Before consciousness formed and tools were made, before speech was learned and cultures were established, before religion, society, politics, and war, came a simple evolutionary change: one primate, our common ancestor, took the first upright step. So begins our family history ... the story told by Marvin Harris in Our Kind. The tale explores topics as varied as how the different races arose; why marriage and the nuclear family were established; why we overeat; how men came to dominate politics; why women have longer life-spans; why yuppies are such conspicuous consumers; how war has come to overshadow us, and whether it always will ... and a great deal more. --

Anthropology is a kind of debate between human possi- bilities--a dialectical movement between the anthropologist as a modern man and the primitive peoples he studies. This brilliant, tough-minded book contains chapters ranging from encounters in the field to essays on the nature of law, schizophrenia and civilization, and the evolution of the work of Claude Lvi-Strauss. Diamond views the anthropologist who refuses to become a searching critic of his own civilization as not merely irresponsible, but a tool of Western civilization.

Alexander Lesser, one of Franz Boas's finest students, and probably one of the best of his time in his research on the Plains Indians, is a brilliant but neglected figure in American anthropology. This representative selection of Lesser's work is designed to make the range of his writings accessible to a broad audience. His work is of particular interest to present-day readers for its advocacy of an historical-evolutionary perspective in anthropology. Such an approach, almost unique at the time Lesser was writing, has become increasingly widely appreciated since. His work is also of interest for the light it throws on the British 'functionalist' school, and the effects of their views on American anthropology.