The rise of China on the international stage is one of the most significant developments in contemporary geopolitics. Mainstream Western international relations theories argue that the rise of a new global power invariably leads to worrisome instability.

Born in 1961, US anthropologist and activist David Graeber was weaned on leftist politics, and declared himself an anarchist at age 16. He became an anthropology professor, and his early cultural research in Madagascar exposed him to poverty that he saw as caused by pressures to repay excessive government debt.

Douglas McGregor's 1960 book is a vital study of the conditions that make employment satisfying and meaningful. Traditionally, managers assumed people were lazy and would not work unless strictly controlled. McGregor believed this was a faulty view of human nature.

Durkheim's 1897 work is a powerful evidence-based study of why people take their own lives. In the late nineteenth century, it was generally accepted that each suicide was an individual phenomenon, caused by such personal factors as grief, loss, and financial problems.

Based on 20 months of fieldwork among the Azande people of South Sudan, Evans-Pritchard's work became the founding text in the anthropology of witchcraft. Although the book had little impact when it first appeared in 1937, its popularity grew after World War II and its influence on anthropology is still strong nearly 80 years later.

Advertisements for soap. The image of a lm star. We accept these common objects as a normal part of our life. But each also carries hidden messages that none of us even suspect - as Barthes demonstrated in his unique analysis of the signs that generate meanings and assumptions we all take for granted.

Elizabeth Loftus' 1979 work explains why people sometimes remember events inaccurately and how this simple fact has a profound impact on the criminal justice system, especially given the value placed on eyewitness accounts. Although, as these are based on memories that are not always reliable.

In The Age of Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm focuses on the tumultuous late 18th and early 19th centuries. He argues that the "dual revolutions" of the time -the French Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution - changed the way the whole world thought about politics and power, and fundamentally shaped the modern era.