这是一本人类学著作，讲述礼物交换在人类多种社会形态中的地位和重要性，以及它在社会关系的生产和再生产中的作用。礼物和礼物赠与的理论，基本上就是研究那种其价值可以转移的物件交换，无论是其象征价值还是经济价值。在本书中，著名法国人类学家莫里斯·古德利尔对关于礼物在社会生活和社会关系中重要性的各种观念进行了重新探讨，他着重研究的是那些神圣之物，它们具有价值，但从不交换。 本书的开头部分对马塞尔·莫斯和克劳德·列维-斯特劳斯在这一方面的开创性著作进行了仔细分析，然后介绍作者自己在美拉尼西亚的田野调查。古德利尔认为，那些传统的礼物理论都有缺陷，因为它们只考虑那些交换性的物件。他本人在神圣之物和与神圣之物相联系的权威授予这个领域中来解释礼物赠与，对当代和传统的礼物赠与理论都提出了挑战，为这个传统性的争辩课题注入了令人兴奋的活力。 在礼物理论方面，《礼物之谜》是当前一份重大的理论贡献，也是礼物理论史的一本精要指南。

From Publishers Weekly The timely question, What caused the current global financial crisis? provokes answers usually aimed at the level of institutions and the more abstract market logic. Ho's refreshing ethnography of the daily lives of Wall Street investment bankers takes another tack and outlines a web of practices, beliefs and structures that may be vital to understanding what keeps the market system in place despite built-in instabilities. Ho, a former business analyst and now an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, unpacks constant downsizing, high risk/high reward job liquidity, shortsighted compensation structures, prestige and the ruse of shareholder value. Her keen eye for the significance of space illuminates workplace narratives, e.g., segregating staff by floor, function and prestige; constant and lavish recruiting events at Princeton and Harvard; and anticlimactically tawdry office space for most workers. The author exposes how elite undergraduates are immersed in a culture promoting finance as the only legitimate job, how educational pedigrees reinforce the financial world's self-image—while the actual jobs remain rigidly hierarchical (stratifying women, people of color and non–Ivy League graduates), highly unstable and isolating, encouraging a culture in which making money is the only value. (Aug.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review "We're pretty familiar with the economic rationale for the regime of cost-cutting and downsizing throughout corporate America in recent decades. But Karen Ho's research greatly enriches our understanding of how Wall Street's own peculiar culture of transient relationships and relentless competition has contributed to the shareholder revolution. And, along the way, her interviews and fieldwork offer a very revealing picture of the mind of Wall Street. A fascinating and important book." Doug Henwood, editor of Left Business Observer " Karen Ho has picked an excellent time to publish her fascinating new study...patient ethnographic analysis has produced a fascinating portrait that will be refreshingly novel to most bankers...Ho peppers her account with revealing eyewitness stories...Most fascinating of all is her account of how Wall Street becomes deluded by its own rhetoric about "market efficiency"...I, for one, would vote that Ho's account becomes mandatory reading on any MBA (or investment banking course); if nothing else, it might be more entertaining than the other texts that bankers swallow so uncritically." Gillian Tett, Financial Times, 2nd October 2009

A lively and provocative look at how evolution shapes our behavior and our lives.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, our brains and bodies are hardwired to carry out an evolutionary mission that determines much of what we do, from life plans to everyday decisions.

With an accessible tone and a healthy disregard for political correctness, this lively and eminently readable book popularizes the latest research in a cutting-edge field of study-one that turns much of what we thought we knew about human nature upside-down.

Every time we fall in love, fight with our spouse, enjoy watching a favorite TV show, or feel scared--walking alone at night, we are in part behaving as a human animal with its own unique nature-a nature that essentially stopped evolving 10,000 years ago. Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa re-examine some of the most popular and controversial topics of modern life-and shed a whole new light on why we do the things we do.

Reader beware: You may never look at human nature the same way again.

An outstanding compendium of fourteen papers, almost exclusively based on recent anthropological field research in Hong Kong and Taiwan on the diverse Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist beliefs and practices of the Chinese peasant ... This collection is of great value in explicating the structure of the supernatural world as seen by the Chinese peasant, its similarity to the formal imperial bureaucracy, and the effect of economic conditions on the carrying out of related practices.'Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies This volume examines aspects of religion and ritual in China. Various topics are covered including the sociology of Chinese religion, religion and ritual in Lukang, religious organization in the history of a Taiwanese town, and village alliance temples in Hong Kong.

For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them?slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an ?anarchist history,? is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states. In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of ?internal colonialism.? This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott?s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.

王铭铭最近同时推出了三种人类学作品，《西学“中国化”的历史困境》之外的两种实际上只是改订后的旧作，只有此书才是值得留意的新书。“本土化”问题，一直是王铭铭的焦虑所在，而他对此问题其实有着相互矛盾的两种感情：一方面，作为中国人类学者，他当然希望能搞出针对中国本土问题的人类学来，而不只是照搬西方理论；而另一方面，他又强烈地感到，人类学在“本土化”过程中出现了很多问题。实际上，全书有一个贯穿始终的论点，即与海外人类学一样，中国人类学有值得自己珍惜的历史遗产。要想走出一条人类学的“中国之路”，就必须有反思地继承中国人类学的这笔历史遗产。