Since the end of the nineteenth century, the division between nature and culture has been fundamental to Western thought. In this groundbreaking work, renowned anthropologist Philippe Descola seeks to break down this divide, arguing for a departure from the anthropocentric model and its rigid dualistic conception of nature and culture as distinct phenomena. In its stead, Descola proposes a radical new worldview, in which beings and objects, human and nonhuman, are understood through the complex relationships that they possess with one another. 

Precious snippets of ancient song.

The most important poets writing in Greek in the sixth century BC came from Sicily and southern Italy. Stesichorus was called by ancient writers “most Homeric”—a recognition of his epic themes and noble style. He composed verses about the Trojan War and its aftermath, the Argonauts, the adventures of Heracles. He may have been a solo singer, performing these poems to his own cithara accompaniment. Ibycus probably belonged to the colony of Rhegium in southwestern Italy. Like Stesichorus he wrote lyrical narratives on mythological themes, but he also composed erotic poems. Simonides is said to have spent his later years in Sicily. He was in Athens at the time of the Persian Wars, though, and was acclaimed for his epitaph on the Athenians who died at Marathon. He was a successful poet in various genres, including victory odes, dirges, and dithyrambic poetry. The power of his pathos emerges in the fragments we have.

All the extant verse of these poets is given in this third volume of David Campbell’s edition of Greek lyric poetry, along with the ancients’ accounts of their lives and works. Ten contemporary poets are also included, among them Arion, Lasus, and Pratinas.

The LCL edition of Greek Lyric is in five volumes. Sappho and Alcaeus—the illustrious singers of sixth-century Lesbos—are in the first volume. Volume II contains the work of Anacreon, composer of solo song; the Anacreontea; and the earliest writers of choral poetry, notably the seventh-century Spartans Alcman and Terpander. Bacchylides and other fifth-century poets are in Volume IV along with Corinna (although some argue that she belongs to the third century). The last volume includes the new school of dithyrambic poets (mid-fifth to mid-fourth century), together with the anonymous poems: drinking songs, children’s songs, cult hymns, and others.

Precious snippets of ancient song.

Bacchylides, nephew of Simonides and rival of Pindar, wrote choral poetry of many types. We have a number of his victory odes—poems celebrating victories in athletic contests—as well as dithyrambs and other hymns. He was a master of the captivating narrative. Also represented in this volume is the Boeotian Corinna, whose work, versions of local myths, survives in greater quantity than that of any other Greek woman poet except Sappho. Ancient authorities regarded Corinna as an older contemporary and mentor of Pindar; but some modern scholars place her later, in the third century BC. Other women are here too: Myrtis, also from Boeotia; Telesilla of Argos, famous for her military leadership as well as her hymns; the shadowy Charixena; and Praxilla of Sicyon, author of choral poems and drinking songs.

David Campbell gives all the extant verse of these poets, along with the ancients’ accounts of their lives and works. This fourth volume of his much-praised edition of Greek lyric poetry also includes Timocreon of Rhodes, pentathlete and writer of invective; Diagoras of Melos, choral poet and alleged atheist; and Ion of Chios. Sophocles is represented by fragments of his paean Asclepius, Euripides by the few surviving lines of his ode for Alcibiades’ dazzling victory in the chariot race at Olympia.

This is the fourth in a five-volume edition of Greek lyric poets. Sappho and Alcaeus, the illustrious singers of sixth-century Lesbos, are in the first. Volume II contains the work of Anacreon, composer of solo song; the Anacreontea; and the earliest writers of choral poetry, notably the seventh-century Spartans Alcman and Terpander. Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides, and other sixth-century poets are in Volume III. The last volume includes the new school of dithyrambic poets (mid-fifth to mid-fourth century), together with the anonymous poems: drinking songs, children’s songs, cult hymns, and others.

“A brilliant work on a profoundly important subject. The leading scientific authority on motherhood has come through again.” —E. O. Wilson

“Thought provoking…An engaging and compelling argument [that] requires us to rethink entrenched views about how we came to be human.” —Science

Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution.

Mothers and Others finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood. If the young were to survive in a world of scarce food, they needed to be cared for, not only by their mothers but also by siblings, aunts, fathers, friends—and, with any luck, grandmothers. Out of this complicated and contingent form of childrearing, Sarah Hrdy argues, came the human capacity for understanding others. Mothers and others teach us who will care, and who will not.

From its opening vision of “apes on a plane”; to descriptions of baby care among marmosets, chimpanzees, wolves, and lions; to explanations about why men in hunter-gatherer societies hunt together, Mothers and Others is compellingly readable. But it is also an intricately knit argument that ever since the Pleistocene, it has taken a village to raise children—and how that gave our ancient ancestors the first push on the path toward becoming emotionally modern human beings.

In his autobiography Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov compared his life to a spiral, in which “twirl follows twirl, and every synthesis is the thesis of the next series.” The first four arcs of the spiral of Nabokov’s life—his youth in Russia, voluntary exile in Europe, two decades spent in the United States, and the final years of his life in Switzerland—are now followed by a fifth arc, his continuing life in literary history, which this volume both explores and symbolizes.

This is the first collection of essays to examine all five arcs of Nabokov’s creative life through close analyses of representative works. The essays cast new light on works both famous and neglected and place these works against the backgrounds of Nabokov’s career as a whole and modern literature in general. Nabokov analyzes his own artistry in his “Postscript to the Russian Edition of Lolita,” presented here in its first English translation, and in his little-known “Notes to Ada by Vivian Darkbloom,” published now for the first time in America and keyed to the standard U.S. editions of the novel. In addition to a defense of his father’s work by Dmitri Nabokov and a portrait-interview by Alfred Appel, Jr., the volume presents a vast spectrum of critical analyses covering all Nabokov’s major novels and several important short stories. The highly original structure of the book and the fresh and often startling revelations of the essays dramatize as never before the unity and richness of Nabokov’s unique literary achievement.

Moteuczoma, the last king who ruled the Aztec Empire, was rarely seen or heard by his subjects, yet his presence was felt throughout the capital city of Tenochtitlan, where his deeds were recorded in hieroglyphic inscriptions on monuments and his command was expressed in highly refined ritual performances. What did Moteuczoma’s “fame” mean in the Aztec world? How was it created and maintained? In this innovative study, Patrick Hajovsky investigates the king’s inscribed and spoken name, showing how it distinguished his aura from those of his constituencies, especially other Aztec nobles, warriors, and merchants, who also vied for their own grandeur and fame. While Tenochtitlan reached its greatest size and complexity under Moteuczoma, the “Great Speaker” innovated upon fame by tying his very name to the Aztec royal office.

As Moteuczoma’s fame transcends Aztec visual and oral culture, Hajovsky brings together a vast body of evidence, including Nahuatl language and poetry, indigenous pictorial manuscripts and written narratives, and archaeological and sculptural artifacts. The kaleidoscopic assortment of sources casts Moteuczoma as a divine king who, while inheriting the fame of past rulers, saw his own reputation become entwined with imperial politics, ideological narratives, and eternal gods. Hajovsky also reflects on posthumous narratives about Moteuczoma, which created a very different sense of his fame as a conquered subject. These contrasting aspects of fame offer important new insights into the politics of personhood and portraiture across Aztec and colonial-period sources.

More than a mode of gathering information about the past, oral history has become an international movement. Historians, folklorists, and other educational and religious groups now recognize the importance of preserving the recollections of people about the past. The recorded memories of famous and common folk alike provide a vital complement to textbook history, bringing the past to life through the stories of those who lived it.

Oral History is designed to introduce teachers, students, and interested individuals to the techniques, problems, and pleasures of collecting oral history. The authors, themselves experienced educators, examine the uses of oral history in the classroom, looking at a wide range of projects that have been attempted and focusing on those that have succeeded best.

Besides suggesting many possible projects, they discuss the necessary hardware and its use: recording equipment and procedures, interview outlines and preliminary research, photography and note-taking in the field, transcription and storage of information, legal forms, and more. For the teacher, the authors offer helpful advice on training students to be sensitive interviewers in both formal and informal situations.

How can oral histories collected in the classroom be put to use? The authors discuss their uses within the curriculum; in projects such as oral history archives, publications such as the popular Foxfire books, and other media productions; and in researching current community problems. Useful appendixes survey a variety of reference tools for the oral historian and describe in detail how a Foxfire-concept magazine may be developed.

“The Origin of Others combines Toni Morrison’s accustomed eloquence with meaning for our times as citizens of the world.” —Nell Irvin Painter, New Republic

America’s foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?

Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin of Others. In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Camara Laye are among the authors she examines. Readers of Morrison’s fiction will welcome her discussions of some of her most celebrated books—Beloved, Paradise, and A Mercy.

If we learn racism by example, then literature plays an important part in the history of race in America, both negatively and positively. Morrison writes about nineteenth-century literary efforts to romance slavery, contrasting them with the scientific racism of Samuel Cartwright and the banal diaries of the plantation overseer and slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood. She looks at configurations of blackness, notions of racial purity, and the ways in which literature employs skin color to reveal character or drive narrative. Expanding the scope of her concern, she also addresses globalization and the mass movement of peoples in this century. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Morrison’s most personal work of nonfiction to date.

If children were little scientists who learn best through firsthand observations and mini-experiments, as conventional wisdom holds, how would a child discover that the earth is round—never mind conceive of heaven as a place someone might go after death? Overturning both cognitive and commonplace theories about how children learn, Trusting What You’re Told begins by reminding us of a basic truth: Most of what we know we learned from others.

Children recognize early on that other people are an excellent source of information. And so they ask questions. But youngsters are also remarkably discriminating as they weigh the responses they elicit. And how much they trust what they are told has a lot to do with their assessment of its source. Trusting What You’re Told opens a window into the moral reasoning of elementary school vegetarians, the preschooler’s ability to distinguish historical narrative from fiction, and the six-year-old’s nuanced stance toward magic: skeptical, while still open to miracles. Paul Harris shares striking cross-cultural findings, too, such as that children in religious communities in rural Central America resemble Bostonian children in being more confident about the existence of germs and oxygen than they are about souls and God.

We are biologically designed to learn from one another, Harris demonstrates, and this greediness for explanation marks a key difference between human beings and our primate cousins. Even Kanzi, a genius among bonobos, never uses his keyboard to ask for information: he only asks for treats.