Culture Still Matters Notes From The Field

Culture Still Matters: Notes from the Field is a critical defence of anthropology's contributions to analysis of significant social and cultural issues through ethnographic fieldwork, covering theoretical concepts about culture and their critiques in readable prose.

Now with SAGE Publishing! Cultural Anthropology: A Global Perspective delves into both classic and current research in the field, reflecting a commitment to anthropology’s holistic and integrative approach. This text illuminates how the four core subfields of anthropology—biological anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology—together yield a comprehensive understanding of humanity. In examining anthropological research, this text often refers to research conducted in other fields, sparking the critical imagination that brings the learning process to life. The Tenth Edition expands on the book’s hallmark three-themed approach (diversity of human societies, similarities that make all humans fundamentally alike, and synthetic-complementary approach) by introducing a new fourth theme addressing psychological essentialism. Recognizing the necessity for students to develop an enhanced global awareness more than ever before, author Raymond Scupin uses over 30 years of teaching experience to bring readers closer to the theories, data, and critical thinking skills vital to appreciating the full sweep of the human condition. This title is accompanied by a complete teaching and learning package.

Now with SAGE Publishing! Using state-of-the-art research, Anthropology: A Global Perspective introduces students to the four core subfields of anthropology and applied anthropology. Integrating material from each subfield, this comprehensive text is founded on four essential themes: the diversity of human societies; the similarities that tie all humans together; the interconnections between the sciences and humanities; and a new theme addressing psychological essentialism. Authors Raymond Scupin and Christopher R. DeCorse demonstrate how anthropologists use research techniques and methods to help solve practical problems and show students how anthropology is relevant to improving human societies. This supportive textbook is grounded in the belief that an enhanced global awareness is essential for people preparing to take their place in the fast-paced, interconnected world of the twenty-first century. The extensively revised Ninth Edition includes a new chapter on gender and sexuality, features a dramatically new look with new photos and figures, and has been updated to reflect the most recent findings in the field. This title is accompanied by a complete teaching and learning package.

This book explores the nature of cultural and culturally structured social and behavioral entities, their evolutionary interactions, and the central role purposive behaviors play in those interactions. It, first, makes the case for cultural and cultural structured systems being considered as true entities bounded in time and space, and not ephemera in a constant state of becoming another system. Second, it examines how these entities interact to produce evolutionary culture change. It then argues that the intent of purposive behaviors is reliably knowable in the aggregate, at least when dealing with expressions of behavioral tendencies in the animal kingdom, humans included. Finally, the book references well documented behavioral tendencies for examples of proximate causation in the evolution of settled village societies and, following that, socially complex societies. Through these efforts, the book synthesizes the various approaches to the evolution of culture and provides a complete and comprehensive picture of the process. It provides a corrective to the tendency to view cultural systems as entirely open ended and as capable of changing in any direction; and also to treating cultural evolution as solely a result of selective forces, that is, in terms of only ultimate causation. This book provides an engaging and critical counterview to established theories of cultural evolution and is of interest to scholars and students of different disciplines, from anthropology and archeology, to evolutionary biology and epigenetics.

In Visions of Development in Central Asia: Revitalizing the Culture Concept, Noor O’Neill Borbieva reflects on anthropology’s withdrawal from discussions about culture and the parallel rise of the intellectually and politically problematic discourse of “culture matters thinking,” or CMT. CMT asserts that cultures are homogeneous and that the dominant values of its culture determine a state’s socioeconomic and political trajectories. Drawing on practice theory, ecological psychology, complexity science, and poststructuralism, Borbieva urges anthropologists to revisit debates about culture in order to counteract the influence of simplistic formulations such as CMT. Through an examination of ethnographic material from Kyrgyzstan, gathered during the years she worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer and as an anthropologist, Borbieva examines how debates about culture shaped the development sector’s agenda in Central Asia. She argues that mainstream discussions of culture not only misunderstand the cultural basis of human diversity but also threaten that diversity by promoting a one-size-fits-all vision of well-being. Borbieva suggests an alternative vision, one that recognizes the profound complexity of human sociality and embraces the many forms of human thriving that grow out of our cultural differences.

A cross-cultural and ethno-historical perspective exploring the lives and legacies of several Muslim women rulers from medieval to modern times.

This book chronicles the life and times of tribal leader Mujāhid Ḥaydar, scion of a prominent local dynasty, and his agency in highland Yemen’s political conflicts from the 1970s to the early 2000s. When the political elites of the Ṣāliḥ regime murder his father and his elder brothers, he is forced to exact revenge and lead his tribe through dramatic vicissitudes that culminate in the catastrophe of the Ḥūthī wars. Mujāhid’s life is a story of ongoing strife, heroism, resistance, commitment to the defence of honour, loss, and exile. His biography offers nuanced and original insights into how tribal politics in Yemen influence the domain of the state and are often intertwined with it – such that neither can be comprehended independently from the other.

This book offers an invaluable look at what cultural anthropologists do when they are in the field. Through fascinating and often entertaining accounts of their lives and work in varied cultural settings, the authors describe the many forms fieldwork can take, the kinds of questions anthropologists ask, and the common problems they encounter. From these accounts and the experiences of the student field workers the authors have mentored over the years, In the Field makes a powerful case for the value of the anthropological approach to knowledge.