Small Places, Large Issues - An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology

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.

Series Preface

Preface to the fifth 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. Social differentiation 1: Gender and Age

10. Social differentiation 2: Caste and Class

11. Religion and Ritual

12. Language and Cognition

13. Politics and Power

14. Political identity 1: Ethnicity and the Politics of Identity

15. Political identity 2: Nationalism and Minorities

16. Economic Anthropology 1: Exchange and Consumption

17. Economic Anthropology 2: Production and Technology

18. Humanity and the Biosphere

19. Complexity and Change

20. Medical Anthropology

21. Anthropology and the Paradoxes of Globalisation

22. The Anthropology of Climate Change

Epilogue: Making Anthropology Matter

Bibliography

Index