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Print Price: $13.50

Format:
Paperback
176 pp.
halftones, line drawings, 111 mm x 174 mm

ISBN-13:
9780192853462

Publication date:
February 2000

Imprint: OUP UK

Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction

John Monaghan and Peter Just

Series : Very Short Introductions

If you want to know what anthropology is, look at what anthropologists do.

This Very Short Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology combines an accessible account of some of the disciplines guiding principles and methodology with abundant examples and illustrations of anthropologists at work.

Peter Just and John Monaghan begin by discussing anthropologys 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. They then examine specific ways in which social and cultural anthropology have advanced our understanding of human society and culture, drawing on examples from their own fieldwork. The book ends with an assessment of anthropologys present position, and a look forward to its likely future.

1. Fieldwork and Ethnography; 2. Culture; 3. Society; 4. Sex and blood; 5. Class and caste, village and city, home and the world; 6. Language and social life; 7. The culturally constructed self 8. The future of anthropology; Further reading; Index.

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Peter Just is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. His research and teaching interests include law and dispute settlement, religion and magic, and the cross-cultural study of personality and emotions. He is the author of Dou Donggo Justice: Conflict and Morality in an Indonesian Society (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).

John Monaghan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University, and author of The Covenants With Earth and Rain: Exchange, Sacrifice, and Revelation in Mixtec Sociality (University of Oklahoma Press, 1995).

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Special Features

'A very good idea, these Very Short Introductions, a new concept from OUP' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
Authors draw on their own experience of anthropology, including fieldwork in Mexico and Indonesia
Accessible and stimulating
Success of the VSI series so far, and plans for expansion