Robert B. Edgerton – författare

Author and scholar Robert Edgerton challenges the notion that primitive societies were happy and healthy before they were corrupted and oppressed by colonialism. He surveys a range of ethnographic writings, and shows that many of these so-called innocent societies were cruel, confused, and misled.

Chronicles the Japanese military's transformation from honorable soldiers known for their chivalry and kindness towards their wounded and imprisoned enemies into men who massacred hundreds of thousands in the Pacific theater during World War II.

This new edition brings up to date a classic study of the everyday lives of previously institutionalized people with mental retardation. For the first time, the author allowed these people to speak about their own lives, their fears, and their hopes. He focused on the role of stigma in their lives and their efforts to pass as normal, as well as the need they had for normal benefactors. Now, using the same ethnographic methods, Robert Edgerton follows up the original population over a period of three decades. His new findings greatly expand our knowledge of these individuals, suggesting that as they grow older they increase their social competence, life satisfaction, independence, and ability to contribute to the lives of others. Human service professionals and others concerned with mental retardation will welcome Edgerton's discussion of current issues such as the role of environmental factors in modifying mental retardation and the need for new conceptual approaches.

In Alone Together: Social Order on an Urban Beach, the focus is on the social dynamics and unwritten rules governing interactions at Southland Beach, a popular, urban Southern California beach. With millions of visitors each year, Southland Beach draws a diverse crowd, including locals, tourists, and people from various socio-economic backgrounds, all converging in close quarters. Despite the potential for conflict due to its dense and varied population, the beach generally remains a peaceful and enjoyable place. The study explores how beachgoers navigate personal space, behavior expectations, and the presence of authority figures like lifeguards and police, often creating an unspoken order among themselves.Southland Beach has evolved from a space primarily frequented by "beach people"—locals with a deep connection to the beach—to an urban attraction visited by millions. The research examines how strangers from different backgrounds manage to coexist in a shared space where typical urban concerns, like distrust and social fragmentation, could easily lead to conflict. The study explores whether the beach can maintain its reputation as a haven for relaxation and leisure, given its transformation into a microcosm of city life with all its potential challenges. Factors like limited clothing, proximity, and occasional substance use could introduce tension, yet a unique, often implicit social structure keeps interactions largely harmonious.The book aims to analyze this balance between enjoyment and potential disorder, questioning how a community of strangers can coexist so closely without formalized rules. The study applies insights from sociology and anthropology to understand the beachgoers’ shared practices, revealing how informal norms and individual expectations of behavior contribute to a functional, if fragile, social order. Through observation and interviews, the research delves into the varying roles of lifeguards, police, and beachgoers themselves in shaping and maintaining this social environment, illuminating the intricate yet resilient order that defines life on Southland Beach.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

Rules, Exceptions, and Social Order by Robert B. Edgerton explores one of the most basic but perplexing questions of human social life: why do societies both insist on rules and simultaneously create exceptions to them? Drawing on philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and history, Edgerton examines how rules provide the foundation for freedom, security, and social order, yet are often bent, negotiated, or suspended. From Epictetus and Rousseau to Malinowski and Goffman, theorists have debated whether rules are sovereign or strategic, absolute or flexible. Edgerton reconsiders this long-running debate by showing that all societies enforce some rules rigidly—sometimes with life-or-death consequences—while allowing flexibility in others. The paradox, he argues, is not incidental but central: exceptions to rules often sustain, rather than subvert, social order.Through rich ethnographic and historical examples, the book ranges from Trobriand Islanders and the Sebei of Uganda to Confucian China and modern regulatory states. Edgerton shows how illness, intoxication, age, or status may excuse people from ordinary obligations, while other prohibitions—on incest, food taboos, or ritual obligations—admit no exceptions. He traces how scholars have moved from the “normative theory” of culture, in which rules were internalized and sacred, to “strategic interactionism,” in which rules became resources for maneuver and manipulation. Yet Edgerton insists that this corrective goes too far: it ignores the enduring power of strict rules to constrain and compel. Rules, Exceptions, and Social Order offers a nuanced framework for understanding the interplay between constraint and flexibility, showing how societies balance freedom, security, and moral imperatives through the shifting line between rules and their exceptions.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.

In Alone Together: Social Order on an Urban Beach, the focus is on the social dynamics and unwritten rules governing interactions at Southland Beach, a popular, urban Southern California beach. With millions of visitors each year, Southland Beach draws a diverse crowd, including locals, tourists, and people from various socio-economic backgrounds, all converging in close quarters. Despite the potential for conflict due to its dense and varied population, the beach generally remains a peaceful and enjoyable place. The study explores how beachgoers navigate personal space, behavior expectations, and the presence of authority figures like lifeguards and police, often creating an unspoken order among themselves.Southland Beach has evolved from a space primarily frequented by "beach people"—locals with a deep connection to the beach—to an urban attraction visited by millions. The research examines how strangers from different backgrounds manage to coexist in a shared space where typical urban concerns, like distrust and social fragmentation, could easily lead to conflict. The study explores whether the beach can maintain its reputation as a haven for relaxation and leisure, given its transformation into a microcosm of city life with all its potential challenges. Factors like limited clothing, proximity, and occasional substance use could introduce tension, yet a unique, often implicit social structure keeps interactions largely harmonious.The book aims to analyze this balance between enjoyment and potential disorder, questioning how a community of strangers can coexist so closely without formalized rules. The study applies insights from sociology and anthropology to understand the beachgoers’ shared practices, revealing how informal norms and individual expectations of behavior contribute to a functional, if fragile, social order. Through observation and interviews, the research delves into the varying roles of lifeguards, police, and beachgoers themselves in shaping and maintaining this social environment, illuminating the intricate yet resilient order that defines life on Southland Beach.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

Rules, Exceptions, and Social Order by Robert B. Edgerton explores one of the most basic but perplexing questions of human social life: why do societies both insist on rules and simultaneously create exceptions to them? Drawing on philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and history, Edgerton examines how rules provide the foundation for freedom, security, and social order, yet are often bent, negotiated, or suspended. From Epictetus and Rousseau to Malinowski and Goffman, theorists have debated whether rules are sovereign or strategic, absolute or flexible. Edgerton reconsiders this long-running debate by showing that all societies enforce some rules rigidly—sometimes with life-or-death consequences—while allowing flexibility in others. The paradox, he argues, is not incidental but central: exceptions to rules often sustain, rather than subvert, social order.Through rich ethnographic and historical examples, the book ranges from Trobriand Islanders and the Sebei of Uganda to Confucian China and modern regulatory states. Edgerton shows how illness, intoxication, age, or status may excuse people from ordinary obligations, while other prohibitions—on incest, food taboos, or ritual obligations—admit no exceptions. He traces how scholars have moved from the “normative theory” of culture, in which rules were internalized and sacred, to “strategic interactionism,” in which rules became resources for maneuver and manipulation. Yet Edgerton insists that this corrective goes too far: it ignores the enduring power of strict rules to constrain and compel. Rules, Exceptions, and Social Order offers a nuanced framework for understanding the interplay between constraint and flexibility, showing how societies balance freedom, security, and moral imperatives through the shifting line between rules and their exceptions.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.

This Companion provides the first definitive overview of psychocultural anthropology: a subject that focuses on cultural, psychological, and social interrelations across cultures. Brings together original essays by leading scholars in the fieldOffers an in-depth exploration of the concepts and topics that have emerged through contemporary ethnographic work and the processes of global changeKey issues range from studies of consciousness and time, emotion, cognition, dreaming, and memory, to the lingering effects of racism and ethnocentrism, violence, identity and subjectivity

In 1817, the first British envoy to meet the king of the Asante of West Africa was dazzled by his reception. A group of 5,000 Asante soldiers, many wearing immense caps topped with three foot eagle feathers and gold ram's horns, engulfed him with a "zeal bordering on phrensy," shooting muskets into the air. The envoy was escorted, as no fewer than 100 bands played, to the Asante king's palace and greeted by a tremendous throng of 30,000 noblemen and soldiers, bedecked with so much gold that his party had to avert their eyes to avoid the blinding glare. Some Asante elders wore gold ornaments so massive they had to be supported by attendants. But a criminal being lead to his execution - hands tied, ears severed, knives thrust through his cheeks and shoulder blades - was also paraded before them as a warning of what would befall malefactors. This first encounter set the stage for one of the longest and fiercest wars in all the European conquest of Africa. At its height, the Asante empire, on the Gold Coast of Africa in present-day Ghana, comprised three million people and had its own highly sophisticated social, political, and military institutions. Armed with European firearms, the tenacious and disciplined Asante army inflicted heavy casualties on advancing British troops, in some cases defeating them. They won the respect and admiration of British commanders, and displayed a unique willingness to adapt their traditional military tactics to counter superior British technology. Even well after a British fort had been established in Kumase, the Asante capital, the indigenous culture stubbornly resisted Europeanization, as long as the "golden stool," the sacred repository of royal power, remained in Asante hands. It was only after an entire century of fighting that resistance ultimately ceased.

When Aldine originally published this book in 1969, the emerging multidisciplinary field of alcohol studies was dominated by biology, chemistry, physiology, and other 'hard sciences.' As such, writes Dwight Heath in his new foreword, the work challenged the prevailing wisdom in the authors’ use of historical, ethnographic, and cross-cultural data and their analysis of drinking behavior as an anthropological and sociocultural phenomenon. From the Foreword to the Percheron Press Edition: '[O]ne of only a few books that can truly be said to have had a major impact on our understanding of alcohol use and its outcomes.'

This Companion provides the first definitive overview of psychocultural anthropology: a subject that focuses on cultural, psychological, and social interrelations across cultures. Brings together original essays by leading scholars in the fieldOffers an in-depth exploration of the concepts and topics that have emerged through contemporary ethnographic work and the processes of global changeKey issues range from studies of consciousness and time, emotion, cognition, dreaming, and memory, to the lingering effects of racism and ethnocentrism, violence, identity and subjectivity