Christmas Book Ideas & Reading List 2024

Unusual gifts, teach-yourself collections and inspiration for the New Year

Reading list ideas and guides into anthropology/archaeology are two queries that people most often send me. Something like “I’m a beginner but I want to learn about unusual tribes, where do I begin?”. I thought I’d put together some ideas for you, including good books for Xmas presents, sets of books to ease into the study of new fields and some inspiration for next year’s reading.

So without further ado.

Xmas Book Ideas:

• Against The Grain - James C. Scott

  A new history of the origins of agriculture and the State, from one the best living anthropologists.

• The Mind In The Cave - David Lewis-Williams

  A fascinating history of Palaeolithic cave art and how it might be linked to the origins of shamanism and religion.

• After The Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000 - 5000 BC - Steven Mithen

  The perfect introduction to prehistory for a beginner. Outdated in parts, but still the best overview available.

• Blood & Thunder - Hampton Sides

  The gripping biography of the American mountain-man Kit Carson and the wider context of the Navajo wars

• The Peloponnesian War - Donald Kagan

  Solid outline and narrative of one of history’s most important wars.

• Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination - Peter Ackroyd

  A cultural anthropology of the English mindset, from Anglo-Saxon poetry to Victorian ghost stories

• Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire - Roger Crowley

  Too often overlooked by the Anglosphere, Crowley brings to life the mind-blowing heroism and energy of the Portuguese expansions.

• Sea People - Christina Thompson

  The ‘unputdownable’ narrative of the Polynesian world, its incredible maritime empire and its discovery by European sailors.

• Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost - Michael Walsh

  The ultimate male book, history’s most epic last stands from Thermopylae to Stalingrad, the grit, terror and heroism of fighting to the death.

• Gods of Bronze - Dan Davis

  Technically a series, and my only offering of fiction, Davis’ epic saga starts on the bronze age steppe and brings to life the vitality and myth of the era.

• The Horse, the Wheel & Language - David Anthony

  The book that created a thousand Indo-European fans. Anthony ranges over linguistics, archaeology and history to make his powerful argument. Outdated in parts, but essential reading nonetheless.

• Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art - Rebecca Wragg-Sykes

  The mysteries of the Neanderthal world have never been better explained than in this book. Written by a prehistorian working in the field, this is the most up-to-date and accessible introduction available.

• The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages - François-Xavier Fauvelle

  Real African history is rarely in the mainstream, and even less so the medieval period. This collection of short and punchy history-chapters reveals the colour and wonder of the dark continent.

Introduction to Anthropology Collection

This list is for someone genuinely interested in anthropology as a discipline and wants to explore how the field developed. I’ve included a mix of traditional or classic works and some more modern pieces.

• Anthropology and Modern Life - Franz Boas

  Published in 1928, this classic of the genre continues to be well-received. Boas is a giant of anthropology, and whether or not one agrees with him, he needs to be read as part of any overview of the topic. His hallmarks are empiricism, methodological cultural relativism and anti-racism.

• Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea - Bronisław Malinowski

  From 1922 comes the first proper modern ethnographic study. Polish-British anthropologist Malinowski was catapulted to fame with this close and personal book based on fieldwork in Melanesia.

• Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande - Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard

  E.E Pritchard lived a remarkable life, living amongst all kinds of people, fighting in WW2 and teaching as a professor at Oxford. His 1937 work about Azande religion was amongst the first to try understand how irrational belief systems worked within a wider group structure, to try and interpret them within their own standpoint or framework.

• The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies - Marcel Mauss

  French scholar Marcel Mauss wrote this essay in 1925 and in doing so sparked an entire paradigm within anthropology about the role and function of the ‘gift’. Reciprocity and exchange are embedded within the fabric of all cultural life in some way, and Mauss revealed this to the world, overturning old expectations.

• The Savage Mind - Claude Lévi-Strauss

  Lévi-Strauss was another legend of anthropology, and his 1962 work is a milestone within ‘structuralist’ thought. The deep structures that underlie social life are explored and the ‘savage mind’ revealed to be universal - we all make use of what is at hand.

• The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombies, and Magic - Wade Davis

  A controversial book from 1985. Davis attempts to explore and reveal to the world the hidden ethnobotanical knowledge and practices behind the Haitian Voodoo zombie phenomenon. Not without its critics, the books still deserves to be read for its fascinating approach to the crossover between biochemistry and social religion.

• Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa - Katherine A. Dettwyler

  A 1993 memoir/ethnography/personal reflections work which still divides first time readers. Dettwyler writes as she lives in West Africa, exploring all the happiness and heartache she witnessed and experienced.

• The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia James C Scott

  Scott appears again, this time for his work looking at the wild uplands of SE Asia known as ‘Zomia’. Building on his previous work on how people resist state intervention in their lives, Scott explores how mobility, forms of transient agriculture and social fluidity allow the resident of Zomia to keep governments and authorities off their backs.

Weird-and-Wonderful Tribes

This list is less academic in tone, and more focused on specific works dealing with particular tribes or peoples around the world.

• Yanomamö: The Fierce People - Napoleon Chagnon

  Probably anthropology’s most infamous book. Chagnon’s 1968 work is a classic of sociobiology, describing the lives of the Amazonian Yanomamo people, and trying to interpret the ever-present violence through an evolutionary lens. A must read for all budding anthropologists.

• The Forest People - Colin Turnbull

  One of the most famous ethnographies ever written. Turnbull’s wonderful account of living with the Central African Bambuti Pygmies is a classic personal, sympathetic and human portrayal of a very different and unusual people.

• Native North American Armor, Shields, and Fortifications - David E. Jones

  Not strictly an ethnography or study on one group or another, but rather a sweeping overview of Native American warfare both before and after European contact. The focus on material objects - shields, weapons, armour and forts - is different in tone to other works, but here you get a real sense of cultural differences free from the political dimension. Chock full of rabbit holes to dive down, very much worth reading and referencing.

• Feasting With Cannibals: An Essay on Kwakiutl Cosmology - Stanley Walens

  The Pacific Northwest of America has produced some of the most fascinating and contradictory peoples - hunter-gatherers with social hierarchy, slaves, a unique and wonderful art style, a bellicose elite of male warriors. Walens dives into the unsettling cosmological vision of the Kwakiutl, how they see the fabric of the universe as woven from mouths, the act of eating and being eaten. A short and powerful way to get inside an alien mentality.

• Facing Mount Kenya - Jomo Kenyatta

  This 1938 classic is remarkable for not only being written by a member of the subject people, but the author went on to be Kenya’s first President. A detailed description of the Bantu Kikuyu people, including descriptions of traditional FGM practices. His Boasian style, combined with his insider knowledge, but writing to explain and defend his people to the outside world, makes it a unique book in anthropological history.

• A Black Civilization: A Study of an Australian Tribe - W. Lloyd Warner

  One of the most complete ethnographic accounts of an Aboriginal Australian people - the Yolngu/Murngin of northeast Arnhem Land. Covering their social structure, technology, warfare and customs, Warner’s 1937 work is still accessible and insightful.

• Moriori: A People Rediscovered - Michael King

  The only modern work to cover the sad but fascinating story of the Moriori, the pacifist cousins to the Māori, who suffered a terrible fate and still need their tale to be told. Drawn from primary and secondary sources, King’s book will be the standard reference for the Moriori for generations.

Suggestions for 2024

There’s plenty of new and undiscovered books out there for 2024, so here is some inspiration for your own reading:

• Archaeology and the genetic revolution in European prehistory. (2022) - Kristian Kristiansen

• The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492. (2024) - Marcy Norton

• The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved (2024) - Steven Mithen

• The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity (2022) - Marshall Sahlins

• Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas (2022) - Jennifer Raff

• Energy and Civilization: A History (2017) - Vaclav Smil

• The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization (2020)- Roland Ennos

• The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015) - Thomas W. Laqueur

• Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Study in Nihilism and Ironic Affinities (1999) - Robert G. Morrison

• Thinking Like a Parrot: Perspectives from the Wild (2019) - Alan Bond, Judy Diamond