyce, Marla C. Berns

Striking Iron combines interdisciplinary scholarship with vivid illustrations to offer the most comprehensive treatment of the blacksmith’s art in sub-Saharan Africa to date. For more than two millennia, African blacksmiths have transformed one of Earth’s...

The Nuosu Book of Origins

A Creation Epic from Southwest China

By Mark Bender, Qingchun Luo, Jjivot Zopqu

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295745701.s01

The Nuosu people, who were once overlords of vast tracts of farmland and forest in the uplands of southern Sichuan and neighboring provinces, are the largest division of the Yi ethnic group...

Tea and Solidarity

Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka

By Mythri Jegathesan

Beyond nostalgic tea industry ads romanticizing colonial Ceylon and the impoverished conditions that beleaguer Tamil tea workers are the stories of the women, men, and children who have built their families and lives in line...

Working with the Ancestors

Mana and Place in the Marquesas Islands

By Emily C. Donaldson. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Throughout the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia, forest spirits share space with ancestral ruins and active agricultural plots, affecting land use and heritage preservation. As Marquesans continue their efforts to establish UNESCO World Heritage status,...

The New Way

Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam

By Tâm T. T. Ngô

In the mid-1980s, a radio program with a compelling spiritual message was accidentally received by listeners in Vietnam’s remote northern highlands. The Protestant evangelical communication had been created in the Hmong language by the Far...

Living with Oil and Coal

Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India

By Dolly Kikon. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

The nineteenth-century discovery of oil in the eastern Himalayan foothills, together with the establishment of tea plantations and other extractive industries, continues to have a profound impact on life in the region. In the Indian...

At the Bridge

James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging

By Wendy Wickwire

At the Bridge chronicles the little‑known story of James Teit, a prolific ethnographer who, from 1884 to 1922, worked with and advocated for the Indigenous peoples of British Columbia and the northwestern United States. From...

Marrying for a Future

Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War

By Sidharthan Maunaguru

The civil war between the Sri Lankan state and Tamil militants, which ended in 2009, lasted more than three decades and led to mass migration, mainly to India, Canada, England, and continental Europe. In Marrying...

Lookout Cave

The Archaeology of Perishable Remains on the Northern Plains

By John H. Brumley. Photographs by James Marshall

In the mid-1960s as a young high school student, John Brumley visited Lookout Cave for the first time and knew immediately that the site was exceptional. The cave, located in north central Montana, was initially...

Sensitive Space

Fragmented Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border

By Jason Cons

Enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border have posed conceptual and pragmatic challenges to both states since Partition in 1947. These pieces of India inside of Bangladesh, and vice versa, are spaces in which national security, belonging,...

Caring for Glaciers

Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas

By Karine Gagné. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Regional geopolitical processes have turned the Himalayan region of Ladakh, in northwest India, into a strategic border area with an increasing military presence that has decentered the traditional agropastoralist economy. This in turn has led...

Footbinding as Fashion

Ethnicity, Labor, and Status in Traditional China

By John Robert Shepherd

Previous studies of the practice of footbinding in imperial China have theorized that it expressed ethnic identity or that it served an economic function. By analyzing the popularity of footbinding in different places and times,...

Seawomen of Iceland

Survival on the Edge

By Margaret Willson

Finalist for the 2017 Washington State Book Award in General Nonfiction / History

The plaque said this was the winter fishing hut of Thurídur Einarsdóttir, one of Iceland's greatest fishing captains, and that she lived from...

The Afterlife of Sai Baba

Competing Visions of a Global Saint

By Karline McLain

Nearly a century after his death, the image of Sai Baba, the serene old man with the white beard from Shirdi village in Maharashtra, India, is instantly recognizable to most South Asians (and many Westerners)...

Privileged Minorities

Syrian Christianity, Gender, and Minority Rights in Postcolonial India

By Sonja Thomas

Although demographically a minority in Kerala, India, Syrian Christians are not a subordinated community. They are caste-, race-, and class-privileged, and have long benefitted, both economically and socially, from their privileged position. Focusing on Syrian...