Books - (author:william Howells)and(subject:anthropology)

Product Description:
This classic of economic thought is a scathing critique of American snobbery and wastefulness. Chief among the practices that Veblen so wittily satirizes is 'conspicuous consumption', a pattern of behaviour that still flourishes among us.



Customer Review: Why fat cat CEOs go bad.:
This is a great classic book even if the writing style is a bit dense. This is a must read for anyone who wants to really understand why the 2008 banking meltdown happened. The book was written over 100 years ago and everything he talks about has just happened again. This book will give you the psychological and sociological understanding of why the wealthy act as they do and why the rest of the population suffers from their excesses over and over again. It will also give you good reasons for knowing why their intense desire to control all the resources must be actively managed if the middle class is to survive in any way shape or form in this country.

Customer Review: good to be king:
The basic premise of this book is that modern humans have inherited an instinct to compete with each other for material resources. This competition takes place within the context of a small groups that share the spoils of the competition amongst themselves. (Other primates essentially do the same thing). The theory hinges on the question of what happens when a group of people have access to essentially unlimited resources, but still have the competitive urge. Veblen's answer is that they simply compete amongst themselves to see who can afford to be the most wasteful (like the scene in that Woody Allen movie in which two guys start ripping up dollar bills to impress each other). He refers to such waste as "conspicuous consumption".

According to Veblen, the urge to consume conspicuously explains a lot of human behavior, including fashion, sports, and religion. In all cases the consumer wants to demonstrate to his peers that he can't possibly be involved in doing anything useful. A particularly funny consequence of the urge to consume is the notion of "vicarious consumption," in which really rich people acquire other people (essentially servants and wives) to do their consuming for them. To emphasize the point they dress up their vicarious consumers in preposterous outfits and require them to perform pointless tasks with high precision (think of a butler in a tuxedo serving a 12-course meal or some such).

In this vein, anthropomorphic religions essentially worship the richest guy of all. God is imagined to be so rich that he sits on a throne all day while people in silly clothes (clergy) do nothing but tend to his fabulous mansions (churches). It's an intentionally funny image, although Veblen is careful to say that he's not poking fun at the spiritual aspects of religion, just the form in which modern humans choose to express them.

An interesting subtheme is the alliance between the "leisure class" and the poor, something we see happening today in American politics. In Veblen's theory the alliance occurs because the two classes essentially share the same mindset (obsession with status).

Overall the book is fun to read, except for the writing style, which is reminiscent of essays written by high school students who are studying for the SATs.

Customer Review: the Hobo Philosopher:
Conspicuous consumption describes the phenomenon of buying a product or service not for its utility or necessity but because of its prestige factor or impressive social value. Mr. Veblen's book is described as a satire, pointing out the hypocrisy and shallowness of the leisure or wealthy class. I am only partly through this book but I am finding it very thought provoking.
If Mr. Veblen thought that consumption had a negative conspicuousness, indicative of a hypocritical nature among the wealthy of his day, I can only imagine what he would think of our entire culture today. It seems to me in our present society we have taken conspicuous consumption, beyond the hypocritical and the satirical and into the realm of the obnoxious, the immoral and even the criminal. This really isn't an economics book, nor would I say that it is scientific or academic in nature.
It is more the thoughtful extrapolation of an intelligent, thoughtful and educated individual. Thorstein Veblen is more academic than Mark Twain and not quite as humorous. But he is very entertaining and extremely thought provoking. His style is much like Galbraith's - wordy, circular and humor so subtle that if you are not paying attention you could easily miss it. I am enjoying this book.

Books written by Richard Noble - The Hobo Philosopher:
"Hobo-ing America: A Workingman's Tour of the U.S.A.."
"A Summer with Charlie"
"A Little Something: Poetry and Prose"
"Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother"




Customer Review: America's first great economic treatise:
Boring sciences often require insightful, imaginative writers to make mainstream. So it was with Einstien and theoretical physics, and so it is with economics and Thorstein Veblen as described in this book. Mr. Veblen descended from Norwegian immigrants to the US, and lived in the Midwest from the late 1800s to early 1900s. With a keen eye and insightful mind, he took in the huge economic growth of the US and the beginnings of mass consumerism and corporate advertising in the American population. What he saw was the formation of a middle and upper class that had both idle time and money to spare. Together, this created a leisure class that defined respect, social standing, and self-worth in terms of "pecuniary emulation", i.e. spending money on stuff and entertainment just because one could. Like a zoologist examining wild animals, Veblen picks apart the rituals, clothing, speech, and consumption habits of this newly rich. All of this is recorded and explained in extraordinary and sometimes comical detail in this book. Upon publication, this book became the first great work of economics by an American author, and made Veblen famous. Along with the Great Gatsby, this book provides one of the best description of the American upper class at the beginning of the 20th century.

Customer Review: A classic analysis of how the West sees money:
This may not be a book to read for recreation, unless you like 1890s verbal locutions, but there are other reasons to read it. The emergence of the economic analysis of Western society might intrigue you. You might discover the origins of such still useful terms as 'leisure class' and 'conspicuous consumption,' among others. You might be curious about author Thorstein Veblen's status-conscious, anachronistic world of working men and idle wives, which reflects upper-class society in his day. Published in 1899, this is a classic in sociology and economic literature, although it is a veritable dreadnought of density. It discusses property, ownership, status and leisure in a turn-of-the-last-century American context. Though scholars call it a 'satire,' the book is neither witty nor ironic. Instead, it is a stolid analytical daguerreotype of a world long gone. We suggest that if you tackle Veblen's old-fashioned, slow-flowing prose, you should do it for the background you may glean and the scholarly satisfaction you may feel when you are done. Instead of Alexander Pope's, 'What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed,' this book presents what oft was said and usually better, but not as early.

Product Description:

In 1919, C. Burton and Hattie S. Cosgrove bought land in Grant Country, New Mexico, and began excavating ruins containing Classic Mimbres (ca. A.D. 1000-1150) ceramics. The self-trained archaeologists took great care in uncovering and recording their findings. They so impressed A.V. Kidder of the Peabody Museum when he visited the site he invited them to manage a museum expedition to the Swarts Ruin.

Long out of print, this classic volume is the Cosgrove's report of their Mimbres Valley Expedition seasons of 1924 to 1927. The excavation recorded nearly 10,000 artifacts, including an extraordinary assemblage of Mimbres ceramics. Hattie Cosgrove's meticulous line drawings of over 700 individual Swarts Ruin pots have long been an invaluable design catalog for contemporary Native American artists and serve as a rich resource for designers seeking Southwest inspiration in their work.

This clothbound facsimile edition of the original 1932 publication will be an essential to the libraries of all scholars, artists, and admirers of Native American art and archaeology.

Product Description:
Utilizing and expanding the database presented in his earlier monographs Cranial Variation in Man and Skull Shapes and the Map, Howells develops methods for allocating a human skull to one of 28 modern populations for historical or forensic purposes.

Product Description:
"A warm, penetrating biography of mankind. Fully illustrated with maps and drawings.".plus an index

Product Description:

Customer Review: Excerpt from an article in the Washington Post December 2005:
{I have not yet read "Mankind So Far". Dr. Howells's wife, Muriel Gurdon Seabury, was my father's Aunt, therefore, my interest in this book:}
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William W. Howells; Anthropologist Advanced Studies of Humans
Thursday, December 29, 2005; B06

Dr. William White Howells, 97, a retired professor of anthropology at Harvard whose use of cranial measurements provided the first objective basis for the conclusion that modern humans are of one, little-varying species, died Dec. 20 at his home in Kittery Point, Maine,. . .

In the mid-1960s, when questionis about racial differences were being widely debated, Dr. Howells and his wife took and recorded 68 measurements on about 3,000 human skulls from sites in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Analysis by computer led him to conclude that variation within groups far exceeded variation between groups.

He also concluded that present-day humans are of one homogeneous species, although earlier humans, including such recent close relatives as Neanderthals, were significantly different. His findings were subsequently verified by DNA and other modern methods. Anthropologists still use his skull measurements to determine the lineal separation of human groups.

Dr. Howells, a descendant of the writer William Dean Howells, was born in New York City and received his doctorate from Harvard in 1934. He worked at the American Museum of Natural History before World War II and served as a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve in Washington from 1943 to 1946. He was in the Office of Naval Intelligence.

He taught anthropology at the University of Wisconsin from 1937 to 1954 and at Harvard from 1954 until his retirement in 1974. he was the author of "Mankind So Far" (1944), an early book on human evolution designed for a general readership.

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