Bøger i Methodology & History in Anthropology serien

Steiner's (1909-52) classic study Taboo and three other essays, on superstition, enslavement and the early Hebrew lineage system, and Chagga law and truth comprise the first of two volumes collecting the work of the Prague-born social and cultural anthropologist who ended his brief career at Oxford.

The work of Louis Dumont, who died in 1998, on India and modern individualism represented certain theoretical advances on the earlier structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. One such advance is Dumont''s idea of hierarchical opposition, which he proposed as a truer representation of indigenous ideologies than Lévi-Strauss''s binary opposition. In this book the author argues that, although structuralism is often thought to have gone out of fashion, Dumont''s greater concern with praxis and agency makes his own version of structuralism more contemporary. The work of his followers and fellow travelers, as well as his own, indicates that hierarchical opposition is capable of taking structuralism in new and more realistic directions, reminding us that it has never been the preserve of Lévi-Strauss alone.

A translation of Louis Dumont's lectures on kinship, which provide a comprehensive overview of descent theory and alliance theory for students. This work features these two theories of kinship which are associated with the British and French schools of social anthropology, as well as the theoretical tendencies of functionalism and structuralism.

Studying how people become religious, this volume offers a perspective for the study of religion, one that examines the works of transmission and innovation through the prism of learning. It argues that religious culture is socially and dynamically constructed by agents who are not mere passive recipients but engaged in active learning processes.

How should we tell the histories of academic disciplines? All too often, the political and institutional dimensions of knowledge production are lost beneath the intellectual debates. This book redresses the balance. Written in a narrative style and drawing on archival sources and oral histories, it depicts the complex pattern of personal and administrative relationships that shape scholarly worlds. Focusing on the field of social anthropology in twentieth-century Britain, this book describes individual, departmental and institutional rivalries over funding and influence. It examines the efforts of scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Evans-Pritchard and Max Gluckman to further their own visions for social anthropology. Did the future lie with the humanities or the social sciences, with addressing social problems or developing scholarly autonomy? This new history situates the discipline's rise within the post-war expansion of British universities and the challenges created by the end of Empire.

Outside France, French anthropology is conventionally seen as being dominated by grand theory produced by writers who have done little or no fieldwork themselves, and who may not even count as anthropologists in terms of the institutional structures of French academia.

A dialogue between theory and ethnography, the book shows how Durkheimian sociology has become a mainstay of social thought and theory, pointing to multiple ways in which Durkheim's great work on religion remains relevant to thinking about culture.