Small Places, Large Issues

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

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. Unlike other texts on the subject, Small Places, Large Issues incorporates the anthropology of complex modern societies. Using reviews of key works to illustrate his argument, Thomas Hylland Eriksen's lucid and accessible overview remains an established introductory text in anthropology.



This fourth edition is updated throughout and increases the emphasis on the interdependence of human worlds. It incorporates recent debates and controversies, ranging from globalisation and migration research to problems of cultural translation, and discusses the challenges of interdisciplinarity in a lucid way.
Series Preface

Preface to the Fourth Edition

1. Anthropology: Comparison and Context

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. Marriage and Relatedness

9. Gender and Age

10. Caste and Class

11. Politics and Power

12. Exchange and Consumption

13. Production, Nature and Technology

14. Religion and Ritual

15. Language and Cognition

16. Complexity and Change

17. Ethnicity

18. Nationalism and Minorities

19. Anthropology and the Paradoxes of Globalisation

20. Public Anthropology

Epilogue: Making Anthropology Matter

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Social Science
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Religión
• Field work
• Minority group
• Social group
• Ethnography
• General officer
• Globalization
• Nationalism
• Anthropology
• Ritual
• Fieldwork
• Religion
• General
• Social
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 août 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783715183
• Langue: English

Extrait

Small Places, Large Issues
Anthropology, Culture and Society
Series Editors: Professor Vered Amit, Concordia University and Professor Christina Garsten, Stockholm University
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Small Places, Large Issues
An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology
FOURTH EDITION
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
First published 1995 Revised fourth edition published 2015 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Thomas Hylland Eriksen 1995, 2001, 2010, 2015
The right of Thomas Hylland Eriksen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN    978 0 7453 3695 4    Hardback
ISBN    978 0 7453 3593 3    Paperback
ISBN    978 1 7837 1517 6    PDF eBook
ISBN    978 1 7837 1519 0    Kindle eBook
ISBN    978 1 7837 1518 3    EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England sText design by Melanie Patrick
Simultaneously printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
Contents
Series Preface
Preface to the Fourth Edition 1. Anthropology: Comparison and Context 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 . Marriage and Relatedness 9 . Gender and Age 10 . Caste and Class 11 . Politics and Power 12 . Exchange and Consumption 13 . Production, Nature and Technology 14 . Religion and Ritual 15 . Language and Cognition 16 . Complexity and Change 17 . Ethnicity 18 . Nationalism and Minorities 19 . Anthropology and the Paradoxes of Globalisation 20 . Public Anthropology
Epilogue: Making Anthropology Matter
Bibliography
Index
Series Preface
Anthropology is a discipline based upon in-depth ethnographic works that deal with wider theoretical issues in the context of particular, local conditions – to paraphrase an important volume from the series: large issues explored in small places . This series has a particular mission: to publish work that moves away from an old-style descriptive ethnography that is strongly area-studies oriented, and offer genuine theoretical arguments that are of interest to a much wider readership, but which are nevertheless located and grounded in solid ethnographic research. If anthropology is to argue itself a place in the contemporary intellectual world, then it must surely be through such research.
We start from the question: ‘What can this ethnographic material tell us about the bigger theoretical issues that concern the social sciences?’ rather than ‘What can these theoretical ideas tell us about the ethnographic context?’ Put this way round, such work becomes about large issues, set in a (relatively) small place, rather than detailed description of a small place for its own sake. As Clifford Geertz once said, ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages; they study in villages.’
By place, we mean not only geographical locale, but also other types of ‘place’ – within political, economic, religious or other social systems. We therefore publish work based on ethnography within political and religious movements, occupational or class groups, among youth, development agencies, and nationalist movements; but also work that is more thematically based – on kinship, landscape, the state, violence, corruption, the self. The series publishes four kinds of volume: ethnographic monographs; comparative texts; edited collections; and shorter, polemical essays.
We publish work from all traditions of anthropology, and all parts of the world, which combines theoretical debate with empirical evidence to demonstrate anthropology’s unique position in contemporary scholarship and the contemporary world.
Professor Vered Amit Professor Christina Garsten
Preface to the Fourth Edition
This book, now in its fourth, revised and updated edition, is a rather conventional introduction to social and cultural anthropology. As the chapter titles indicate, the book does not represent an attempt to reinvent or revolutionise the subject. What I aim to do is simply to introduce the main tools of the craft, the theoretical discussions, the key figures, the main subject-areas and a representative selection of empirical fields studied by anthropologists. By ‘conventional’, incidentally, I do not necessarily mean ‘boring’. (Innovation is not always a good thing. Who wants to go to an innovative dentist? Or to fly with an innovative pilot keen to explore alternative knowledge systems?)
Today, anthropology is a global discipline, but it is unevenly distributed across the globe. English is the dominant language of anthropological discourse, more so today than in its early days, but important research is also being carried out in other languages, from Russian and Japanese to French and Spanish. It is beyond my abilities to do justice to all these national traditions of anthropology, but I have made some feeble attempts. It remains a fact, though, that this book is written from a vantage-point in Anglophone anthropology. For many years, it was common to distinguish between a British ‘social’ and an American ‘cultural’ anthropology. Today, this boundary is blurred, and although the distinction is sometimes highlighted in the text, the book is deliberately subtitled with ‘social and cultural anthropology’ in a bid to overcome an ultimately unproductive boundary.
The most controversial aspect of this book may be the prominence given to classic anthropological research in several of the chapters. In my view, it is not only a great advantage to be familiar with the classic studies in order to understand later trends and debates, but I also remain convinced that a sound grasp of mid-twentieth-century anthropology is essential for doing good research in the twenty-first century. Since many students no longer systematically read classic monographs and articles, the capsule reviews provided here may also give an understanding of the context of contemporary research – its intellectual origins and theoretical debates on which it elaborates. I do not want to give the impression that contemporary anthropologists are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, but they do stand on the shoulders of anthropologists of very considerable merit, and their work needs to be known, even if superficially, in order to understand properly what anthropological researchers are doing now. Some of these people were actually quite impressive.
The general development of this book, both at the theoretical and at the empirical level, moves from simple to increasingly complex models and sociocultural environments – from the social person to the global information society. The book is intended as a companion volume to ethnographic monographs, which remain an indispensable part of an anthropologist’s training, notwithstanding the summaries a textbook is capable of providing.