A comprehensive and accessible survey of the history of theory in anthropology, this anthology of classic and
contemporary readings contains in-depth commentary in introductions and notes to help guide students through excerpts
of seminal anthropological works. The commentary provides the background information needed to understand each
article, its central concepts, and its relationship to the social and historical context in which it was written.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Part One: Historical Foundations of Anthropological Theory
Nineteenth-Century Evolutionism
1. Herbert Spencer, The Social Organism (1860)
2. Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, The Science of Culture (1871)
3. Lewis Henry Morgan, Ethnical Periods (1877)
4. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook (1845-1846)
The Foundations of Sociological Thought
5. �mile Durkheim, What is a Social Fact? (1895)
6. Marcel Mauss, Excerpts from The Gift (1925)
7. Max Weber, Class, Status, Party (1922)
Part Two: Culture Theory in the Early Twentieth Century
Historical Particularism
8. Franz Boas, The Methods of Ethnology (1920)
9. A. L. Kroeber, Eighteen Professions (1915)
10. Benjamin L. Whorf, The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language (1939)
Functionalism
11. Bronislaw Malinowski, The Essentials of the Kula (1922)
12. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, On Joking Relationships (1940)
13. Max Gluckman, The Licence in Ritual (1956)
Culture and Personality
14. Ruth Fulton Benedict, Psychological Types in the Cultures of the Southwest (1928)
15. Margaret Mead, Introduction to Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)
Part Three: Theory at Midcentury
The Reemergence of Evolutionary Thought
16. Leslie White, Energy and the Evolution of Culture (1943)
17. Julian Steward, The Patrilineal Band (1955)
Neomaterialism: Evolutionary, Functionalist, Ecological, and Marxist
18. Morton H. Fried, On the Evolution of Social Stratification and the State (1960)
19. Marvin Harris, The Cultural Ecology of India's Sacred Cattle (1966)
20. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual Regulation of Environmental Relations Among a New Guinea People (1967)
21. Eric Wolf, Peasantry and Its Problems (1966)
Structuralism
22. Claude L�vi-Strauss, Four Winnebago Myths: A Structural Sketch (1960)
23. Sherry B. Ortner, Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture? (1974)
Ethnoscience and Cognitive Anthropology
24. Harold C. Conklin, Hanun�o Color Categories (1955)
25. Stephen A. Tyler, Introduction to Cognitive Anthropology (1969)
Part Four: The Late Twentieth Century and Beyond
Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Behavioral Ecology
26. Edward O. Wilson, The Morality of the Gene (1975)
27. Rebecca Bliege Bird, Eric Alden Smith, and Douglas W. Bird, The Hunting Handicap: Costly Signaling in Human Foraging Strategies (2001)
Anthropology and Gender
28. Sally Slocum, Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology (1975)
29. Eleanor Leacock, Interpreting the Origins of Gender Inequality: Conceptual and Historical Problems (1983)
30. David Valentine, "I Went to Bed with My Own Kind Once�: The Erasure of Desire in the Name of Identity (2003)
Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropology
31. Mary Douglas, External Boundaries (1966)
32. Victor Turner, Symbols in Ndembu Ritual (1967)
33. Clifford Geertz, Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight (1973)
Background to Postmodernism
34. Pierre Bourdieu, Structures, Habitus, Practices (1980)
35. Michel Foucault, The Incitement to Discourse (1976)
Post Modernism and Its Critics
36. Renato Rosaldo, Grief and a Headhunter's Rage (1989)
37. Lila Abu-Lughod, A Tale of Two Pregnancies (1995)
38. Hanson, The Making of the Maori: Cultural Invention and Its Logic (1989)
Globalization, Power, and Agency
39. Arjun Appadurai, Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy (1990)
40. Philippe Bourgois, From J�baro to Crack Dealer: Confronting the Restructuring of Capitalism in El Barrio (1995)
41. Theodore Bestor, Kaiten-zushi and Konbini; Japanese Food Culture in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2006)
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
