100 Books Like The Sexual Life of Savages in North Western Melanesia

Totem and Taboo is among Freud's most-maligned works. 

It struck me like lightning when I picked up a copy in a Sydney bookstore during a break from fieldwork in a New Guinea Highlands village.  Like nothing else I had read as a graduate student in anthropology in New York, it seemed to describe what I was actually experiencing and learning. 

Freud discovered Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics not because he was racist, sexist, and imperialist, as all late 19thC European bourgeois white men are supposed to have been, but rather because, like the neurotics who came to his consulting room, the myths and rituals of small-scale, kinship-based, non-literate societies fixate upon problems of individual development, the child who persists in all of us.

This is a very short book with a single brilliant insight into the human condition. 

It shows how wrong it is to suppose (as Marx and Engels did) that first there were self-sufficient nuclear families who then produced surpluses to exchange with other nuclear families. 

Mauss used early fieldwork in the South Pacific and Northwest Coast of Canada, to demonstrate that exchange is the very essence of human social life, inseparable from the incest taboo, marriage rules, and a fully realized highly elaborate symbolic universe based upon principles of animism, sympathetic magic and rites of passage. 

I am deeply persuaded by psychoanalysis as a rational scientific theory of the unconscious mind which, if it exists as Freud describes it, has a determining role in nearly every aspect of individual and social life among ourselves and exotic others. 

But most scholars, feminists especially (of whom I consider myself one), even when they acknowledge Freud's genius, "then proceed to dismiss the whole business as hopelessly out of date and culture-bound." 

This collection of essays, a series of paired expositions by classic thinkers and eminent scholars in many fields in dialogue with each other, provides an in-depth overview of the debate about 'women and analysis.' 

Given the general skepticism about Freud, it is hard to find a brilliant application of his theory of psychoanalysis in anthropology that also focuses on women. 

This book about Hindu-Buddhist religious devotees at Kataragama in southeastern Sri Lanka includes detailed case studies of female ascetic-ecstatics that explore the symbolism of long locks of matted hair. Obeyesekere demonstrates that the conventional distinction between personal and cultural symbols is inadequate and naive. 

Malinowski's pioneering work on people of the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea still holds a thrill because, after a century, it remains unique in its depth and precision. 

Malinowski was an aristocrat and a snob who, like the armchair thinkers he admired, considered himself a scientist after Darwin. But when World War I broke out, as a Pole in London, he risked deportation to Austria-Hungary or internment as an 'enemy alien'.

Instead, Malinowski remained 'stuck' in the Trobriands for the duration of the War where, with the scrupulousness of one trained in math and physics and the intensity of an 'imprisoned' participant-observer, he produced the first firsthand accounts of indigenous life.  

Though I am not an anthropologist, I devour ethnographies with a gusto that can only be attributed to disciplinary envy. There are several fascinating ethnographies of emotions and how they differ across cultures. Beatty’s book stands out among them for its rich ethnographic description as well as the sophistication with which he treats the relationship of emotion and culture.

He spots the limitations that lab experiments impose on studying emotions and suggests instead that we have to pay attention to the narratives in which emotions are situated, made, and deemed meaningful. And I rather like how he punctures “affect theory.”

I pity current practitioners of academic anthropology. Is there any human society today without the smartphone? It is then all the more valuable to read accounts of art-making derived from fieldwork among pre-industrial, pre-tech communities.

Ellen Dissanayake’s work, seasoned by (pre-phone) research experience in Asia, Africa, and Papua New Guinea, argues urgently for art as a common human necessity.

To me, an important book should: (1) help us to understand and see things differently; (2) be based on careful research and empirically based; and (3) stand the test of time.

Motivating others is the primary purpose if leaders. McClelland led research into the unconscious processes that motivate people. Using projective techniques and latent coding of myths, folklore, music, prayers, literature and such, he and his colleagues unlocked the deeper messages socialized into people. In this book, McClelland reveals a rich 50 year history of rigorous research from psychology, anthropology, sociology, and history. His theory of motivation is the most liberating and useful, as well as validated through voluminous research. He compiled and updated his many books, articles and those of colleagues in this, his last magnum opus. If you wish to learn about Needs for Achievement, Affiliation and Power and how they explain everything from effectiveness to relationships to… show more.

According to Julian Jaynes, the mentality predating consciousness was bicameral. To appreciate the subtlety of his arguments, a grand historical sweep is needed.

At over a thousand pages, this magisterial tour through the origins and impact of anthropology, sociology, linguistics, economics, and psychology affords context by showing how, from the sixteenth century to the present day, the emergence of a post-bicameral, introspective language of the self-played out in modern times.

This is to me is the best book ever written for understanding what human beings are, how we are similar to and different from other animal species, how we develop from helpless newborns to fully functioning adults, and what we are striving for in our lives. Most nonfiction books make a point and then repeat it over and over with examples and anecdotes. In contrast, The Birth and Death of Meaning begins with evolution and progresses logically from its first page to its last. When you finish this book, you will have a much better understanding of yourself, the people in your life, historical and current events, and problems ranging from anxiety and depression to interpersonal conflict to prejudice.