Our books examine how people in disparate cultures across time and space live and think about their world—an examination that encourages us to think critically about our own cherished assumptions about culture, race, gender, reason, politics, and more. The Princeton list features work identified with the subfield of social or cultural anthropology, privileging theoretically and historically informed ethnography.

Recent offerings extend classic ethnographic methods into the study of emerging forms of digital culture. Princeton’s list also illuminates the biological and evolutionary aspects of human development, including books in paleoanthropology, primatology, cultural and behavioral evolution, human biology, and evolutionary medicine.