How is social action related to aesthetics, and anthropology to theatre? What is the meaning of such concepts as "work," "play, "liminal," and "flow"? In this highly influential book, Turner elaborates on ritual and theatre, persona and individual, role-playing and performing, taking examples from American, European, and African societies for a greater understanding of culture ...(展开全部)

The circumcision ritual of the Merina of Madagascar is seen by them primarily as a blessing, involving the transfer of the love and concern of the ancestors of their descendants. Yet the ritual ends in an act of ciolent wounding of the child. Similarily, while the ritual involves a symbolic assault on women, it is nonetheless welcomed by them as a mark of receiving the blessing...(展开全部)

Known as the "bible" of theatre history, Brockett and Hildy’s History of the Theatre is the most comprehensive and widely used survey of theatre history in the market. This 40 th Anniversary Edition retains all of the traditional features that have made History of the Theatre the most successful text of its kind, including worldwide coverage, more than 530 pho...(展开全部)

In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others—shattered dramatic conventions and...(展开全部)

Every child knows what it means to play, but the rest of us can merely speculate. Is it a kind of adaptation, teaching us skills, inducting us into certain communities? Is it power, pursued in games of prowess? Fate, deployed in games of chance? Daydreaming, enacted in art? Or is it just frivolity? Brian Sutton-Smith, a proponent of play theory, considers each possibility as it...(展开全部)

The Gift Relationship has long been acknowledged as one of the classic texts on social policy. Honored by the New York Times as one of the ten most important books of the year when it first appeared in 1970, Titmuss’s The Gift Relationship is even more topical now in an age of AIDS and changing health care policy. A seemingly straightforward comparative study of blood donating ...(展开全部)

Focusing on Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Brecht, Pirandello, O'Neill, and Genet, Mr. Brustein uncovers the roots of the modern theatre in the soil of the rebellion they cultivated. One of the standard and decisive books on the modern theater. --New York Times

Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution. How ...(展开全部)