Cultural Anthropology A Toolkit For A Global Age

The most successful new textbook in a generation, Ken Guest’s text shows students that now, more than ever, global forces affect local culture. Students learn that the tools of cultural anthropology are relevant to their life in our globalized world. The NEW InQuizitive course helps students focus their reading, master the basics, and come to class prepared.

Covering the essential concepts that drive cultural anthropology today, Ken Guest’s Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age shows students that now, more than ever, global forces affect local culture and that the tools of cultural anthropology are essential to living in a global society. A “toolkit” approach encourages students to pay attention to big questions raised by anthropologists, offers study tools to remind readers what concepts are important, and shows them why it all matters in the real world.

"The new edition of Cultural Anthropology unmasks cultural power structures and demonstrates how the research strategies and analytical perspectives of anthropology help us understand and navigate big issues such as racism, sexism, the unequal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and climate change." -- Back cover

The Second Edition of Ken Guest's Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age covers the concepts that drive cultural anthropology by showing that now, more than ever, global forces affect local culture and the tools of cultural anthropology are relevant to living in a globalizing world.

"From the book's signature "toolkit" approach to the new chapter on the Environment and Sustainability to the accompanying videos and interactive learning tools, all aspects of Ken Guest's Cultural Anthropology work together to inspire students to use the tools of anthropology to see the world in a new way and to come to class prepared to have richer, more meaningful discussions about the big issues of our time. Are there more than two genders? How do white people experience race? What defines a family? Is there such a thing as a "natural" disaster? What causes some people to be wealthy while others live in poverty?"--

An insightful look into the central role of religious community in the largest contemporary wave of new immigrants to New York Chinatown yet God in Chinatown is a path breaking study of the largest contemporary wave of new immigrants to Chinatown. Since the 1980s, tens of thousands of mostly rural Chinese have migrated from Fuzhou, on China’s southeastern coast, to New York’s Chinatown. Like the Cantonese who comprised the previous wave of migrants, the Fuzhou have brought with them their religious beliefs, practices, and local deities. In recent years these immigrants have established numerous specifically Fuzhounese religious communities, ranging from Buddhist, Daoist, and Chinese popular religion to Protestant and Catholic Christianity. This ethnographic study examines the central role of these religious communities in the immigrant incorporation process in Chinatown’s highly stratified ethnic enclave, as well as the transnational networks established between religious communities in New York and China. The author’s knowledge of Chinese coupled with his extensive fieldwork in both China and New York enable him to illuminate how these networks transmit religious and social dynamics to the United States, as well as how these new American institutions influence religious and social relations in the religious revival sweeping southeastern China. God in Chinatown is the first study to bring to light religion's significant role in the Fuzhounese immigrants’ dramatic transformation of the face of New York’s Chinatown.

As a practical bridge between the classroom and the field, this down-to-earth, hands-on collection offers an impressive range of insightful, focused vignettes about cultural research that will jumpstart students thinking about the practice of anthropology. Reflecting the contributions of nearly two dozen practicing social scientists, each clearly written chapter of Doing Cultural Anthropology covers the fundamentals of a different data-collection technique. Following an overview of a particular ethnographic method, each author describes his or her own research project and shows how that technique is utilized. Learning-by-doing remains the thrust of the latest edition, which includes two new chapters plus significant revisions to five of the original contributions. Each chapter ends with suggestions for student projects that promote hands-on exposure to what ethnographers actually do. Readers are given just enough information to appreciate the technique and to practice it for themselves.

Help your students apply their anthropological toolkit to the real world.