A History of Anthropology

Front Cover
Pluto Press, May 21, 2013 - History - 254 pages
This is a thoroughly updated and revised edition of a popular classic of modern anthropology. The authors provide summaries of "Enlightenment", "Romantic" and "Victorian" anthropology, from the cultural theories of Morgan and Taylor to the often neglected contributions of German scholars. The ambiguous relationship between anthropology and national cultures is also considered.

The book provides an unparalleled account of theoretical developments in anthropology from the 1920s to the present, including functionalism, structuralism, hermeneutics, neo-Marxism and discourse analysis. There are brief biographies of major anthropologists and coverage of key debates including totemism, kinship and globalization.

This essential text on anthropology is highly engaging, authoritative and suitable for students at all levels.

Contents

Herodotus and other Greeks 1 After Antiquity
3
The European conquests and their impact 6 Why all this is
15
Evolutionism and cultural history 21 Morgan 23 Marx
25
Bastian and the German tradition 27 Tylor and other
32
German diffusionism 35 The new sociology 38 Durkheim
39
Four Founding Fathers
46
The founding fathers and their projects 49 Malinowski among
64
A marginal discipline? 69 Oxford and the LSE Columbia
82
Neoevolutionism and cultural ecology 99 Formalism
117
From function to meaning 121 Ethnoscience and symbolic
135
Questioning Authority
138
Feminism and the birth of reflexive fieldwork 151 Ethnicity 155
155
The end of modernism? 171 The postcolonial world 176
176
Global Networks
192
Towards an international anthropology? 194 Trends for
211
Index
239

The Chicago school 83 Kinshipology 86 Functionalisms
92
Copyright

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About the author (2013)

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and former President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). He is the author of numerous classics of anthropology, including Small Places, Large Issues, Ethnicity and Nationalism and What is Anthropology? Finn Sivert Nielsen worked in the anthropology departments at the University of Tromso and the University of Copenhagen. He is a contributor to A History of Anthropology (Pluto, 2013).

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