Northern Indiana Library

Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction

"If you must recognize what anthropology is, examine what anthropologists do," write the authors of Social and Cultural Anthropology: a really brief advent. This attractive review of the sector combines an available account of a few of the discipline's guiding rules and technique with ample examples and illustrations of anthropologists at paintings.

War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage

The parable of the peace-loving "noble savage" is continual and pernicious. certainly, for the final fifty years, preferred and scholarly works have agreed that prehistoric battle used to be infrequent, risk free, unimportant, and, like smallpox, a ailment of civilized societies by myself. Prehistoric conflict, in response to this view, used to be little greater than a ritualized video game, the place casualties have been restricted and the consequences of aggression fairly gentle.

The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Evolution and Cognition)

Oxford provides, in a single handy and coherently equipped quantity, 20 influential yet formerly rather inaccessible articles that shape the spine of Boyd and Richerson's path-breaking paintings on evolution and tradition. Their interdisciplinary examine relies on notions. First, that tradition is essential for realizing human habit; not like different organisms, socially transmitted ideals, attitudes, and values seriously impact our habit.

Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions--Revised Edition

From handshakes and toasts to chant and genuflection, ritual pervades our social interactions and non secular practices. nonetheless, few folks may possibly establish all of our day-by-day and festal ritual behaviors, less clarify them to an interloper. equally, as a result of the number of actions that qualify as ritual and their many contradictory but, in lots of methods, both valid interpretations, ritual turns out to elude any systematic ancient and comparative scrutiny.