A Meeting by the River

by Clifford Geertz

Geertz does for anthropology what your book does for archaeology—he builds a framework for understanding how power operates through cultural symbols and rituals. His essay on the Balinese cockfight is a masterclass in reading dominance and social hierarchy through seemingly ordinary practices, and you'll recognize the same interdisciplinary rigor and case-study methodology that made Isherwood's collection so compelling.

by Roberto Bolaño

Here's your surprise pick: this is a novel, not an academic text, but Bolaño structures his narrative like an archaeological excavation—fragmentary testimonies, competing perspectives, and the gradual revelation of how power and ideology shape a literary movement. It's messier and more playful than your last read, but it shares that same obsession with how dominance operates through discourse and how resistance gets written out of history.

by Michel de Certeau

De Certeau examines how ordinary people resist and subvert institutional power through small, tactical acts—reading, cooking, walking through cities. It's the perfect complement to your book because while Isherwood's contributors map dominance structures, de Certeau shows you the creative ways people operate *within* those structures. His writing is more philosophical than archaeological, but the intellectual energy is equally infectious.

by Michel Foucault

Published in 1975, this one predates your book by nearly a quarter-century, but it's foundational to everything Isherwood's contributors are building on. Foucault traces how power doesn't just oppress—it *produces* knowledge, bodies, and social order. If you found yourself wanting deeper theoretical grounding for the mechanisms of dominance discussed in the case studies, this is where that conversation began.

by Buck Houghton

Scott studies hill peoples in Southeast Asia who've actively resisted state control for centuries—not through rebellion, but through geography, mobility, and deliberate cultural choices. He writes with the ethnographic detail of an anthropologist but the narrative drive of a historian, and his focus on *how* resistance actually works in practice gives you the ground-level view that complements the theoretical frameworks in your previous read.