Cultural anthropology: a contemporary perspective

Culture, society and the individual - the anthropological approach; culture and people - some basic concepts; language and communication; culture and the individual; tribal peoples - toward a systematic view - the tribal world as mosaic, as ladder and as system; modes of subsistence, modes of adaption; how cultures change; the tribal world - the legacy of human diversity - economic systems; kinship, descent and social structure; marriage, family and community; power and politics; gendered lives; structures of inequality; law and social control; religion - ritual, myth and cosmos; the integration of societies, the structure of cultures; anthropology and the present - response to cataclysm - the tribal world and the expansion of the west; peasants; colonialism and postcolonialism; cities; social science and the postcolonial world; toward human survival.

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This text presents a synthesis of social and cultural anthropology. Roger Keesing was concerned with the political and ethical implications of anthropological fieldwork and sensitive to the global conditions of inequality caused by the spread of capitalist relations of production.In this revision, Dr Andrew Strathern has preserved Keesing's vision, arguments and the ethnographies presented as illustrations of Keesing's theories. New features include revised material on gender relations, recognizing and discussing the feminist and post-feminist approaches in cultural anthropology; a discussion of the shifts in anthropology (postmodernism) and global relations, putting Keesing's theories in the context of contemporary society; and 85 updated case studies illustrating the theories and concepts discussed.