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• Half-title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• 1 Visions of anthropology
• Anthropology and ethnology
• The ‘four fields’ approach
• Theory and ethnography
• Anthropological paradigms
• The notion of a ‘paradigm’
• Diachronic, synchronic, and interactive perspectives
• Society and culture
• Visions of the history of anthropology
• Concluding summary
• FURTHER READING
• 2 Precursors of the anthropological tradition
• Natural law and the social contract
• The seventeenth century
• The eighteenth century
• Definitions of humanity in eighteenth-century Europe
• Feral children
• The Orang Outang
• Notions of the ‘Savage’
• Sociological and anthropological thought
• The sociological tradition
• Polygenesis and monogenesis
• Concluding summary
• FURTHER READING
• 3 Changing perspectives on evolution
• Biological and anthropological traditions
• Unilinear evolutionism
• Maine, Lubbock, and Morgan
• Matrilineality versus patrilineality
• Theories of ‘totemism’
• Tylor and Frazer on ‘early’ religion
• Universal evolutionism
• V. Gordon Childe
• Leslie A. White
• Multilinear evolutionism and cultural ecology
• Julian H. Steward
• George Peter Murdock
• Neo-Darwinism
• Sociobiology
• The symbolic revolution?
• Current trends
• Concluding summary
• FURTHER READING
• 4 Diffusionist and culture-area theories
• Antecedents of diffusionism: philology, Müller, and Bastian
• The philological tradition: diffusionism before the diffusionists?
• Diffusionism proper
• German-Austrian diffusionism
• British diffusionism
• Diffusionism today?
• Culture-area and regional approaches
• The culture-area approach in American anthropology
• Regional comparison, national traditions, and regional traditions
• Concluding summary
• FURTHER READING
• 5 Functionalism and structural-functionalism
• Evolutionist precursors and the organic analogy
• Durkheimian sociology
• The functionalism of Malinowski
• Functionalism and fieldwork
• A scientific theory of culture?
• The structural-functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown
• A natural science of society?
• Function, structure, and structural form
• Semantic structure or social structure?
• Two theories of totemism
• The influence of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown
• Concluding summary
• FURTHER READING
• 6 Action-centred, processual, and Marxist perspectives
• Action-centred and processual approaches
• Roots in sociology
• Roots in anthropology
• Transactionalism
• The Manchester School
• Marxist approaches
• Key concepts in Marxist anthropology
• The structural Marxism of Godelier
• The ‘land and labour’ Marxism of Meillassoux
• Political economy and globalization theory
• Three ethnographic debates
• Friedman versus Leach: the political economy of the Kachin
• Wilmsen versus Lee: Kalahari history and ethnography
• Obeyesekere versus Sahlins: the death of Captain Cook
• Concluding summary
• FURTHER READING
• 7 From relativism to cognitive science
• Franz Boas and the rise of cultural relativism
• Culture and personality
• Primitive thought?
• The anti-relativism of Lévy-Bruhl
• The linguistic relativism of Whorf
• Criticisms of Whorfianism
• The rationality debate
• Towards cognitive science
• Structural semantics
• Cognitive anthropology
• Ethnoscience
• Concluding summary
• FURTHER READING
• 8 Structuralism, from linguistics to anthropology
• Saussure and structural linguistics
• Saussure and his ‘Course’
• Four key distinctions
• After Saussure
• Lévi-Strauss and structural anthropology
• Structuralism, pattern, and ideas
• Elementary structures of kinship
• The culinary triangle
• The Oedipus myth
• Structuralism and national traditions of anthropology
• Concludin summary
• FURTHER READING
• 9 Poststructuralists, feminists, and (other) mavericks
• Poststructuralism and anthropology
• Derrida, Althusser, and Lacan
• Bourdieu’s practice theory
• Foucault’s theory of knowledge and power
• Feminism in anthropology
• From gender studies to feminist anthropology
• Gender as a symbolic construction
• Gender as a complex set of social relations
• Embodiment
• Two maverick eclectics
• Structure and conflict: Bateson on national character
• Structure and action: Douglas on grid and group
• Concluding summary
• FURTHER READING
• 10 Interpretive and postmodernist approaches
• Evans-Pritchard’s interpretive approach
• Geertz’s interpretivism
• Concepts of changing times
• Reflexivity and reflexivism
• Orientalism, occidentalism, and globalization
• Postmodernism and postmodern anthropology
• The return to relativism
• ‘Writing culture’
• Problems with postmodernism
• Mixed approaches: towards a compromise?
• Concluding summary
• FURTHER READING
• 11 Conclusions
• National traditions and the future of anthropological theory
• Further thoughts on histories of anthropology
• Concluding summary
• Appendix 1 Dates of birth and death of individuals mentioned in the text
• Appendix 2 Glossary
• References
• Index