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Letters To Lily
In a frank and unpretentious series of letters addressed to a teenage granddaughter, this highly original book teaches us to know and understand the world we live in and its rules, and how to behave in it. In these thirty letters, Alan Macfarlane answers his granddaughter's questions about how the world works, how it got to be as it is, what it could be, and where she fits in. Lily's enquiries range from the intimate, personal and moral to the political, social and philosophical. What is the nature of good and evil? What is religion? How can I be truly me? Is right and wrong the same wherever you are? What is beauty? Does there have to be torture? Does money matter? Is knowledge always good? What is progress? What is truth? What is sex? Is democracy a good idea? These are just a few of the questions. In responding to Lily's challenging problems, Alan Macfarlane, from a lifetime's experience as a historian, anthropologist and teacher, ranges through history and across the world's cultures. Her questions are timeless. His answers add up to a classic.
Dorset Days
There are four questions behind this account of my childhood. One concerns who I was and how I came to be as I am. So this is the autobiographical quest for personal roots and identity. I hope to throw some light on the wider nature of an experience which is not confined to me - the evolution of a certain sort of middle-class, English, male in the middle of the twentieth century. A second question concerns my family and its history. It seems that I come from a well-documented and interesting family whose tentacles spread across the world and can be traced in detail from the later seventeenth century. In particular, there are sets of letters and memoranda which give an insight into the inner ...
Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England
This is a classic regional and comparative study of early modern witchcraft. The history of witchcraft continues to attract attention with its emotive and contentious debates. The methodology and conclusions of this book have impacted not only on witchcraft studies but the entire approach to social and cultural history with its quantitative and anthropological approach. The book provides an important case study on Essex as well as drawing comparisons with other regions of early modern England. The second edition of this classic work adds a new historiographical introduction, placing the book in context today.
Reflections on Cambridge
The traditions and creativity of Cambridge University have survived 800 years. In celebration, this first-ever combined historical and anthropological account explores the culture, the customs, the colleges and the politics of the revered institution. Having taught there for nearly forty years, the author sets forth a personal but also dispassionate attempt to understand how this ancient university developed and changed and how it continues to influence those who pass through it. This book delves into the history and architecture as well as the charm and the ghosts of Cambridge; it is for anyone who studies, teaches, visits, or is intrigued by this great intellectual centre.
King's College Cambridge
This refreshing guide has been written by Alan Macfarlane, a Fellow of King's College for over forty years and currently a Life Fellow and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology. It is written in collaboration with Patricia McGuire, the King's College Archivist, illustrated by Bridget Strevens Marzo who studied at King's, and assisted by the Fellow Librarian Peter Jones.
Understanding the English, a Personal A-Z
Alan Macfarlane is Emeritus Professor of Anthropological Science at the University of Cambridge, a Life Fellow of King's College, Cambridge and Fellow of the British Academy. He writes as both an insider (British parents, brought up and educated and living in England, working on English history), and as an outsider (five-eighths Scots, working as an anthropologist in Nepal, Japan and China).The book explains very simply some of the key features that those who wish to understand the English might like to know about, and what has caused some of the special nature of the English.
The Riddle of the Modern World
What conditions the chances of liberty, wealth and equality at the start of the third Christian millennium? Why did human civilizations develop so slowly for thousands of years, and then transform themselves during the last three hundred? This study of four great thinkers who lived between 1689 and 1995, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, De Tocqueville, and Ernest Gellner, weaves their lives and works together and through their own words shows how they approached the question of the nature of man, his past and his future.
How Do We Know?
We often tend to believe that we can understand the world around us by just applying our eyes and ears to what is happening. In fact, our knowledge is filtered through many cultural and intellectual forces which shape our understanding. This short book looks at changing world views and paradigms over the last ten thousand years, from oral hunter gatherers to twenty-first century social media. It shows some of the effects of the Axial Age, Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment and Evolutionism. This is done through a broad comparison of the East and the West.
Imperialism and Colonialism
Imperialism and Colonialism: Christopher Bayly, Richard Rathbone and Richard Drayton is a collection of interviews that are being published as a book for the first time. These interviews have been conducted by one of England’s leading social anthropologists and historians, Professor Alan Macfarlane. Filmed over a period of several years, the three conversations in this volume are part of the series Creative Lives and Works. These transcriptions form a part of a larger set of interviews that cut across various disciplines, from the social sciences and the sciences to the performing and visual arts. The current volume is on three foremost imperial and global historians. Colonialism is intrin...
The Origins of English Individualism
The Origins of English Individualism is about the nature of English society during the five centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, and the crucial differences between England and other European nations. Drawing upon detailed studies of English parishes and a growing number of other intensive local studies, as well as diaries, legal treatises and contemporary foreign sources, the author examines the framework of change in England. He suggests that there has been a basic misrepresentation of English history and that this has considerable implications both for our understanding of modern British and American society, and for current theories concerning the preconditions of industrialization.
