Anthropological Theory

R. Jon McGee is professor of anthropology at Texas State University. He is author or editor of numerous books, including Watching Lacandon Maya Lives, Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia (coedited with Richard L. Warms), and Sacred Realms: Readings in the Anthropology of Religion (coedited with Warms and James Garber), now in its second edition.Richard L. Warms is professor of anthropology at Texas State University. In addition to his books with McGee, he has coauthored (with Serena Nanda) the best-selling textbooks Cultural Anthropology, now in its twelfth edition, and Culture Counts, now in its fourth edition.

First published in 1996, this seventh edition of the Anthropological Theory reader, compiled by anthropologists McGee and Warms (both, Texas State Univ.), contains 43 articles published between 1860 and 2016, and is divided into five roughly chronological parts that chart this expanding field's diverse interests. The collection is distinguished by two valuable features. First, the editors include an introductory essay for each section, with contemporary biographical references, to contextualize the authors within the field as a whole and in a social sense more broadly as well. Secondly, and most importantly, in addition to including their essays' original endnotes, the contributing authors also provide a running commentary on each piece in the form of updated footnotes to explain difficult, abstract concepts and to emphasize those points they feel make the piece in question important to the development of theory. Designed as a reader for introductory classes in anthropology, this collection will find a ready audience in colleges and universities offering programs in this field. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through graduate students.

• PrefaceTimelineIntroductionPart OneHISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORYNineteenth-Century Evolutionism1. Herbert Spencer: The Social Organism (1860)2. Sir Edward Burnett Tylor: The Science of Culture (1871)3. Lewis Henry Morgan: Ethnical Periods (1877)4. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook (1846)The Foundations of Sociological Thought5. Émile Durkheim: What Is a Social Fact? (1895)6. Marcel Mauss: Excerpts from The Gift (1925)7. Max Weber: Class, Status, Party (1922)Part TwoCULTURE THEORY IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURYThe Boasians8. Franz Boas: The Methods of Ethnology (1920)9. A. L. Kroeber: On the Principle of Order in Civilization as Exemplified by Changes of Fashion (1919)10. Ruth Benedict: The Science of Custom: The Bearing of Anthropology on Contemporary Thought (1929)11.Margaret Mead: Introduction to Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)12. Zora Neale Hurston: From Of Mules and Men (1935)13. Benjamin L. Whorf: The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language (1941)Functionalism14. Bronislaw Malinowski: The Essentials of the Kula (1922)15. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown: On Joking Relationships (1940)Part ThreeTHEORY AT MID-CENTURYThe Reemergence of Evolutionary Thought16. Leslie White: Energy and the Evolution of Culture (1943)17. Julian Steward: The Patrilineal Band (1955)Neomaterialism18. Marvin Harris: The Cultural Ecology of India’s Sacred Cattle (1966)19. Roy Rappaport Ritual Regulation of Environmental Relations Among New Guinea People (1967)Structure, Language, and Cognition20. Claude Lévi-Strauss: Four Winnebago Myths: A Structural Sketch (1960)21. James P. Spradley: A Bucket Full of Tramps (1970)Part FourLATE-TWENTIETH-CENTURY DEVELOPMENTSSociobiology and Behavioral Ecology22. Edward O. Wilson: The Morality of the Gene (1975)23. Rebecca Bliege Bird, Eric Alden Smith, and Douglas W. Bird: The Hunting Handicap: Costly Signaling in Human Foraging Strategies (2001)Feminist Anthropology24. Sally Slocum: Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology (1975)25. Eleanor Leacock: Interpreting the Origins of Gender Inequality: Conceptual and Historical Problems (1983)Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropology26. Mary Douglas: External Boundaries (1966)27. Victor Turner: Symbols in Ndembu Ritual (1967)28. Clifford Geertz: Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight (1972)Background to Postmodernism29. Pierre Bourdieu: Structures, Habitus, Practices (1980)30. Michel Foucault: The Incitement to Discourse (1976)Postmodernism31. Renato Rosaldo: Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage (1989)32. Allan Hanson: The Making of the Maori: Culture Invention and Its Logic (1989)Globalization33. Eric R. Wolf. Facing Power – Old Insights, New Questions (1990)34. Arjun Appadurai: Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy (1990)35. Theodore C. Bestor: Kaiten-zushi and Konbini: Japanese Food Culture in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2006)Part FiveTRENDS IN CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGYGender36. Lila Abu-Lughod: A Tale of Two Pregnancies (1995)37. Tom Boellstorff: The Emergence of Political Homophobia in Indonesia: Masculinity and National Belonging. (2004)38. Lynn Kwiatkowski: Feminist Anthropology: Approaching Domestic Violence in Northern Viet Nam (2016)Agency and Structure39. Philippe Bourgois: From Jíbaro to Crack Dealer: Confronting the Restructuring of Capitalism in El Barrio (1995)40. Sherry Ortner: Power and Projects: Reflections on Agency (2006)41. Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz: Willing to Work: Agency and Vulnerability in an Undocumented Immigrant Network (2010)The Anthropology of the Good42. Veena Das: Engaging with the Life of the Other: Love and Everyday Life (2010)43. Cheryl Mattingly: Luck Friendship and the Narrative Self (2014)ReferencesCreditsIndex