A History of Anthropology

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 globalisation.

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

Autorentext

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and former President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. He is the author of numerous classics of anthropology, including Small Places, Large Issues - 4th Edition (Pluto, 2015) and What is Anthropology? - 2nd Edition (Pluto, 2017).

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).

Inhalt
Series preface
Preface

1. Proto-Anthropology
   Introduction
   Herodotus and other Greeks
   After Antiquity
   The European Conquests and their Impact
   Why All This is not Quite Anthropology Yet
   The Enlightenment
   Romanticism
2. Victorians, Germans and a Frenchman
   Introduction
   Evolutionism and Cultural History
   Morgan
   Marx
   Bastian and the German Tradition
   Tylor and Other Victorians
   The Golden Bough and the Torres Expedition
   German Diffusionism
   The New Sociology
   Durkheim
   Weber
3. Four Founding Fathers
   Introduction
   The Founding Fathers and their Projects
   Malinowski and the Trobriand Islanders
   Radcliffe-Brown's Natural Science of Society
   Boas and Historical Particularism
   Mauss and the Total Social Prestation
   Anthropology in 1930: Parallels and Divergences
4. Expansion and Institutionalisation
   Introduction
   A Marginal Discipline?
   Oxford and LSE, Columbia and Chicago
   The Dakar-Djibouti Expedition
   Culture and Personality
   Cultural History
   Ethnolinguistics
   The Chicago School
   'Kinshipology'
   Functionalism's Last Stand
   Some British Outsiders
5. Forms of Change
   Introduction
   Neo-evolutionism and Cultural Ecology
   Formalism and Substativism
   Methodological Individualists at Cambridge
   Role Analysis and System Theory
6. The Power of Symbols
   Introduction
   From Function to Meaning
   Ethnoscience and Symbolic Anthropology
   Geertz and Schneider
   Levi-Strauss and Structuralism
   Early Impact
   The State of the Art in 1968
7. Questioning Authority
   Introduction
   The Return of Marx
   Structural Marxism
   The Not-Quite-Marxists
   Political Economy and the Capitalist World System
   Feminism and the Birth of Reflexive Fieldwork
   Ethnicity
   Practice Theory
   The Sociobiology Debate and Samoa
8. The End of Modernism?
   Introduction
   The End of Modernism?
   The Postcolonial World
   A New Departure or a Return to Boas?
   Other Positions
9. Global Networks
   Introduction
   Towards an International Anthropology?
   Trends for the Future
   Biology and Culture
   Globalisation and the Production of Locality
   Bibliography
   Index