Reading list

Anthropology: Verso Student Reading

Our Anthropology reading for the academic year ahead.

Verso Books28 August 2022

From Ed Morales' exploration of Latinx political identities to Lizzie O'Shea's look at how radical history can change our interaction with technology to Benedict Anderson's essential text on global nationalism, look no further for your anthropology fix.

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See all our recommended Student Reading here.

Forbidden Fruit

by Maurice Godelier

Translated by Nora Scott

What is incest? Is it universally prohibited? Does this prohibition concern only "biological" kinships or does it extend to various "social" kinships, such as those that are formed today in so-call...

Mimesis

by Valery Podoroga

Introduction by Ioulia Podoroga

Translated by Evgeni V. Pavlov

The Russian Revolution was a literary as well as political upheaval. With a focus on the revolutionary works of Andrei Platonov and the futurist collective Oberiu, leading Russian literary thinker ...

Mimesis

by Valery Podoroga

Translated by Evgeni V. Pavlov

Valery Podoroga was one of the most important thinkers of his generation. Here his most famous work is translated into English for the first time. In it he gives a panorama view of Russian writing,...

Ecology of Fear

by Mike Davis

Counterpointing Los Angeles’s central role in America’s fantasy life – the city has been destroyed no less than 138 times in novels and films since 1909 – with its wanton denial of its own real his...

City of Quartz

by Mike Davis

No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together." To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it." To Mi...

Prisoners of the American Dream

by Mike Davis

Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis’s brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world’s most industriall...

Planet of Slums

by Mike Davis

According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically u...

Late Victorian Holocausts

by Mike Davis

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship betw...

Future Histories

by Lizzie O'Shea

The key to understanding technology lies not in the future--but in the past. That's the contention of Lizzie O'Shea's Future Histories, a grand tour through past and present to explore the practica...

The Knowledge Economy

by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Adam Smith and Karl Marx recognized that the best way to understand the economy is to study the most advanced practice of production. Today that practice is no longer conventional manufacturing: it...

Latinx

by Ed Morales

“Latinx” (pronounced “La-teen-ex”) is the gender-neutral term that covers the largest racial minority in the United States, and the poorest but fastest-growing American group, whose political empow...

Imagined Communities

by Benedict Anderson

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and tran...

Critique of Everyday Life

by Henri Lefebvre

The three-volume text by Henri Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is now availabl...

Chasing the Harvest

by Voice of Witness

More than a million men, women, and children work in American agriculture, and yet their stories are rarely told, their low-wage jobs are not included in minimum-wage ordinances or campaigns, and t...

Inside This Place, Not of It

by Voice of Witness

Foreword by Michelle Alexander

Inside This Place, Not of It reveals some of the most egregious human rights violations within women’s prisons in the United States. In their own words, the thirteen narrators in this book recount ...

Close to Home

by Christine Delphy

Foreword by Rachel Hills

Translated by Diana Leonard

Close to Home is the classic study of family, patriarchal ideologies, and the politics and strategy of women’s liberation. On the table in this forceful and provocative debate are questions of whet...

The Invention of the Jewish People

by Shlomo Sand

Translated by Yael Lotan

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 ce...

Homo Juridicus

by Alain Supiot

Translated by Saskia Brown

In this groundbreaking work, French legal scholar Alain Supiot examines the relationship of society to legal discourse. He argues that the law is how justice is implemented in secular society, but ...

Work

by Andrea Komlosy

Translated by Loren Balhorn and Jacob Watson

Andrea Komlosy argues in this important intervention that, when we examine it closely, work changes its meanings according to different historical and regional contexts. Globalizing labour history ...

The Origin of Capitalism

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

In The Origin of Capitalism, a now-classic work of history, Ellen Meiksins Wood offers readers a clear and accessible introduction to the theories and debates concerning the birth of capitalism, im...

A Social History of Western Political Thought

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites the history of political theory, from Plato to Rousseau. Treating canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood examines th...

The Hidden Injuries of Class

by Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett

In this reissue of the 1972 classic of social anatomy, Richard Sennets adds a new introduction to shows how the injuries of class persist into the 21st century. In this intrepid, groundbreaking boo...

Social Class in Europe

by Cédric Hugrée, Étienne Penissat and Alexis Spire

Over the last ten years the issue of Europe has been placed at the centre of major political conflicts, revealing profound splits in society. These splits are represented in terms of an opposition ...

Planet of Slums

by Mike Davis

Imagined Communities

by Benedict Anderson

Critique of Everyday Life

by Henri Lefebvre

The three-volume text by Henri Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is now availabl...

Chasing the Harvest

by Voice of Witness

Lavil

by Voice of Witness

Half a dozen years after the deadliest earthquake in the history of the Western Hemisphere struck Haiti, the island nation remains in crisis, but the international community no longer seems interes...

Homo Juridicus

by Alain Supiot

Translated by Saskia Brown

The Social Origins of Private Life

by Stephanie Coontz

Current debates about the future of the family are often based on serious misconceptions about its past. Arguing that there is no biologically mandated or universally functional family form, Stepha...

The Mental and the Material

by Maurice Godelier

Translated by Martin Thom

What is the specificity of the human race within nature? How is its history to be explained? What impact do material realities, natural and man-made, have on human beings? What role does thought, i...

Explore Everything

by Bradley L. Garrett

What does it feel like to find the city’s edge, to explore its forgotten tunnels and scale unfinished skyscrapers high above the metropolis? Explore Everything reclaims the city, recasting it as a ...

America

by Jean Baudrillard

Introduction by Geoff Dyer

Translated by Chris Turner

From the sierras of New Mexico to the streets of New York and LA by night—”a sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity”—Baudrillard mixes aperçus and observations with a wicked sense of f...

Abnormal

by Michel Foucault

Three decades after his death, Michel Foucault remains one of the towering intellectual figures of the last half-century. His works on sexuality, madness, the prison, and medicine are enduring clas...

Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial

Contributions by David Arnold, C.A. Bayly, Tom Brass, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, Rosalind O'Hanlon, Gyanendra Pandey, Gyan Prakash, Sumit Sarkar, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Washbrook

Edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi

Inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the history of subaltern classes, the authors in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial sought to contest the elite histories of Indian nationalist...

The Other

by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Introduction by Neal Ascherson

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Introduction by Neal AschersonIn our globalised but increasingly polarised age, Kapuscinski shows how the Other remains one of the most compelling ideas of our times.In this reflection on a lifetim...

Freud and the Non-European

by Edward W. Said

Introduction by Christopher Bollas

Contributions by Jacqueline Rose

Using an impressive array of material from literature, archaeology and social theory, Edward Said explores the profound implications of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism for Middle-East politics today. ...

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