Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology

The first edition of Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology garnered widespread praise for its comprehensive presentation of issues relating to the history of anthropological theory and epistemology over the past century. The new edition includes a variety of revisions and updates to reflect an on–going resurgence of the discipline, and features several new readings that point to innovative theoretical directions in the development of anthropological theory in recent years. While tracing the course of anthropological theory, readings cover a broad range of topics that include excerpts and central concepts of seminal anthropological works, key classic and contemporary debates in the discipline, and cutting–edge new theorizing. Also revealed are the ways anthropological projects continue to shape broader debates in the social sciences—everything from society and culture, structure and agency, identities and technologies, subjectivities and trans–locality to meta–theory, ontology, and epistemology. At once enlightening and accessible, Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology, 2nd Edition , offers invaluable insights into the theoretical assumptions underlying the development of modern cultural anthropology.

PART I Section 1. Culture and Behaviour 1. The aims of anthropological research. In Race, Language and Culture Franz Boas 2. The concept of culture in science. In The Nature of Culture . Alfred Kroeber 3. Naven: a survey of the problems suggested by a composite picture of the culture of a New Guinea tribe drawn from three points of view Bateson, Gregory 4. The individual and the pattern of culture. From Patterns of Culture . Ruth Section 2. Structure and System 5. The Rules of sociological method E. Durkheim 6. On social structure. In Structure and Function in Primitive Society . Radcliffe–Brown 7. Introduction. From Political Systems of Highland Burma . E. R. Leach 8. Social structure. In Anthropology Today . C. Levi–Strauss Section 3. Function and Environment 9. The group, and the individual in functional analysis. American Journal of Sociology. Malinowski 10. The concept and method of cultural ecology. In Theory of Culture Change . Julian Steward 11. Energy and the evolution of culture. The Science of Culture . Leslie White 12. Ecology, cultural and non–cultural. In Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. A. Vayda and R. Rappaport Section 4. Methods and Objects 13. Understanding and explanation in social anthropology. In The British Journal of Sociology . J. H. M. Beattie 14. Anthropological data and social reality. In Actions, norms and representations . Holy Ladislav and Stuchlik Milan 15. Objectification objectified. In The logic of practice . Pierre Bourdieu PART II Section 5. Meanings as Objects of Study 16. Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture. In The interpretation of cultures . Clifford Geertz 17. Anthropology and the analysis of ideology. Man . Talal Asad 18. Subjectivity and cultural critique. Anthropological Theory. S. Ortner Section 6. Language and Method 19. Structural analysis in linguistics and in anthropology. In Structural Anthropology . C. Levi–Strauss 20. Ordinary language and human action. In Explorations in Language and Meaning . M. Crick 21. Language, anthropology and cognitive science. Man . M. Bloch Section 7. Cognition, Psychology and Neuroanthropology 22. Towards an integration of ethnography, history, and the cognitive science of religion. In Religion, Anthropology and Cognitive Science . Harvey Whitehouse 23. Linguistic and cultural variables in the psychology of numeracy. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute . Charles Stafford 24. Subjectivity. Anthropological Theory . Tanyia Luhrmann 25. Why the behavioural sciences need the concept of the culture–ready brain. Anthropological Theory . Charles Whitehead Section 8. Bodies of Knowledges 26. Knowledge of the body. Man . Michael Jackson 27. The end of the body? American Ethnologist . E. Martin 28. Hybrid Bodies of the Scientific Imaginary. In Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment . Lesley Sharp PART III Section 9. Coherence and Contingency 29. Puritanism and the spirit of Capitalism. Max Weber 30. Introduction. Europe and the People Without History . Eric Wolf 31. Of Revelation and Revolution. J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff 32. Epochal structures I. reconstructing historical materialism. In History, power and ideology: central issues in Marxist anthropology . Donald Donham 33. Structures and the habitus. In Outline of a Theory of Practice . Pierre Bourdieu Section 10. Universalisms and Domain Terms 34. Body and mind in mind, body and mind in body: some anthropological interventions in a long conversation. In Bodies and persons: comparative perspectives from Africa and Melanesia . M. Lambek 35. So, is female to male and nature is to culture? In The politics and erotics of culture . S. B. Ortner 36. Global anxieties. Anthropological Theory . H. L. Moore Section 11. Perspectives and their Logics 37. The rhetoric of ethnographic holism. Cultural Anthropology . R. Thornton 38. Writing against culture. In Recapturing Anthropology . L. Abu–Lughod 39. Cutting the network. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute . M. Strathern Section 12. Objectivity, Morality and Truth 40. The primacy of the ethical. Current Anthropology . N. Scheper–Hughes 41. Moral models in anthropology. Current Anthropology . R. D′Andrade 42. Postmodernist anthropology, subjectivity, and science: a modernist critique. Comparative Studies in Society and History . M. E. Spiro 43. Beyond good and evil? Anthropological Theory . D. Fassin PART IV Section 13. The Anthropology of Western Modes of Thought 44. The invention of women: making an African sense of western gender discourses. O. Oyewumi 45. Valorizing the present: Orientalism, postcoloniality and the human sciences. Cultural Dynamics . V. Dhareshwar 46. Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute . E. Viveiros de Castro Section 14. (Re)defining Objects of Enquiry 47. What was life? Answers from three limit biologies. Critical Inquiry . Stefan Helmreich 48. The near and the elsewhere. In Non–places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity . Marc Augé 49. Relativism. In We Have Never Been Modern . Bruno Latour Section 15. Subjects, Objects and Affect 50. How to read the future: the yield curve, affect, and financial prediction. Public Culture . Caitlin Zaloom 51. Signs are not the garb of meaning. In Materiality . Web Keane 52. Affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute . Navaro–Yashin Section 16. Imagining Methodologies and Meta–things 53. Beyond ′culture′: space, identity, and the politics of difference. Cultural Anthropology . A. Gupta & J. Ferguson 54. What is at stake – and is not – in the idea and practice of multi–sited ethnography. Canberra Anthropology . G. E. Marcus 55. Grassroots globalization and the research imagination. Public Culture . A. Appadurai 56. The end of anthropology, again: on the future on an in/discipline. American Anthropologist . John Comaroff Section 17. Anthropologising Ourselves 57. Participant objectification. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9 . Bourdieu 58. Anthropology of anthropology? Further reflections on reflexivity. Anthropology Today . S. Sangren 59. World anthropologies: cosmopolitics for a new global scenario in anthropology. Critique of Anthropology . G. Ribeiro 60. Cultures of expertise and the management of globalization: toward the re–functioning of ethnography. In Global Assemblages . Douglas Holmes and George E. Marcus

Henrietta L. Moore is the William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her most recent book is Still Life: Hopes, Desires and Satisfactions (2011). Todd Sanders is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and has worked in Africa for two decades. His books include Those Who Play with Fire: Gender, Fertility and Transformation in East and Southern Africa (2004) and Beyond Bodies: Rainmaking and Sense Making in Tanzania (2008).