Being, Made

  Samuele Poletti is an associate researcher at the Center for South Asian and Himalayan Studies at the Université Paris Nanterre. © HAU Books 2026 ISBN: 9781914363566 [paperback] ISBN: 9781914363580 [open access PDF] 6″ x 9″, 280 pp. 43 halftones, 1 map $35 Buy this book Amazon Google Books Preview Open Access PDF

Sovereigns of Gold, Spirits of Silver

Maurizio Esposito La Rossa is an anthropologist, an associate professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and a member of the Centre Alexandre Koyré in Paris. Michael Lambek is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and a Canada Research Chair Emeritus at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He is the author of numerous books, including The …

Animals and Death

After Siberian shamanism, the anthropologist Charles Stépanoff turns to hunting in rural France—and discovers common ground. Praise for the French edition: “Hunting provokes scandal. But what is it exactly that so disturbs us? The living world is both more brutal and more rich than we can measure—and perhaps more than we can bear. By showing …

A Framework for Hybrid Translation

Anthropology strives to be the science of human diversity, and yet vast archives of non-Anglophone scholarship remain sequestered behind prohibitive linguistic and financial barriers, turning the global discipline into an Anglo-centric silo. Hau Books is launching a focused initiative to help publish great works that were not originally written in English, through a critical framework …

Southern Epistemologies

  H. Clark Barrett is Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. He studies contemporary variation in social and moral judgment as a window into the evolution of human cognition. His current project asks how evolution, cognition, and ethics can be better understood by expanding their study outside traditional European frameworks. Michael L. Cepek has been working …

I Was Married to a Horse, and Other Tales of an Accidental Anthropologist

“This brave, witty, and vivid memoir of the journeys of a soul-searching anthropologist will appeal to all readers interested in how we find meaning in the map of memory as we look back on the intersection of our lives and the eruptions of history.” — Ruth Behar, author of The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks …

Metapersons

“Born from decades of ethnographic engagement and theorizing, this is a signature contribution to current efforts to rethink the philosophical foundations of our discipline. Its argument is that personhood is neither innate nor bestowed but the result of a capacity for transcendence that humans acquire from infancy as they are linguistically scaffolded and keyed into …

The Elementary Forms of Corruption

“In this brilliant (and funny) ethnographic ode to Durkheim, anthropologist Aaron Ansell takes us to Brazil’s sertão, where he unpacks forms of patronage and understandings of corruption alive in the political system between 2003 and 2022, shedding light on the secrets of social life that our discipline holds dear. Fantastic insights are revealed about Brazil’s …

André Leroi-Gourhan on Technology

Extracts from the Introduction by Nathan Schlanger “There are indeed several substantial differences at play between Anglo-American ‘material culture studies’ and the French technologie culturelle or anthropologie des techniques, largely inspired by Leroi-Gourhan. A different emphasis on consumption on the one side and production on the other is accompanied, in the latter case, by a …