For its millions of readers, the National Geographic has long been a window to the world of exotic peoples and places. In this fascinating account of an American institution, Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins explore the possibility that the magazine, in purporting to teach us about distant cultures, actually tells us much more about our own.

Lutz and Collins take us inside the National Geographic Society to investigate how its photographers, editors, and designers select images and text to produce representations of Third World cultures. Through interviews with the editors,...

The contributors to this state-of-the-art collection are prominent figures in psychological anthropology, and they write about recent developments in this field. Rooted in psychoanalytic psychology, the early practitioners in the forties and fifties concentrated on studying cross-cultural variation in child rearing practices. While tensions between individual experience and collective meanings are still central to psychological anthropology, alongside fresh versions of the psychoanalytic approaches, other approaches to the study of cognition, emotion, and ethnopsychology have been introduced....

A look at Fayetteville, North Carolina, home to Fort Bragg, that poses the question, 'Are we all military dependents?'

Fayetteville has earned the nicknames of Fatalville and Fayettenam. Unusual and not-sounusual features of the town include gross income inequalities, an extraordinarily high incidence of venereal disease, miles and miles of strip malls, and a history of racial violence. Through interviews with residents and historical research, Catherine Lutz immerses herself in the life of the town to discover how it has supported the military for over a century. From secret training...