Filmed
talk What
is social anthropology?
You can
explore some of the ideas and methods of anthropology further on this
web-site.
Films
Under
‘Lectures’ you will find a film of how my wife and I did
anthropological fieldwork in the Himalayas. There is also a film taken
in the village where I talk about some of the changes that have occurred
over the thirty years I have been visiting Nepal.
There
are a series of ten introductory lectures on the basic way of looking
at kinship and marriage, and four on basic economic anthropology.
In due course there will be further films on politics and law, and
religion and ritual.
There
is a series of nine films covering classical theory in all the social
sciences from 1700-2000.
Under
‘Anthropological Ancestors’, you will find over fifty
interviews in which distinguished researchers talking about why they
became anthropologists, how they worked, and what they found out.
Books
I have
tried to explain the basic ideas in anthropology in a simple, non-technical,
way in thirty letters to my grand-daughter Lily, imagined to be about
17 years old. They can be found off this web-site under Letters to
Lily: on How the World Works. The web-site to the book also contains
suggestions for further reading.
Up to
date reading lists are to be found on various Social Anthropology
Departmental Web Sites, including that at Cambridge.
Among
older textbooks which took a broad view of the subject are:
John
Beattie, Other Cultures (1964)
Roger Keesing, Cultural Anthropology (various editions from the 1980’s)
James L. Peacock and A.T.Kirsch, The Human Direction (1980’s
on)
More
recent introductions to social anthropology include:
Chris
Hann, Teach Yourself Social Anthropology (1998)
Robert Layton, An Introduction to Theory in Social Anthropology (1997)
Ioan Lewis, Social and Cultural Anthropology in Perspective: The Relevance
to the Modern World (2003)
Wendy James and Michael Lambek, The Ceremonial Animal; A New Perspective
of Anthropology (2004)
A very
good compendium of articles on all aspects of anthropology is:
Tim Ingold,
(ed.), Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology (1994)
Two classic
accounts of what anthropologists do and how they live, though both
are more difficult to get, are:
Claude
Levi-Strauss, A World on the Wane (1961)
Elinor Bowen, Return to Laughter (1964)
The language
of anthropology
Anthropologists
for various reasons have developed a technical language, filled with
words with specialist meanings. You will find under ‘Lectures’
on this web-site a rough list of some of the principal terms they
use, which you can print out and available as you read or watch further.
Back
to LECTURES