The anthropology book

The anthropology book

Book - 2025

Explore and understand the key ideas and movements in anthropology--the study of human societies and cultures and how they work. The Anthropology Book introduces key concepts from different branches of the subject, such as cultural anthropology, ethnography, and biological anthropology, and explains how they have developed over the past century. The book explores the origins of human life and cultures, and how societies develop traditions, laws, and languages. Profiling renowned anthropologists, such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Margaret Mead, and covering topics as diverse as biology, medicine, war, sexuality, family roles, and kinship.

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301/Anthropology
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Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor New Shelf 301/Anthropology (NEW SHELF) Due Apr 20, 2026
Subjects
Anthropology > Popular works.
Anthropology.
Society.
Popular works.
Informational works.
Biographies.
Genres
Popular works
Informational works
Biographies
Published
New York, NY : DK Publishing 2025.
Language
English
Other Authors
Miruna Achim (contributor)
Edition
First American edition
Item Description
Includes index.
Physical Description
336 pages : illustrations, maps, portraits ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780593966815
9780241638583
  • Introduction
  • Early Anthropology: Before 1918
  • Traveling turns you into a storyteller
  • Early travelogues
  • They lived free, healthy, honest, and happy lives
  • "The noble savage"
  • Light will be thrown on the origin of man
  • The theory of evolution
  • A universal sequence of social evolution
  • Unilineal evolution
  • Our resemblances are more numerous than our differences
  • The universal nature of religion
  • Equality is not to be confounded with sameness
  • Fighting racial segregation
  • The similarity of custom
  • Origins of culture
  • Civilization is not absolute
  • Cultural relativism
  • Society is the soul of religion
  • The social roots of religion
  • A difference of sound combined with a difference of ideas
  • The structure of language
  • Anthropology Between the Wars: 1918-1950
  • How rules become adapted to life
  • Biopsychological functionalism
  • Forging a nation out of two metals
  • The indigenismo movement
  • Balancing accounts
  • The concept of reciprocity
  • Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable
  • Culture shapes behavior
  • A complex network of social relations
  • Kinship and social order
  • A consistent pattern of thought and action
  • Culture and personality
  • The culmination of a progressive change
  • Revolutions in prehistory
  • Every man's spice-box seasons his own food
  • Autoethnography
  • Witchcraft has its own logic
  • Local belief systems
  • Alternation between hunger and plenty
  • Social and cultural dimensions of-nutrition
  • A rigorously empirical approach
  • Comparative ethnography
  • We are products and active agents
  • The evolutionary synthesis
  • A defining framework for experience
  • Language and cognition
  • Post-War Anthropology: 1950-1980
  • We're all really from Africa
  • Origins of humanity
  • Every real society is a process in time
  • The fluidity of social systems
  • A quest for cultural regularities or laws
  • Multilinear evolution
  • Myths operate in men's minds without their being aware
  • Structuralism
  • Language is a human possession
  • The rules of language
  • The entire span of cultural history as our laboratory
  • The New Archaeology
  • People hear speech through a screen of stereotypes
  • English vernacular
  • Where there is dirt there is system
  • Purity and society
  • Why not trace humanity's spread across the planet?
  • Population genetics
  • Hierarchy is a fundamental social principle
  • Caste systems
  • Beliefs are shaped by material conditions
  • Cultural materialism
  • Small deviations into large differences
  • Systems theory
  • Rituals create society
  • Rites of passage
  • A product of self and group identity
  • Defining ethnicity
  • When you meet chimps you meet individual personalities
  • Chimpanzee behaviors
  • A more effective way of speaking about the past
  • Processual archaeology
  • Behind the facelessness of a bureaucratic society
  • Studying up
  • Woman is not closer to nature than man
  • Feminist anthropology
  • Man is suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun
  • Thick description
  • An expression of its maker's mind
  • Material culture
  • An organizational basis for a sexual divide-and-rule policy
  • Women and the political economy
  • The soul is the prison of the body
  • Gender, sexuality, and power
  • The evolution of culture is an adaptive process
  • Stages of social organization
  • Culture is interpretation
  • Reflexive ethnography
  • Creating the world through language
  • Ritual and language
  • Identities are embodied in the human skeleton
  • Bioarchaeology
  • An elaborate and ordered system of ideas and practice
  • Medicine and healing practices
  • Why don't you study your own kind
  • Anthropology at home
  • A manifestation of dis-ease
  • Mental health and society
  • Modern Anthropology: 1980-2000
  • What is business good for?
  • Commodity fetishism
  • She understood signs had power
  • The capacity for communication
  • Concrete procedures in the face of death
  • Burial rituals
  • Birds are voices in the forest
  • The anthropology of sound
  • There are no people without history
  • Global capitalism
  • Power assumes a religious form
  • Religion and secular power
  • Interpretation occurs at the trowel's edge
  • Post-processual archaeology
  • The notion of kinship is undefined and vacuous
  • Kinship studies
  • The Japanese past and the American present
  • Adapting cultural traditions
  • Hybrids of machine and organism
  • Multispecies ethnography
  • Culture is historically altered in action
  • Structure and agency
  • Sugar shaped the modern world
  • The anthropology of food
  • Commodities have social lives
  • The value of objects
  • Poetry is a discourse in defiance
  • Oral poetry
  • Common cultural elements early farmers brought
  • The agricultural theory of language diffusion
  • A powerful, even all-consuming beast
  • Nationalist thought
  • The myth of meritocracy
  • White privilege
  • An identity tenuously constituted through a stylized repetition of acts
  • Gender performativity
  • Emotion has been given a gender
  • Emotional control
  • Our kind of family
  • Kinship ideologies
  • Windows on cultures
  • Museum anthropology
  • An apparatus for the exercise of power
  • Development and colonial attitudes
  • Traits that provide a common social identity
  • Cultural intimacy
  • Everything we know is up for grabs
  • Transitology
  • The pen is a double-edged sword
  • Academic disidentification
  • The mind as a cathedral
  • Cognitive fluidity
  • Constructs that classify people
  • Accents, dialects, and code-switching
  • Your world has a center you carry with you
  • Transcultural predicaments
  • Do no harm
  • The ethics of anthropology
  • Contemporary Anthropology: 2000 Onward
  • Vernacular English
  • An identity marker
  • The role of African-American Vernacular English
  • A dynamic and collaborative process
  • Long-term deep interviewing techniques
  • Gender identity starts before birth
  • Socialization of gender roles
  • Television has led us to see our own daily lives as dramas
  • Ethnography of media
  • A language of the mind
  • Symbolism in cave art
  • Everything comes in pairs
  • Gender equality
  • Their cuisine conveyed their identity
  • Food and modernity
  • The veil as a form of agency
  • The gender politics of piety
  • Aim to illuminate, build understanding or challenge assumptions
  • Critical ethnography
  • Survivors remake their worlds
  • The aftermath of violence
  • Home and not-home
  • Citizenship and belonging
  • We need cooked food
  • Nutrition and human evolution
  • God speaks to the human mind
  • The evangelical experience
  • Molecular origins
  • DNA politics
  • The forest has its own life
  • Relating to nonhuman beings
  • The mosaic that is our genome
  • Sequencing ancient DNA
  • To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed
  • The power of photography
  • Black girls shift the shape of spaces
  • Challenging systemic oppression
  • Stories told from objects
  • Documenting the undocumented
  • The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward
  • A new social order
  • The bridge between the living and the deceased
  • Human burials
  • A new behavior in the human repertoire
  • The significance of early trade
  • Without a concept of the future the present ceases to exist
  • Anthropologies of the future
  • A birth story that bears the burden of racism
  • Reproductive inequality
  • Evidence to identify individuals
  • Biometric hand anatomy
  • Loneliness is everybody's business
  • The loneliness epidemic
  • More-than-human effects
  • Political violence and conflict
  • A capacity to create a built environment
  • Early human wood technology
  • Directory
  • Glossary
  • Index
  • Quote Attributions
  • Acknowledgments
Review by Booklist Review

Anthropology has evolved into a study that borrows tools from the social sciences and leverages advanced analytical techniques from the natural sciences, especially biology. To try to capture the major ideas in anthropology, distill them to a few pages, and keep them relevant is a daunting task, which this book successfully accomplishes. The ideas are chronologically presented, from Ibn Battuta's fourteenth-century travelogues to recent developments in medical anthropology (the loneliness epidemic) and archaeology (early woodworking techniques). Sidebars contextualize each idea, presenting prior and subsequent relevant works. The main text expounds on the idea in accessible terms. Some entries also include a biography or a diagram showing salient relationships. Most ideas span a two-page spread. Each era begins with a time line showing when relevant works discussed were published. As with other books in DK's Big Ideas Simply Explained series, the pages are visually appealing, using various fonts, photographs, and infographics. This well-planned page design helps break up dense text into manageable chunks. The work is best suited for those readers looking for a thought-provoking overview of main ideas within anthropology.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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