Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Routledge World Reference)
Language: English
Pages: 664
ISBN: 0415285585
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This is the only encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology to cover fully the many important areas of overlap between anthropology and related disciplines. This work also covers key terms, ideas and people, thus eliminating the need to refer to other books for specific definitions or biographies.
Special features include:
* over 230 substantial entries on every major idea, individual and sub-discipline of social and cultural anthropology
* over 100 international contributors
* a glossary of more than 600 key terms and ideas.
Pax Ethnica: Where and How Diversity Succeeds
Ishi's Brain: In Search of Americas Last "Wild" Indian
X-Events: The Collapse of Everything
Greek Laughter: A Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity
The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work
out and with respect to the theories that have guided the work. At a very general level it is possible to say that anthropological research in Latin America has fallen into two main categories: those dealing with Native American indigenous cultures, and those more concerned with the articulation of social processes that have come in the wake of *moderaization and industrialization. Whereas the former studies focus primarily on the internal structurings of indigenous communities and have a
traits between such groups. The work of Gustav Kossina (particularly his †‘Kulturkreis’ concept) was extremely influential in the European archaeology of this period, including the ambitious pan-European culture historical syntheses of †Gordon Childe. Much of this work was motivated by a search for the prehistoric origins of historically identified ethnic groups and a desire to push national histories deeper into the past. The 1950s witnessed a growing dissatisfaction with this kind of research
that it was founded on a religious principle of hierarchy, defined by both the opposition between the pure and impure, and the absolute separation of religious status from politico-economic power. Hence the caste system, as reported in village ethnographies, was the concrete manifestation of an ancient Hindu system of values. India was an unhistorical, holistic, hierarchical society: the antithesis of historical, individualist, egalitarian society in the modern West. By insisting that India as a
type—their conception of their enterprise was quite different from that which has prevailed since the second third of the twentieth century (see Stocking 1965). Explicating human history Until the 1920s, sociocultural anthropologists, *biological anthropologists, and *archaeologists were joined in a common historical project—one defined by the nineteenth-century assumption that truly scientific explanations (of virtually all phenomena) were historical. And anthropology’s purview comprehended
that are historically particular, geographically local and culturally diverse. Anthropologists have found this a productive field for social and symbolic analysis, taking into consideration even the ways in which Jesus Christ and his followers transformed local Jewish imagery to convey their message. The eucharist or last supper, a central Christian sacrament representing Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection resembles its closest model, the Jewish passover, ‘but every critical element in the
