Top 10 books of everyday social anthropology | Books | The Guardian

defining what anthropology really is sometimes feels like chasing soap in the bathroom. we all know that we are shaped by cultural patterns that we inherit from our environment. but we rarely know what determines that “culture” or how to discuss cultural difference, much less in a world where diversity issues now generate so much political heat. Just to add to the challenge, the branch of social science that studies human cultures, called social anthropology, has a contradictory past: while it champions diversity today, it has a racist and imperial past unknown to modern anthropologists.

but while culture is hard to define, no one can ignore it, certainly not in a world so globalized and dangerously polarized that we clearly need to gain empathy for others. and there is another urgent reason to think about culture today: covid-19 has thrown us all into a new form of culture shock, as the lockdown pushed us into cyberspace with extraordinary speed, and a return to physical life, ” real” is forcing us to rethink how we structure our lives all over again. My own book, Anthro-Vision, discusses why culture, and culture shock, is worth thinking about in the digital age, drawing on my training as an anthropologist and my work as a business and financial journalist. but here are 10 other books that help explain why culture and anthropology are so important today.

You are reading: Good books on anthropology

1. think like an anthropologist by matthew engelkebrilliant, lively, short (sort of) introduction to the key issues shaping anthropology. the ideal introduction for a general reader, a student, or the parent of a teenager who doesn’t understand why her son wants to study anthropology instead of accounting. (don’t worry, they can still find a job).

2. gods of upper air: how a circle of renegade anthropologists reinvented race, sex, and gender in the 20th century by charles kingthe title is weird but this is a really fantastic book about the history of anthropology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of modern Western thought or the current debate on diversity issues. it is a vivid insight into a part of western history that tends to be ignored. A must have for anyone involved in legal, government and corporate politics.

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3. The World’s Weirdest People: How the West Became Psychologically Quirky and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henry One of my favorite books from last year. henrich trained as an aeronautical engineer but later became an anthropologist and evolutionary biologist and this renaissance training allows him to write brilliantly about the peculiarities of today’s strange, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic western societies. it emphasizes how aberrant the alien culture is. You will never look at psychology experiments the same way again after reading this; or ignore how literacy and individual identity affect our thoughts.

4. debt, the first 5,000 years by david graeber this book came out just after the 2008 financial crisis and is one of the most brilliant explanations by any social scientist of the underlying structural patterns that created the great financial crisis. Graeber died suddenly last year, but his book remains even more relevant today, as Graeber challenges many of the ideas economists have absorbed about barter, debt, and credit. Necessary reading for any economist and financier, or anyone who has ever wondered about the cultural and historical context of their mortgage or credit card.

5. Seeing English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior by Kate Fox This is a delightful book from an academic who is not only an anthropologist, but her father, Robin Fox, has played a pivotal role in the development of the twentieth century. century anthropology. offers a masterful cultural analysis of the peculiarities of English culture that will make you rethink things like the English gambling industry and our tendency to talk endlessly about the weather. But the story also illustrates a crucial point about anthropology: Although the discipline used to focus on non-Western cultures, it now studies the West as well. thus, while robin fox analyzed mexico, her daughter has turned the lens to analyze her supposedly “native” English land. both perspectives are fascinating.

6. ghost work: how to stop silicon valley from building a new global underclass by mary l gray and siddharth suri He works in a microsoft research unit. she uses her discipline to highlight an embarrassing and overlooked aspect of the world of modern technology, namely “ghost” (or contract) workers, and thankfully the seattle tech giant didn’t try to stop her from posting this . The fact that she has written it together with Suri, a computer scientist, illustrates another important aspect of modern anthropology: it can perform cutting-edge analysis when combined with other specialties.