(Untitled)

[mexicanwine]

because i'm making my amazon.com christmas wishlist:

what's your favorite ethnography?
or just anthropologically related book?
and if you want to, why?

mine's Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression by Steven Feld.

Comments

[wagrobanite]

The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist's Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo by Clea Koff

It was hard to pick just one of many forensic anthropologist books on my wish list (several of my family members have emailed me jokelying asking if I had a body buried somewhere that I wanted to cover up and/or that I was morbid). I want this book because of the grad schools (University of New Mexico) has a forensic anthropologist that has worked on Mass Graves and I find it fascinating.

[grey_gardens]

I agree with The Bone Woman - great book.

A few other than come to mind...

* Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil by Nancy Scheper-Hughes
* In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in the Barrio by Philippe Bourgois
* The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
* AIDS Doctors: Voices from The Epidemic, an oral history by Ronald Bayer and Gerald Oppenheimer

[leoparda]

Just about anything by Marvin Harris, I guess. I got "Cannibals and Kings" from a university library purge a decade or more ago, and I just love how he made things understandable for us laypeople.

[caatinga]

Oh man, I really liked William La Fleur's Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan! Very interesting, very readable.

[ladyofannwn]

ooo...that does sound interesting!

[hammer_time]

Parallel Worlds
Into the Heart
The Mountain People

[rantipole6]

Guests of the Sheik by Elizabeth Warnock Ferna. It's written by an anthropologist's wife who accompanied him to 1950's rural Iraq and lived life under a full veil to get to know the women of the village.