Books in the The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures series

James Ferguson examines the rise of social welfare programs in southern Africa in which states give cash payments to their low income citizens. These programs, Ferguson argues, offer new opportunities for political mobilization and inspire new ways to think about issues of production, distribution, markets, labor and unemployment.

Conversing with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, father and son, Marisol de la Cadena explores the entanglements and partial connections between indigenous and non-indigenous worlds, and the ways in which indigenous knowing both include and exceed modern and non-modern practices.

In The Value of Comparison Peter van der Veer highlights anthropology's continuing ability to gain insights on the whole through the comparative study of the particular and unique while critiquing the quantitative social sciences for their sweeping generalizations.

This collaborative ethnography of Italian-Chinese fashion ventures offers a new methodology for understanding transnational capitalism in a global era.

Janet Carsten traces the multiple meanings of blood as it moves from donors to labs, hospitals, and patients in Penang, Malaysia, showing how those meanings provide a gateway to understanding the social, political, and cultural dynamics of modern life.

Michael Herzfeld documents how marginalized groups use official discourses of national tradition against the authority of the bureaucratic nation-state state and violent repercussions that can often follow.