Main description:

This introduction to social and cultural anthropology has become a modern classic, revealing the rich global variation in social life and culture across the world.

Presenting a clear overview of anthropology, it focuses on central topics such as kinship, ethnicity, ritual and political systems, offering a wealth of examples that demonstrate the enormous scope of anthropology and the importance of a comparative perspective. Using reviews of key works to illustrate his argument, for over 25 years Thomas Hylland Eriksen's lucid and accessible textbook has been a much respected and widely used undergraduate-level introduction to social anthropology.

This fully updated fifth edition features brand new chapters on climate and medical anthropology, along with rewritten sections on ecology, nature and the Anthropocene. It also incorporates a more systematic engagement with gender and digitalisation throughout the text.

Contents:

Preface to the fifth edition

1. Anthropology: Comparison and connections

2. A brief history of anthropology

3. Fieldwork and ethnography

4. The social person

5. Local organisation

6. Person and society

7. Kinship as descent

8. Kinship as marriage and relatedness

9. Social differentiation 1: Gender and age

10. Social differentiation 2: Caste, class and intersectionality

12. Thought and reality

13. Political anthropology

14. Political identity 1: Ethnicity and minorities

15. Political identity 2: Nationalism and the politics of identity

16. Economic anthropology 1: Exchange and consumption

17. Economic anthropology 2: Labour and production

18. Ecology: An anthropology of the Anthropocene

19. Complex modernities

20. Medical anthropology

21. The paradoxes of globalisation

22. The anthropology of climate

Afterword: Why everybody deserves a drop of anthropology

Bibliography

Index