Political Anthropology

The field of political anthropology is complicated by a breadth and depth of interests that include every kind of ethnographically and historically represented political community, and nearly every kind of recorded political practice, behavior, and organization. To make sense of this array of information, political anthropologists examine political topics and issues in the context of research paradigms that include structural-functionalism, pro-cessualism, political economy, political evolution, and, arguably, post-modernism. In Political Anthropology, Donald V. Kurtz examines how anthropologists think about politics, political organizations, and problems fundamental to political anthropology. He explores the ideas with which they address universal political concerns, the paradigms that direct political research by anthropologists, and political topics of special interest.