Books by H. Sidky

In this book, H. Sidky examines how a cadre of American academics influenced by French postmodern philosophy during the 1980's and 1990's informed and empowered the assault on science and truth by corporate organizations, post-truth politicians, religious extremists, and right-wing populists in the present post-truth era.

Religion: An Anthropological Perspective provides a critical view of religion focusing upon important but overlooked topics such as religion, cognition, and prehistory; science, rationality, and religion; altered states of consciousness, entheogens and religious experience; religion and the paranormal; magic and divination; religion and ecology; fundamentalism; and religion and violence.

In The Origins of Shamanism, Spirit Beliefs, and Religiosity, H. Sidky uses first-hand ethnographic fieldwork and scientific theoretical work in archaeology, psychology, and neurotheology to explore the origins of shamanism, spirit beliefs, the evolution of human consciousness, and the origins of ritual behavior and religiosity.

Haunted by the Archaic Shaman critically engages the general discourse on shamanism by using ethnographic data gathered among different ethnic groups in the Nepal Himalayas to address several key conceptual issues and problems in the scholarly field of shamanic studies.

In this volume, Sidky undertakes the task of reconstructing the history of Greek Bactria, a warlike kingdom that existed twenty-two centuries ago in what is now northern Afghanistan, from fragmentary sources. The resulting work brings to life ancient documents in a narrative scope, where a forgotten people are recreated in the reader's mind. The story of east meeting west, and the resulting synthesis, is re-told here, with critical analysis of sources fitting easily alongside vivid descriptions of glorious battles and great cities. This easily accessible, yet scholarly, work will interest students of ancient history and archaeology.