Anthropology

In The Anthropology of Politics: A Reader in Ethnography, Theory and Critique, editor Joan Vincent offers her readers a selection of classic and contemporary articles on the anthropology of politics. Her introduction, headnotes, and suggested readings make this an indispensable resource for students, scholars, and instructors alike.

An ideal complement to standard anthropology texts or as a stand-alone text/reader, the best-selling Conformity and Conflict continues to offer an in-depth look at anthropology as a powerful way to study human behavior and events.

 

The 37 articles cover a broad range of theoretical perspectives and demonstrate basic anthropological concepts. The twelfth edition retains the previous edition's accessibility and the view that anthropology provides a fascinating perspective on the human experience.

 

The 13th edition has been shaped by the current concerns in both anthropology and American society, including globalization, the study of women's lives, race and ethnicity, and the practical applications of anthropology and the ways it leads to everyday careers.

 

The newly revised table of contents reflects the suggestions of Conformity and Conflict users. Thirty percent of the readings are either revised or entirely new to this edition.  Nine new articles appear in this edition of Conformity and Conflict (Readings 7, 12, 15, 18, 22, 25, 29, 32, 33), three of which were expressly commissioned for this edition (12, 29, 25).  Four articles (5, 28, 31 and 35) have been updated for this edition.

 

More attention is paid to cultural ecology, to the impact of the world market and world systems on human social life, and to human change in increasingly large and complex societies. An entirely NEW section on globalization includes three new articles that introduce readers to key concepts -  how popular culture spreads to different societies, the processes by which cultural artifacts, social structures, and how ideas are adopted and changed as they reach new societies.

Through the use of video segments, interactive exercises, quizzes, 3-D animations, sound, and digital images, students can actively participate in 12 labs on their terms--at home, in the library, or at any time! Recent fossil discoveries are included, as well as exercises in behavior and archaeology, and critical-thinking and problem-solving activities. When you order Virtual Laboratories on the web-based CengageNOW platform, a powerful course management component allows you to reorder the labs, move content within the labs, utilize the pre-lab and post-lab tests for each lab, and track how much time students spend on each lab. Virtual Laboratories includes Web links, outstanding fossil images, exercises, a notebook feature, and a post-lab self-quiz. Virtual Laboratories is also available on CD (with a portion of the features and functionality of the online version).

Investigating Culture offers an innovative approach to understanding culture as a constructed phenomenon open to investigation of its implicit premises and explicit forms.

• Provides a refreshing alternative to traditional textbooks by challenging students to think in new ways and to apply these ideas to their own lives


• Focuses on the ways that humans orient themselves, e.g., in space and time, according to language, food, the body, and the symbols provided by public myth and ritual


• Each chapter includes: an introduction framing the central issues, examples from a range of cultures, a selected reading or two, additional suggested readings, and exercises

Framed around the concept of culture, Nanda and Warms' brief book shows you how culture matters in driving and explaining human behavior, as well as the dynamic nature of culture that interrelates various cultural systems in adaptive (or maladaptive) ways. The text emphasizes why understanding culture is important for understanding what is going on in the world today, and how we can solve problems and effect positive change. The authors will draw you into the book's concepts via engaging ethnographic storytelling and a conversational writing style that connects you to the topics. You'll focus on contemporary issues, issues of globalization, issues of gender, and issues of equalities and inequalities topics that are important to both the study of anthropology and your understanding of the world around you.

From Back Cover: Fourteen authors, including many of the best-known scholars in the field, explore how people actually experience their culture and how those experiences are expressed in forms as varied as narrative, literary work, theater, carnival, ritual reminiscence, and life review. Their studies will be of special interest for anyone working in anthropological theory, symbolic anthropology and contemporary anthropology. (Description by http-mart)

On its first publication in 1973 Adam Kuper's entertaining history of half a century of British social anthropology provoked strong reactions. But his often irreverent account soon established itself as one of the introductions to anthropology.
Since the second revised edition was published in 1983, important developments have occurred within British and European anthropology.
This third, enlarged and updated edition responds to these fresh currents. Adam Kuper takes the story up to the present day, and a new final chapter traces the emergence of a modern European social anthropology in contrast with developments in American cultural anthropology over the last two decades.
Anthropology and Anthropologists provides a critical historical account of modern British social anthropology: it describes the careers of the major theorists, their ideas and their contributions in the context of the intellectual and institutional environments in which they worked.

Why do the Nuer stipulate forty cattle in brideprice? Why is the number ten so important in North American mythology? What does the anthropologist Clifford Geertz really mean to say when he talks about the correspondence of Balinese time cycles? Numbers play some part, often quite central, in almost all known cultures, yet until now the subject has never been examined in detail from an anthropological perspective. This book is the first attempt to find out how people in a wide range of diverse cultures and in different historical contexts, use and understand numbers. The opening chapters provide the basis for looking at the way numbers operate in different contexts, by looking at the logical, psychological and linguistic implications. The following eight chapters deal with specific themes: ethnoscience, politics, measurement, time, money, music, games and architecture. The final chapter relates such operations to social, economic and cultural factors.