In 1906 a young man from the Congo named Ota Benga was put on show in the monkey house of the Bronx Zoo, and visitors were told he was a missing link. Less than a century later, anthropologists were digging up the bones of people murdered by Argentina's dictatorship so that their families could bury them and judges could convict their killers. Both stories belong to the same discipline. Anthropology has been used to rank human beings and to prove that no such ranking holds, which is part of what makes it worth studying with open eyes.

Here you will follow the human story from footprints pressed into volcanic ash to gift exchanges that cross hundreds of miles of open sea, and meet the fieldworkers, from Malinowski to Zora Neale Hurston, who tried to see the world as other people see it. You will learn why your mother's brother might matter more than your father, why a lucky pen before an exam is not so different from Trobriand canoe magic, and how to respect a culture without surrendering the idea that every person in it has rights. Afterward, the customs you grew up with may start to look a little strange, and the customs of strangers a little less so.