Books on Social Anthropology
General books
Barnard, A. Social Anthropology: A Concise Introduction (Studymates). Very clear, succinct and wide-ranging.
Carrithers, M (1992) Why Humans Have Cultures (a stimulating and readable introduction to some contemporary themes.
Coleman, S. and B. Simpson (eds.) (1998) Discovering Anthropology: A Resource Guide for Teachers and Students, London: Royal Anthropological Institute (as the title suggests, this is not a text book but a guide to texts, which also contains annotated bibliographies on the main sub-fields of anthropology and information on careers. It is available from the Royal Anthropological Institute, 50 Fitzroy Street, London W1P 5HS.)
Eriksen, T H (1995) Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, London: Pluto Press (an interesting and readable introduction to the subject).
Keesing, R (1998) Cultural Anthropology.
La Fontaine, J (1985) What is Social Anthropology? (brief, but very clear and simple presentation).
MacClancy, J (ed)(2002), Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines, Chicago University Press.
A selection of books written by members of the department
Edwards, Jeanette (2000) Born and Bred: Idioms of Kinship and New Reproductive Technologies in England, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gledhill, John (2000) Power and Its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics. London: Pluto Press. (2nd Edition)
Green, Sarah (1997) Urban Amazons: Lesbian Feminism and Beyond in the Gender, Sexuality and Identity Battles of London. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Grimshaw, Anna (1992) Servants of the Buddha: Religious Women in a Winter Landscape. Open Letter Press.
Harvey, Penny (1996) Hybrids of modernity: anthropology, the nation-state and the Universal Exhibition. London: Routledge.
Harvey, Penny & Peter Gow (eds.) (1994) Sex and Violence: Issues in Representation and Experience. London: Routledge.
Rheubottom, David (2000) Age, Marriage and Politics in Fifteenth-Century Ragusa (Oxford University Press).
Wade, Peter (1997) Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. London: Pluto Press.
Wade, Peter (2000) Music, Race and Nation: Musica Tropica in Columbia, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Wade, Peter (2002), Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (London: Pluto Press).
Werbner, Richard (1991) Tears of the Dead: The Social Biography of an African Family. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Werbner, Richard (with T. Ranger) (1996) Postcolonial identities in Africa. London: Zed Books
A selection of some classic and modern ethnographic books that will give you a better idea of the scope of anthropological research and will be useful within the course itself.
Bourgeois, P (1995) In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (in a best-selling modern classic of urban anthropology, Bourgeois explores the lives of Puerto Rican crack dealers in New York City).
Briggs, J (1970) Never in Anger (a sensitive account of an anthropologist’s fieldwork among an Inuit [Eskimo] group).
Downey, G L (1998) The Machine in Me: An Anthropologist sits among Computer Engineers, New York; London: Routledge.
Evans-Pritchard, E E (1940) The Nuer (a classic study of an East African society).
Gupta, A and J Ferguson (eds) 1999(1997), Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hutchinson, S E (1996) Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War and the State. Berkeley: University of California Press (Sharon Hutchinson revisits the Nuer of Evans-Pritchard’s classic study in the context of Southern Sudan’s bitter civil war)
Kaplan, M (1995) Neither Cargo Nor Cult, Durham: Duke University Press (a reconsideration of Peter Worsley’s classic work on Melanesian cargo cults)
Lancaster, R N & M Di Leonardo (eds), The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy, New York: London: Routledge.
Malinowski, B (1979) The Ethnography of Malinowski, ed. M W Young (an anthology of writings of a great anthropologist, about the people of the Trobriand Islands).
Okely, J (1983) The Traveller-Gypsies (an interesting description of the life of English Gypsies).
Scheper-Hughes, N (1992) Death Without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, Berkeley: University of California Press (a prize-winning monograph which has caused great controversy, this book offers a harrowing account of the lives of the poor in a Brazilian sugar-growing region and challenges western models of the psychology of motherhood)