Want to know what books anthropology majors read for their degree? What we study (spoiler alert: way more than just witchcraft) and how we study them? Here is my book list!
Similar to how literature students read novels, poems, and perhaps nonfiction, anthropology students read texts called “ethnographies.” These books combine nonfiction narrative storytelling with theoretical insights, or are basically stories with a lot of commentary. Ethnographies are the result of living with a community for years, speaking the language, and participating in everyday life, and its value lies in how it teases out the nuances in lived experiences instead of studying events from a cozy armchair.
Now, my list is not what all anthropology majors read because prescribed books differ for each student depending on what courses they take and what school they’re attending. I also study socio-cultural anthropology, not biological anthropology. I don’t study the stuff about archaeology, ancient civilizations, and primates (I did take one course on those though and it was so fascinating!). Broadly speaking, I study human societies and cultures with a focus on how everyday experiences link to broader political, economic, historical, and social structures. I know, not quite Indiana Jones.
So without further ado, here are all the books I’ve read so far for my anthropology degree! This is around 2 years’ worth of school, and I’ve only included books that I read in full.
“Those who are most ‘fluent’ in the rituals, customs and traditions of a particular culture generally lack the detachment necessary to explain the ‘grammar’ of these practices in an intelligible manner. This is why we have anthropologists. Most people obey the unwritten rules of their society instinctively, without being conscious of doing so.”
I read this fun book for my Introduction to Socio-cultural Anthropology class! Watching the English is basically pop-anthropology made for entertainment as well as education, a book that introduces anthropological methods and theories in laypeople’s terms. In it, Fox analyzes the social norms underlying English culture—the ironic and understated sense of humor, class consciousness, gender, weather-speak, and politeness, among others—why people adhere to these norms and what happens when people break them.
Do you know how within your own culture, practices and rules are so normalized that they become invisible to you while the practices and rules of cultures you aren’t exposed to are very visible? Watching the English and anthropology more broadly de-normalize or de-naturalize these unwritten cultural practices and rules, emphasizing how much of what we take for granted as normal or “just the way things are” are actually mere social constructs. That’s why we often say anthropologists “make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar.”
Being an Englishwoman herself, Fox articulates the taken-for-granted social norms and expectations that permeate English society. With the precision of a surgeon and detachment of a forensic scientist, Fox dissects English behavior in hilariously objective terms. She does an excellent job of making “the familiar strange,” as she illustrates how just like any society, English culture is also riddled with practices, customs, and rituals—many of them very amusing.
Watching the English is an entertaining way to dip your toes into anthropology. But because it’s the pop-culture version of the discipline, the book’s methods and theories are all watered down. Fox also doesn’t link English social norms to broader political, economic, historical, and social structures, which is where I argue the real value of anthropological knowledge lies.
“An overemphasis on cultural difference can act like a smoke screen, drawing attention away from the unequal structures and power differences that produce suffering, absolving distant observers from any complicity in it.”
Infected Kin belongs to the subfield known as medical anthropology, where we examine how broader social structures shape health and illness experiences, and how health and illness are lenses for the analysis of broader social structures. This book is the result of anthropologist Block and nonfiction writer McGrath’s two years living in Mokhotlong, Lesotho where the HIV epidemic is the second worst in the world. Block and McGrath discuss the lived responses to the epidemic, how HIV breaks families up, and how Basotho people strategically access different kinds of healthcare, among others.
Out of all the books on this list, Infected Kin moved me the most. It seamlessly shifts between happiness and suffering, sadness and kindness, loss and love as Block and McGrath paint a picture of how global inequalities manifest in local contexts. Unlike other social sciences, the norm in anthropology is to write about the lives of the people the researcher conducted their research with. So with a blend of creative writing and anthropological scholarship, Block and McGrath share the lives of the Basotho people they worked with and argue how HIV/AIDS is ultimately about family.
This book fights back against cultural explanations for suffering and inequality—against explanations that link people’s poverty with “culture” and “ignorance,” for example. Contemporary anthropology never takes “primitive” and “backwards” as adequate answers for explaining culture either. Our goal, as always, is to understand culture on the culture’s own terms without value or moral judgments.
Some Basotho people, for example, don’t get tested for HIV/AIDS or take their medications not because they lack education, but because of chronic resource constraints, poverty, kinship relations, history, violence, structural inequalities, and so on. Invoking the anthropology adage, “make the familiar strange and the strange familiar” again, this book also discusses the utility of witchcraft—how people attributing supernatural causes to illness are not ignorant but are actually using witchcraft as a social resource, while exposing the shortcomings and cultural practices embedded in biomedicine.
I actually used the concepts from this book to write an essay about healthcare in Manila, because I saw some striking parallels between the two places despite having wildly different histories and geographical contexts.
“Strengthening the health system is not enough. We need to consider what it is that women want and start working with them.”
Now hooked on medical anthropology, I took a higher level course and read Unsafe Motherhood! This book primarily illustrates how far from just being biological or physiological phenomena, health and illness are actually deeply political. Berry chronicles why Safe Motherhood, a global health initiative that aims to decrease maternal mortality, is ineffective and how it instead damages the social network of indigenous Mayans in Sololá, Guatemala. She discusses kinship relations, Guatemalan birthing practices, how everyday violence is tied to historical violence, legacies of colonialism, and power relations not just on an international scale but also on an interpersonal scale.
Unsafe Motherhood made me understand so thoroughly the frequent disconnect between global health policies and on-the-ground practices due to the top-down approach of these campaigns. As a result, national and local contexts are not considered and such campaigns become ineffective and even harmful. Healthcare workers from Safe Motherhood, for example, look down on “ignorant” Mayans for not going to the hospital to give birth when in fact, historic state-sanctioned genocide, poverty, social obligations, strict Evangelical doctrines, and racism in hospital settings are large reasons why Mayans don’t access healthcare.
Safe Motherhood also operates on the assumption that biomedicine is superior and that other healthcare systems will eventually die out, when in fact that’s not the case nor is it desirable. Berry argues that what we take for granted as “neutral” or “objective” healthcare systems like biomedicine are actually not. Instead, they’re shaped by political and economic structures, and produce political and economic effects of their own.
This is the appeal of anthropology for me. In anthropology, nothing is really as neutral or objective as it seems. Because we live in a society, almost everything—if not everything—is embedded in cultural systems. In fact, what we consider “neutral” or “objective” are often Western or white European standards and practices. Anthropology taught me to think in a radically different way and to interrogate whatever it is we take for granted as the norm.
“This book turns attention to the nightmare face of globalization seldom addressed in the scholarly literature: to the lives, livelihoods, and struggles of people unable to move and “fixed” in space by economic hardship and by spatial practices restricting movement, citizenship rights, and access to a living wage.”
I read The Devil Behind the Mirror for a class on the anthropology of globalization. This book takes a microscopic look at how globalization impacts Andrés and Boca Chica, adjacent coastal towns in the Dominican Republic. Gregory tackled so many themes in this book, all of them revolving around the tourism economy. He discussed how global politics impact local livelihoods, the continuity of colonialism, social divisions of labor, migration, citizenship, sovereignty, transnational media, gender, and sex tourism.
The titular “devil” behind the mirror refers to commodity fetishism whereby people increasingly see themselves reflected in the commodities they buy. For example, we are our smartphones (a literal mirror!), our clothes, our cars, our jewelry, and so on. Of course, there’s something behind every commodity that makes it possible—financing, material resources, labor, and infrastructures. But it’s exactly this production process that contemporary globalization increasingly obscures. So what this ethnography does is trace the social, economic, and political processes that went into making certain commodities, and in the end we find a searing critique of globalization.
Globalization was initially imagined to be this giant equalizer where the increased flow of goods, capital, persons, technologies, and ideas will decrease global inequalities. But scholars notice the opposite happening—that globalization actually builds on, extends, and exacerbates historical forms of inequality. Hence, globalization is less like a flow but more of a point-to-point connection, and within that point-to-point connection, many places and people are left out and marginalized even further.
In The Devil Behind the Mirror, the promise of more capital brought in by foreign investors, US multinational corporations, and the privatization of state-owned industries was just an illusion. In fact, eversince transnational corporations and free trade zones were established in the area, local people in Andrés and Boca Chica increasingly worked in the informal economy. I was reading stories about people who were plagued by the uncertainty of day-to-day income and local companies in ruins. Hence, Gregory illustrates how globalization didn’t benefit the poor in the Dominican context, but the already-rich. In fact, it marginalized poor people even more.
“There is a series of phenomena of great importance which cannot possibly be recorded by questioning or computing documents, but have to be observed in their full actuality.”
This list wouldn’t be complete without classic anthropological texts! I read Argonauts for my history of anthropology course, which is appropriate given that it’s the ethnography that started it all. Written in 1922, Malinowski sought to understand the culture of the Trobrianders, people who live in the Kiriwina chain of islands in Papua New Guinea. He wrote about the Kula Exchange, the use of magic, the politics and economics of yams, and matrilineal kinship relations, among others.
In this book, Malinowski wrote against scholars who created speculative arguments and theories without having on-the-ground data as evidence. He thus sought to make the social sciences more “scientific” in the sense that the production of knowledge must be based on empirical evidence and objectivity, similar to the natural sciences. And in Argonauts, he outlined and demonstrated by example scientific methods to gather and analyze fieldwork stories and data.
Fun fact! Argonauts was considered radical at the time it was published, which was during the period of high colonialism when colonial powers were invested in portraying non-white people as backwards, primitive, and lazy for the authority of their rule depended on those constructs. It was also during this time when Eugenics, a discipline that sought to establish a scientific basis for racism, really took off. So, when Malinowski argued in Argonauts that non-white people are also just as reasonable as white people, he was alredy hailed as a forward and radical thinker among scholars. It’s hilarious and embarrassing, really. But that’s history for ya.
“Taking seriously the importance of women’s wealth not only brought women as the neglected half of society clearly into the ethnographic picture, but also forced me to revise many of Malinowski’s assumptions about Trobriand men.”
Anthropology scholars started to incorporate feminist lenses, methods, and representations into the discipline at the same time second-wave feminism rose into prominence in the 1970s. Published in 1988 then, Trobrianders is a feminist take on Argonauts. Because Malinowski only focused on men in his work, Weiner went back to the community Malinowski lived with and primarily explored women’s wealth. The book thus presents a comprehensive account of lisaladabu, a Kiriwinian women-only ritual of giving away banana leaf bundles and colored grass skirts.
Trobrianders challenged the systemic indifference of anthropology at the time towards women’s lives, and the idea that female-dominated aspects of culture are unserious research topics. We actually still see this in society today, as female-dominated interests like make-up and romance novels continue to be seen as shallow while male-dominated interests like sports and video games carry more cultural capital. Even when women were portrayed in early ethnographies, they were often written as passive objects rather than agentive actors moving in their own social fields. Hence, it was important for Weiner’s work to challenge the male-centric biases of Malinowski’s early work.
Honestly though, I didn’t enjoy reading Argonauts and Trobrianders because they were both so dry. Both of them are mostly just full-on descriptions of Trobriand culture, versus the other books I read that had political and economic critiques and analyses. Anthropology back then really was just invested in describing culture, not necessarily on analyzing broad social structures.
“Decolonized work requires the involvement of all parties in the research process, a breaking down of the boundaries between academia and the world, and a full recognition of anthropology’s so-called research subjects as thinkers and researchers in their own right.”
This is my favorite ethnography so far because it totally shaped my political and intellectual passion for decolonization! Decolonizing Ethnography analyzes the structural factors that prevent undocumented workers in “Hometown” (NJ, USA) from asserting their rights. On the one hand, they face threats of deportation, work accidents, and wage thefts as employers take advantage of their undocumented status while on the other hand, they lack unity, understanding of their rights, and collective action. Throughout all this, the quartet of researchers demonstrated by example how researcher-community collaboration is one of the best ways forward to decolonize anthropology.
First of all, this research team was so inspiring to read about. Bejarano and Goldstein are academic scholars while García and Juárez are undocumented immigrants, “Hometown” community members, and activists. The former two taught the latter two in anthropological methods, data collection, and research synthesis while the latter two taught the former two in activism, public advocacy, and community engagement. The dynamics between them show me a future anthropology where researchers and collaborators are all equal, where anthropology applies its criticisms on social inequality onto itself, and where theory finally becomes practice.
I’ve been curious and sensitive to colonization and its effects since I was young. I still remember being a kid, wondering why American music was always playing in Philippine radio stations and not understanding why Filipino music wasn’t being played in America. My 7-year-old brain didn’t have the words nor intellect to explain this unequal relation of power, but now I do.
This work to decolonize anthropology, however, is going to be a long one because colonial relations of power have shaped the discipline. Research back then was extractive, as white researchers usually went to non-white places just to collect data. European colonial domination also made it safe for often-white anthropologists to live with indigenous communities. It’s anthropology’s biggest sin to keep theorizing about suffering and inequities but not acting to alleviate them.
And so, decolonization doesn’t mean going back to a time when colonization has never touched a particular place or people (I argue that’s not possible nor is it productive). For the authors of Decolonizing Ethnography, decolonizing research means community-led research, public-facing outputs, and collaborative writing practices. Activist-anthropologists like them blend advocacy, activism, and research to make sure that research has material effects—that research doesn’t just stay with the people at the ivory tower.
Those are all the ethnographies and anthropology books I’ve read so far for my degree! What are some interesting books you’ve read for yours? Let me know in the comments!
If you’re looking for more intellectually stimulating books, then check out my feminist book list. I’ve used my anthropology training to write cultural analyses as well, so check that out if those sound interesting to you!
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That’s all for now. Thanks so much for reading!
— Alyanna
