"If you want to know what anthropology is, look at what anthropologists do," write the authors of Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction. This engaging overview of the field combines an accessible account of some of the discipline's guiding principles and methodology with abundant examples and illustrations of anthropologists at work.
Peter Just and John Monaghan begin by discussing anthropology's most important contributions to modern thought: its investigation of culture as a distinctively human characteristic, its doctrine of cultural relativism, and its methodology of fieldwork and ethnography. Drawing on examples from their own fieldwork in Indonesia and Mesoamerica, they examine specific ways in which social and cultural anthropology have advanced our understanding of human society and culture. Including an assessment of anthropology's present position, and a look forward to its likely future, Social and Cultural Anthropology will make fascinating reading for anyone curious about this social science.
About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.
Industry Reviews
"I cannot imagine a better short introduction to anthropology... it is firmly anchored in the traditional concerns of fieldwork and participant observation."--Kent V. Flannery, University of Michigan
"The most original introduction to anthropological thinking I have seen... The reader is made to experience anthropology as it is practiced, as a process that begins in the field of observations and continues on as an explanatory, interpretive, theoretical, and finally disciplinary activity-- anthropology as it is done rather than talked about. The writing is notably lucid, simple, and unpretentious. The book gives the reader a sense of unique achievements of anthroplogy amopng the social disciplines, and of its position as evolving and never finished business."--Igor Kopytoff, University of Pennsylvania "I cannot imagine a better short introduction to anthropology... it is firmly anchored in the traditional concerns of fieldwork and participant observation."--Kent V. Flannery, University of Michigan
"The most original introduction to anthropological thinking I have seen... The reader is made to experience anthropology as it is practiced, as a process that begins in the field of observations and continues on as an explanatory, interpretive, theoretical, and finally disciplinary activity-- anthropology as it is done rather than talked about. The writing is notably lucid, simple, and unpretentious. The book gives the reader a sense of unique achievements of anthroplogy amopng the social disciplines, and of its position as evolving and never finished business."--Igor Kopytoff, University of Pennsylvania
