Bøger i Zone Books serien

A radically interdisciplinary inquiry into the origins of human consciousness, community, and potential.

Understanding late medieval pictorial representations of violence.

A fascinating account of the Na society, which functions without the institution of marriage.

Essays by a provocative Italian philosopher on memory and oblivion, on what is lost and what remains.

The first English-language publication of a major history of the Great Lakes region of Africa.

A far-reaching philosophical investigation into the persistence and disappearance of speech, in individuals and in linguistic communities.

An exploration of the roles of conflict and forgetting in ancient Athens.

Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet are leaders in a contemporary French classical scholarship that has produced a stunning reconfiguration of Greek thought and literature.

Essays that span the career of a prominent anthropologist and address the fundamental questions of the field.

A meditation on the human body as described by the classical Greeks and by the ancient Chinese.

How the far North offered a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination.

A groundbreaking reassessment of Symbolist artists and writers that investigates the concerns they shared with scientists of the period--the problem of subjectivity in particular.

An examination of pleasure--short-term delight and the cultivation of longer-term satisfaction--in early Chinese thought.

A new narrative for the emergence of human music, drawing from archaeology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory.

A deft reinterpretation of the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon as a therapeutic artifact.

When animals and their symbolic representations--in the Royal Menagerie, in art, in medicine, in philosophy--helped transform the French state and culture.

Revisiting an era when the discipline of architecture staked out a role in global environmental governance and the biopolitical management of populations.

Siegfried Kracauer¿s biography of the composer Jacques Offenbach is a remarkable work of social and cultural history. First published in German in 1937 and in English translation in 1938, the book uses the life and work of Offenbach as a focal point for a broad and penetrating portrayal of Second Empire Paris. Offenbach¿s immensely popular operettas have long been seen as part of the larger historical amnesia and escapism that pervaded Paris in the aftermath of 1848. But Kracauer insists that Offenbach¿s productions must be understood as more than glittering distractions. The fantasy realms of such operettas as La Belle Hélène were as one with the unreality of Napoleon III¿s imperial masquerade, but they also made a mockery of the pomp and pretense surrounding the apparatuses of power. At the same time, Offenbach¿s dreamworlds were embedded with a layer of utopian content that can be seen as an indictment of the fraudulence and corruption of the times.

In this classic meditation on the problem of style in art history, Henri Focillon describes how art forms change over time.

The history of Mexico's fearless intimacy with death--the elevation of death to the center of national identity.

Exploring the thought of Mulla Sadra Shirazi, an Iranian Shi'ite of the seventeenth century: a universe of politics, morality, liberty, and order that is indispensable to our understanding of Islamic thought and spirituality.