• Provides a comprehensive selection of 60 readings and an insightful overview of the evolution of anthropological theory
• Revised and updated to reflect an on-going strength and diversity of the discipline in recent years, with new readings pointing to innovative directions in the development of anthropological research
• Identifies crucial concepts that reflect the practice of engaging with theory, particular ways of thinking, analyzing and reflecting that are unique to anthropology
• Includes excerpts of seminal anthropological works, key classic and contemporary debates in the discipline, and cutting-edge new theorizing
• Reveals broader debates in the social sciences, including  the relationship between society and culture; language and cultural meanings; structure and agency; identities and technologies; subjectivities and trans-locality; and meta-theory, ontology and epistemology

Henrietta L. Moore is the William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her most recent book is Still Life: Hopes, Desires and Satisfactions (2011).

Todd Sanders is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and has worked in Africa for two decades. His books include Those Who Play with Fire: Gender, Fertility and Transformation in East and Southern Africa (2004) and Beyond Bodies: Rainmaking and Sense Making in Tanzania (2008).

PART I

Section 1. Culture and Behaviour

1. The aims of anthropological research. In Race, Language and Culture
Franz Boas

2. The concept of culture in science. In The Nature of Culture.
Alfred Kroeber

3. Naven: a survey of the problems suggested by a composite picture of the culture of a New Guinea tribe drawn from three points of view
Bateson, Gregory

4. The individual and the pattern of culture. From Patterns of Culture.
Ruth

Section 2. Structure and System

5. The Rules of sociological method
E. Durkheim

6. On social structure. In Structure and Function in Primitive Society.
Radcliffe-Brown

7. Introduction. From Political Systems of Highland Burma.
E. R. Leach

8. Social structure. In Anthropology Today.
C. Levi-Strauss

Section 3. Function and Environment

9. The group, and the individual in functional analysis. American Journal of Sociology.
Malinowski

10. The concept and method of cultural ecology. In Theory of Culture Change.
Julian Steward

11. Energy and the evolution of culture. The Science of Culture.
Leslie White

12. Ecology, cultural and non-cultural. In Introduction to Cultural Anthropology.
A. Vayda and R. Rappaport

Section 4. Methods and Objects

13. Understanding and explanation in social anthropology. In The British Journal of Sociology.
J. H. M. Beattie

14. Anthropological data and social reality. In Actions, norms and representations.
Holy Ladislav and Stuchlik Milan

15. Objectification objectified. In The logic of practice.
Pierre Bourdieu

PART II

Section 5. Meanings as Objects of Study

16. Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture. In The interpretation of cultures.
Clifford Geertz

17. Anthropology and the analysis of ideology. Man.
Talal Asad

18. Subjectivity and cultural critique. Anthropological Theory.
S. Ortner

Section 6. Language and Method

19. Structural analysis in linguistics and in anthropology. In Structural Anthropology.
C. Levi-Strauss

20. Ordinary language and human action. In Explorations in Language and Meaning.
M. Crick

21. Language, anthropology and cognitive science. Man.
M. Bloch

Section 7. Cognition, Psychology and Neuroanthropology

22. Towards an integration of ethnography, history, and the cognitive science of religion. In Religion, Anthropology and Cognitive Science.
Harvey Whitehouse

23. Linguistic and cultural variables in the psychology of numeracy. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Charles Stafford

24. Subjectivity. Anthropological Theory.
Tanyia Luhrmann

25. Why the behavioural sciences need the concept of the culture-ready brain. Anthropological Theory.
Charles Whitehead

Section 8. Bodies of Knowledges

26. Knowledge of the body. Man.
Michael Jackson

27. The end of the body? American Ethnologist.
E. Martin

28. Hybrid Bodies of the Scientific Imaginary. In Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment.
Lesley Sharp

PART III

Section 9. Coherence and Contingency

29. Puritanism and the spirit of Capitalism.
Max Weber

30. Introduction. Europe and the People Without History.
Eric Wolf

31. Of Revelation and Revolution.
J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff

32. Epochal structures I. reconstructing historical materialism. In History, power and ideology: central issues in Marxist anthropology.
Donald Donham

33. Structures and the habitus. In Outline of a Theory of Practice.
Pierre Bourdieu

Section 10. Universalisms and Domain Terms

34. Body and mind in mind, body and mind in body: some anthropological interventions in a long conversation. In Bodies and persons: comparative perspectives from Africa and Melanesia.
M. Lambek

35. So, is female to male and nature is to culture? In The politics and erotics of culture.
S. B. Ortner

36. Global anxieties. Anthropological Theory.
H. L. Moore

Section 11. Perspectives and their Logics

37. The rhetoric of ethnographic holism. Cultural Anthropology.
R. Thornton

38. Writing against culture. In Recapturing Anthropology.
L. Abu-Lughod

39. Cutting the network. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
M. Strathern

Section 12. Objectivity, Morality and Truth

40. The primacy of the ethical. Current Anthropology.
N. Scheper-Hughes

41. Moral models in anthropology. Current Anthropology.
R. D'Andrade

42. Postmodernist anthropology, subjectivity, and science: a modernist critique. Comparative Studies in Society and History.
M. E. Spiro

43. Beyond good and evil? Anthropological Theory.
D. Fassin

PART IV

Section 13. The Anthropology of Western Modes of Thought

44. The invention of women: making an African sense of western gender discourses.
O. Oyewumi

45. Valorizing the present: Orientalism, postcoloniality and the human sciences. Cultural Dynamics.
V. Dhareshwar

46. Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
E. Viveiros de Castro

Section 14. (Re)defining Objects of Enquiry

47. What was life? Answers from three limit biologies. Critical Inquiry.
Stefan Helmreich

48. The near and the elsewhere. In Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity.
Marc Augé

49. Relativism. In We Have Never Been Modern.
Bruno Latour

Section 15. Subjects, Objects and Affect

50. How to read the future: the yield curve, affect, and financial prediction. Public Culture.
Caitlin Zaloom

51. Signs are not the garb of meaning. In Materiality.
Web Keane

52. Affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Navaro-Yashin

Section 16. Imagining Methodologies and Meta-things

53. Beyond 'culture': space, identity, and the politics of difference. Cultural Anthropology.
A. Gupta & J. Ferguson

54. What is at stake - and is not - in the idea and practice of multi-sited ethnography. Canberra Anthropology.
G. E. Marcus

55. Grassroots globalization and the research imagination. Public Culture.
A. Appadurai

56. The end of anthropology, again: on the future on an in/discipline. American Anthropologist.
John Comaroff

Section 17. Anthropologising Ourselves

57. Participant objectification. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9.
Bourdieu

58. Anthropology of anthropology? Further reflections on reflexivity. Anthropology Today.
S. Sangren

59. World anthropologies: cosmopolitics for a new global scenario in anthropology. Critique of Anthropology.
G. Ribeiro

60. Cultures of expertise and the management of globalization: toward the re-functioning of ethnography. In Global Assemblages.
Douglas Holmes and George E. Marcus