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Description
Author
Contents
Reviews
This comprehensive anthology presents 40 readings that are critical to an understanding of anthropological theory and the development of anthropology as an academic discipline. The readings have broad anthropological appeal, emphasizing social and cultural anthropology.
The third edition has been completely revised throughout and organized to work more closely alongside the companion overview text, A History of Anthropological Theory. It includes six new readings as well as two original essays written by contemporary anthropologists on "Why Theory Matters." These new essays help ground the more abstract readings in the collection. The glossary has been significantly expanded and the discussion questions have been revised. The result is a volume that offers not only a strong foundation in the history of the discipline but also a good overview of developments in twentieth- and twenty-first-century anthropological theory, including feminist anthropology, postmodernity, medical anthropology, globalization, postcolonialism, and public anthropology.
Paul A. Erickson is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at St. Mary's University in Halifax.
Liam D. Murphy is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at California State University, Sacramento.
Liam D. Murphy is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at California State University, Sacramento.
Preface
Introduction
Part One: The Early History of Anthropological Theory
Overview
1. Bourgeois and Proletarians
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
2. The Science of Culture
Edward Burnett Tylor
3. Ethnical Periods
Lewis Henry Morgan
4. The Organic Analogy Reconsidered
Herbert Spencer
5. General Summary and Conclusion [The Descent of Man]
Charles Darwin
6. [Part] III [Civilization and Its Discontents]
Sigmund Freud
7. Introduction [The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life]
Emile Durkheim
8. The Sociology of Charismatic Authority
Max Weber
9. Nature of the Linguistic Sign and Synchronic and Diachronic Law
Ferdinand de Saussure
Why Theory Matters: Don Brenneis
Part Two: The Early Twentieth Century
Overview
10. The Methods of Ethnology
Franz Boas
11. Conclusion [Primitive Society]
Robert Lowie
12. What Anthropology Is About
Alfred Louis Kroeber
13. Introduction [Coming of Age in Samoa]
Margaret Mead
14. The Individual and the Pattern of Culture
Ruth Benedict
15. Structuralism and Ecology
Claude Levi-Strauss
16. Structuralism in Social Anthropology
Edmund Leach
17. Introduction [Islands of History]
Marshall Sahlins
18. Social Structure
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown
19. The Subject, Method, and Scope of This Inquiry [Argonauts of the Western Pacific]
Bronislaw Malinowski
20. Introduction [African Political Systems]
Meyer Fortes and Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard
21. Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa
Max Gluckman
Why Theory Matters: Louise Lamphere
Part Three: The Later Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries
Overview
22. The Unconscious Patterning of Behavior in Society
Edward Sapir
23. Energy and Tools
Leslie A. White
24. The Epistemology of Cultural Materialism
Marvin Harris
25. Symbols in Ndembu Ritual
Victor Turner
26. Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture
Clifford Geertz
27. Language, Gender, and Power: An Anthropological Review
Susan Gal
28. Self-Interest and the Social Good: Some Implications of Hagen Gender Imagery
Marilyn Strathern
29. Knowing the Oriental
Edward W. Said
30. Introduction [Europe and the People Without History]
Eric R. Wolf
31. Are There Histories of Peoples Without Europe? A Review Article
Talal Asad
32. The Birth of the Asylum
Michel Foucault
33. The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language
Pierre Bourdieu
34. Partial Truths
James Clifford
35. A Crisis of Representation in the Human Sciences
George E. Marcus and Michael M.J. Fischer
36. Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties
Sherry B. Ortner
37. A Critical-Interpretive Approach in Medical Anthropology: Rituals and Routines of Discipline and Dissent
Margaret Lock and Nancy Scheper-Hughes
38. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy
Arjun Appadurai
39. Sex on the Brain
Stefan Helmreich and Heather Paxson
40. Anthropology and The Bell Curve
Jonathan Marks
Conclusion
Glossary
Sources
For a fundamental grounding in the ideas that define anthropology as an intellectual discipline, one couldn't ask for a better-chosen selection of accessible key texts. With new inclusions for this edition, Erickson and Murphy take anthropology back to its anti-reductive roots and challenge us to explore the meaning of contemporary biological claims about human diversity. This is must-reading for anyone who wants to know what anthropology is all about.
Jonathan Marks, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
This collection gets better with each edition! Updated article selections and the addition of commentaries on 'why theory matters' at the end of each section make this an even more perfect companion to the textbook, and a must for introductory and history of theory classes in anthropology.
Linda-Anne Rebhun, University of California, Merced
