"A thought-provoking, stimulating volume on the past, present and future of cultural materialism that is both laudatory of Harris' research strategy and critical of it." Paul Shankman, University of Colorado One of the most important anthropologists of all time, Marvin Harris was influential worldwide as the founder of cultural materialism. This book accessibly analyzes Harris's theories and their important legacies today. The chapters explore cultural materialism's epistemology and its relation to rational choice theory, Darwinian social science, and population pressures. The authors assess recent attempts to extend and reformulate cultural materialism and highlight cross-cultural, archaeological, and ethnographic applications of cultural materialism today.
Endogamy, the custom forbidding marriage outside one's social class, is central to social history. This study considers the factors determining who married whom, whether partner selection changed over the past three hundred years and regional differences between Europe and South America.
A rich, witty, and accessible introduction to the anthropology of contemporary cultures, Cultural Complexity emphasizes that culture is organized in terms of states, markets, and movements. Hannerz pays special attention to the interplay between the centralizing agencies of culture, such as schools and media, and the decentering diversity of subcultures, and considers the special role of cities as the centers of cultural growth. Hannerz discusses cultural process in small-scale societies, the concept of subcultures, and the economics and politics of culture. Finally, he presents the twentieth-century globalization of culture as a process of cultural diffusion, polycentralism, and local innovation, focusing on periods of intensive cultural productivity in Vienna, Calcutta, and San Francisco.
This 1969 work gathers together essays on Third World development by nine social scientists with diverse academic interests. These contributions are united by a relative uncertainty in relation to development, derived from the contemporary critical reappraisal of the area, together with a need to create fresh methodologies for the advancement of their respective fields.
Arising from Bondage is an epic story of the struggle of the Indo-Caribbean people. From the 1830's through World War I hundreds of thousands of indentured laborers were shipped from India to the Caribbean and settled in the former British, Dutch, French and Spanish colonies. Like their predecessors, the African slaves, they labored on the sugar estates. Unlike the Africans their status was ambiguous--not actually enslaved yet not entirely free--they fought mightily to achieve power in their new home. Today in the English-speaking Caribbean alone there are one million people of Indian descent and they form the majority in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. This study, based on official documents and archives, as well as previously unpublished material from British, Indian and Caribbean sources, fills a major gap in the history of the Caribbean, India, Britain and European colonialism. It also contributes powerfully to the history of diaspora and migration.
Examining in detail the apparently inexorable polarization of society in such countries as Rwanda, Algeria, and South Africa, the author questions whether current theories correctly explain the past or offer adequate guides for the future. In their place he puts forward an alternative neo-Durkheimian view of the possibility of non-violent revolutionary change, based on the development of such social and cultural continuities as already exist within each plural society. But he warns that -this is an age of passionate commitment to violence in which vicarious killers abound in search of a Vietnam of their own.- The aim of this groundbreaking and challenging book is to create theoretical perspectives in which to view the racial conflict of plural societies. Written in the turbulent early 1970s, the book demonstrates the inadequacy of then prevailing views such as Marxist interpretations of racial conflict as class struggle, and the Fanon a priori rejection of non-violent techniques of change, which Kuper holds responsible for the acceptance of what he calls -the platitudes of violence.- The book concludes with more personal sections focusing on the author's struggles with the then prevailing South African society, critiques of that, and censorship of his attempts to make these public. In the light of subsequent changes in South Africa many decades later, this book serves not only as an important work of political sociology but as a personal testament to the fight against racism in South Africa. Leo Kuper was professor of sociology and director of the African Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. A South African by birth, he was one of the first writers on genocide as well as other aspects of African studies and urban sociology. His major book, Genocide (Penguin, 1981), remains in print. The Leo Kuper Foundation is a non-governmental organization dedicated to the eradication of genocide through research, advice, and education. It was created in Washington, DC in 1994 following the death of Leo Kuper, with the aim of improving measures to prevent genocide. The main area of work for the past five years has been in support of the creation of an International Criminal Court. Troy Duster is director at the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge, New York University.
