Anthropology

The first introductory anthropology text to present and integrate a four fields perspective through out the text, while simultaneously integrating important topics such as ethics, methods, gender and race in all chapters.

Co-authors cultural anthropologist, Barbara Miller, and world-renowned biological anthropologist, Bernard Wood, are joined by three of the brightest new scholars in archaeology and biological anthropology to provide coherent and in-depth coverage of each of the four fields of anthropology. This text presents the core concepts of anthropology from the unique voices of the four fields using current discoveries, research and issues to demonstrate how the issues and perspectives are connected and why anthropology is relevant to today's world. Up-to-date research and the impact of the newest discoveries upon the “classics” in anthropology are reflected in the choice of examples presented to illustrate key ideas. Beautifully illustrated, Anthropology: Crossing the Fields maximizes the effectiveness of the art program by building pedagogy into the captions of photos, figures, tables and maps.

The result is an original and unique text, which provides the most faithful and holistic representation available of anthropology today.

Each chapter begins with “The Big Questions” and concludes with “The Big Questions Revisited,” “Key Concepts,” and “Suggested Readings.”

About the Authors.

I. INTRODUCING THE STUDY OF HUMANITY.

Introducing Anthropology.

Anthropology’s Four Fields.

CROSSING THE FIELDS: What Is Europe?

Anthropology in the “Real World.”

LESSONS APPLIED: Archaeology Findings Increase Food Production in Bolivia.

2. Culture and Diversity.

The Concept of Culture.

Multiple Cultural Worlds.

LESSONS APPLIED: Historical Archaeology and the Story of the Northern Cheyenne Outbreak of 1879.

CROSSING THE FIELDS: Elderly Females Take the Lead in Baboon Societies.

Contemporary Debates about Culture.

CRITICAL THINKING: Adolescent Stress: Biologically Determined or Culturally Constructed?

3. Science, Biology, and Evolution.

Science and the Tree of Life

CRITICAL THINKING: Classification: Phenotype versus Molecules.

Evolution Explains the Tree of Life and Humanity’s Place in It.

LESSONS APPLIED: Applying Science to the Ethical Treatment of Nonhuman Primates.

How Evolution Works.

CROSSING THE FIELDS: Breeding and Culture in the “Sport of Kings”

METHODS CLOSE-UP: Using DNA Evidence to Trace the Origins of the Indigenous People of the Andaman Islands.

4. Research Methods in Anthropology.

Studying Humanity’s Past

METHODS CLOSE-UP: Preserving and Studying Egyptian Mummy Tissue for Clues about Ancient Disease.

LESSONS APPLIED: Defining Guidelines Regarding the Chemical Contamination of Native American Objects.

Studying Contemporary Humanity.

CRITICAL THINKING: Missing Women in the Trobriand Islands.

CROSSING THE FIELDS: Visual Anthropology Methods for All Four Fields.

Research Challenges.

II. BIOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION.

5. The Nonhuman Primates.

The Primates.

METHODS CLOSE-UP: Using Fecal Samples to Study the Effect of Female Hormones on the Behavior of Free-Ranging Spider Monkeys.

CRITICAL THINKING: Infanticide in Primates and the Sexual Selection Hypothesis.

Varieties of Primates.

Nonuman Primates: Windows to Humanity’s Past Face a Fragile Future

CROSSING THE FIELDS: Learning about Chimpanzee Tool Use through Archaeology

LESSONS APPLIED: Using Primatology Data for Primate Conservation Programs

Finding and Interpreting Hominin Fossils

LESSONS APPLIED: Paleoanthropologists Advocate for Museums in Africa

METHODS CLOSE-UP: Reconstructing Whole Fossils from Fragments.

The Early Hominins

CROSSING THE FIELDS: Cultural Variations on the Narrative of Human Origins and Evolution.

CRITICAL THINKING: “Lumpers” and “Splitters.”

Early Hominin Adaptations.

7. Emergence and Evolution of Archaic Homo.

The First Humans.

CRITICAL THINKING: What Is Really in the Toolbox?

Archaic Homo Moves Out of Africa.

LESSONS APPLIED: Anthropologists Advocate for World Heritage Status for Atapuerca, Spain.

Behavioral and Cultural Evolution

METHODS CLOSE-UP: Recovering Mammalian DNA from Neanderthal Stone Tools

CROSSING THE FIELDS: From Kanzi to Olduvai, But Not Quite.

8. Modern Humans: Origins, Migrations, and Transitions.

The Origin of Modern Humans

METHODS CLOSE-UP: Cultural Clues from South Africa about Modern Human Diet.

Modern Humans during the Upper Paleolithic

LESSONS APPLIED: Helping to Resolve Conflicts about Repainting Australian Indigenous Cave Art.

CRITICAL THINKING: Unfair to Neanderthals?

Transitions during the Holocene Era

CROSSING THE FIELDS: Linguistic Anthropology Provides Insights into the Bantu Expansion.

9. The Neolithic and Urban Revolutions.

The Neolithic Revolution and the Beginnings of Settled Life

METHODS CLOSE-UP: Reconstructing Prehistoric Diets during the Early Neolithic in Denmark.

Civilization: The Urban Revolution, States and Empires

CROSSING THE FIELDS: A Theory from Cultural Anthropology about How Early States Formed.

LESSONS APPLIED: Archaeologists, Government, and Communities Learning to Work Together in Mexico

CRITICAL THINKING: Kennewick Man and Native American Reburial 

Lessons from the Neolithic and Later Times about Our World.

III. CONTEMPORARY HUMAN SOCIAL VARIATION.

Contemporary Human Genetic Variation.

METHODS CLOSE-UP: Ethics in Genetics Diversity Research.

CROSSING THE FIELDS: Popular Opinion in Iceland on the National Human Genome Project.

Contemporary Human Physical Variation.

Urban Life’s Challenges to Human Biology and Health.

CRITICAL THINKING: Lessons from the 1865 Cholera Epidemic in Gibraltar.

LESSONS APPLIED: Fruits ‘R’ Us: A Participatory Action Research Project to Improve Nutrition among Young in West Philadelphia

11. Economic Systems.

Production

LESSONS APPLIED: The Global Network of Indigenous Knowledge Resource Centers.

Mode of Consumption and Exchange.

CRITICAL THINKING: Can the Internet Create Responsible Consumers?

CROSSING THE FIELDS: Linking the Gender Division of Labor to Diet and Growth.

METHODS CLOSE-UP: Studying Children’s Food Stealing.

Globalization and Changing Economies.

12. Reproduction and Human Development.

Modes of Reproduction.

Culture and Fertility.

METHODS CLOSE-UP: Taking Gender into Account When Surveying Sexual Behavior.

Personality, Human Development, and the Life Cycle.

LESSONS APPLIED: The Role of Cultural Brokerage in the Newborn Nursery.

CRITICAL THINKING: Cultural Relativism and Female Genital Cutting.

CROSSING THE FIELDS: Menopause, Grandmothering, and Human Evolution.

13. Illness and Healing.

Ethnomedicine.

CROSSING THE FIELDS: Linguistic Anthropology and the Medical Interview.

CRITICAL THINKING: Why Do People Eat Dirt?

Theoretical Approaches in Medical Anthropology.

METHODS CLOSE-UP: A Quantitative Comparison of Health Problems of Pastoralist and Settled Turkana Men.

Globalization and Change.

14. Kinship and Domestic Life.

The Study of Kinship.

CRITICAL THINKING: How Bilineal Is American Kinship?

Households and Domestic Life.

CROSSING THE FIELDS: What Burials Reveal about Household Members’ Status: The Prehistoric Oneota of Wisconsin.

LESSONS APPLIED: Ethnography to Prevent Wife Abuse in Rural Kentucky

Changing Kinship and Household Dynamics.

METHODS CLOSE-UP: Love Letters and Courtship in Nepal Changing Households.

15. Social Groups and Social Stratification.

Social Groups

METHODS CLOSE-UP: Multi-sited Research to Study the Breast Cancer Movement in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Social Stratification.

CRITICAL THINKING: What’s Missing from This Picture?

CROSSING THE FIELDS: The Role of Archaeology in an African American Cultural Heritage Project.

Civil Society: Between Groups and Government.

LESSONS APPLIED: Cultural Anthropology and Community Activism in Papua New Guinea.

16. Political and Legal Systems.

Politics, Political Organization, and Leadership Politics and Culture.

METHODS CLOSE-UP: Life Histories Provide Clues about Women’s Political Socialization in Korea.

Social Order and Social Conflict.

CROSSING THE FIELDS: Postconflict Reconciliation through Making Amends among Nonhuman Primates.

LESSONS APPLIED: Legal Anthropologist Advises Resistance to “Coercive Harmony”

CRITICAL THINKING: The Yanomami: The “Fierce People”?

Change in Political and Legal Systems.

IV. COMMUNICATION AND THE SEARCH FOR MEANING.

17. Communication.

Human Verbal Language.

LESSONS APPLIED: Anthropology and Public Understanding of the Language and Culture of People Who Are Deaf.

METHODS CLOSE-UP: Dealing with the “Observer’s Paradox.”

Language, Thought, and Society.

CROSSING THE FIELDS: An Evolutionary Perspective on Baby Talk.

CRITICAL THINKING: A Tale of Two News Stories.

Beyond Words: Human Paralanguage.

18. Religion.

Religion in Comparative Perspective.

CROSSING THE FIELDS: The Prehistoric Use of Red Ochre in Southern Africa and the Origins of Ritual.

LESSONS APPLIED: Aboriginal Women’s Culture, Sacred Site Protection, and the Anthropologist as Expert Witness

METHODS CLOSE-UP: Studying Birth Rituals in Indonesia

CRITICAL THINKING: Why Did the Aztecs Practice Human Sacrifice and Cannibalism?

World Religions.

Directions of Change.

19. Expressive Culture.

Art and Culture.

CRITICAL THINKING: Probing the Categories of Art.

METHODS CLOSE-UP: Without Participation, There Is No Meaning.

Play, Leisure, and Culture.

Change in Expressive Culture.

CROSSING THE FIELDS: Applying Cladistic Analysis to Change in Oriental Carpets.

LESSONS APPLIED: A Strategy for the World Bank on Cultural Heritage.

V. FORCES OF CHANGE AND HUMANITY’S FUTURE.

20. People on the Move.

Categories of Migration.

CROSSING THE FIELDS: Biological Anthropologists Reveal Health Effects of Immigration to the United States.

METHODS CLOSE-UP: Studying a Virtual Community

The New Immigrants to the United States and Canada.

Migration Policies and Politics in a Globalizing World.

CRITICAL THINKING: Haitian Cane Cutters in the Dominican Republic—A Case of Structure or Human Agency?

LESSONS APPLIED: Studying Pastoralists’ Movements for Risk Assessment and Service Delivery.

21. Development Anthropology.

Two Processes of Cultural Change.

CRITICAL THINKING: Social Effects of the Green Revolution

LESSONS APPLIED: The Saami, Snowmobiles, and the Need for Social Impact Analysis.

Approaches to Development.

METHODS CLOSE-UP: The Importance of Teamwork in Development Research.

Emerging Issues in Development

CROSSING THE FIELDS: Human Evolutionist Supports the Repatriation of Saartje Baartman’s Remains to South Africa.

Glossary.

References.

Index.