For more than three decades, Ethnic Americans has been hailed as a classic history of immigration to America. Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers begin with a brief overview of immigration during the colonial and early national eras (1492 to the 1820s), focusing primarily on the arrival of English Protestants, while at the same time stressing the diversity brought by Dutch, French, Spanish, and other small groups, including "free people of color" from the Caribbean. Next they follow large-scale European immigration from 1830 to the 1880s. Catholicism became a major force in America during this period, with immigrants—five million in the 1880s alone—creating a new mosaic in every state of the Union. This section also touches on the arrival, beginning in 1848, of Chinese immigrants and other groups who hoped to find gold and get rich. Subsequent chapters address eastern and southern European immigration from 1890 to 1940; newcomers from the Western Hemisphere and Asia who arrived from 1840 to 1940; immigration restriction from 1875 to World War II; and the postwar arrival and experiences of Asian, Mexican, Hungarian, and Cuban refugees. Taking the past fifteen years into account, the fifth edition of Ethnic Americans considers recent influxes of Asians and Hispanics, especially the surge in the Mexican population, and includes expanded coverage of nativist sentiment in American politics and thought. --

The best known, most often cited history of anthropological theory is finally available in paperback! First published in 1968, Harris's book has been cited in over 1,000 works and is one of the key documents explaining cultural materialism, the theory associated with Harris's work. This updated edition included the complete 1968 text plus a new introduction by Maxine Margolis, which discusses the impact of the book and highlights some of the major trends in anthropological theory since its original publication. RAT, as it is affectionately known to three decades of graduate students, comprehensively traces the history of anthropology and anthropological theory, culminating in a strong argument for the use of a scientific, behaviorally-based, etic approach to the understanding of human culture known as cultural materialism. Despite its popularity and influence on anthropological thinking, RAT has never been available in paperback_until now. It is an essential volume for the library of all anthropologists, their graduate students, and other theorists in the social sciences.

"Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) was the leading social anthropologist in Paris between the world wars, and his Manuel d'ethnographie, dating from that period, is the longest of all his texts. Despite having had four editions in France, the Manuel has hitherto been unavailable in English. This contrasts with his essays, many of which have long enjoyed the status of classics within anthropology. We are therefore pleased to present, in the English language for the first time, this extraordinary work that is based on the more than thirty lectures Mauss delivered each year under the title 'Instructions in descriptive ethnography, intended for travellers, administrators and missionaries.' Mauss's treatment of fundamental questions, such as how to conceptualize and classify the range of social phenomena known to us from history and ethnography, has lost none of its freshness."--

Betafo, a rural community in central Madagascar, is divided between the descendants of nobles and descendants of slaves. Anthropologist David Graeber arrived for fieldwork at the height of tensions attributed to a disastrous communal ordeal two years earlier. As Graeber uncovers the layers of historical, social, and cultural knowledge required to understand this event, he elaborates a new view of power, inequality, and the political role of narrative. Combining theoretical subtlety, a compelling narrative line, and vividly drawn characters, Lost People is a singular contribution to the anthropology of politics and the literature on ethnographic writing.

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. --

'British prehistory will never look the same again.' Professor Colin Renfrew, University of Cambridge Stephen Oppenheimer's extraordinary scientific detective story combining genetics, linguistics, archaeology and historical record shatters the myths we have come to live by. It demonstrates that the Anglo-Saxon invasions contributed just a tiny fraction (5%) to the English gene pool. Two-thirds of the English people reveal an unbroken line of genetic descent from south-western Europeans arriving long before the first farmers. The bulk of the remaining third arrived between 7,000 and 3,000 years ago as part of long-term north-west European trade and immigration, especially from Scandinavia - and may have brought with them the earliest forms of English language. As for the Celts - the Irish, Scots and Welsh - history has traditionally placed their origins in Iron Age Central Europe. Oppenheimer's genetic synthesis tells a different story. There is indeed a deep divide between the English and the rest of the British. But as this book reveals the division is many thousands of years older than previously thought. 'Be prepared to have all your cherished notions of English history and Britishness swept away' - Clive Gamble

The published work of Claude Levi-Strauss over the last three and a half decades has established him as one of the world′s most innovative anthropologists. Yet throughout this period he was maintaining a full taching commitment in Paris. The pieces in Anthropology and Myth illustrate (in his own words) ′the efforts, the tentative advances and retreats and now and again the achievements of a thought process during some thirty-two years that amount to a large propotion of an individual life and the span of a generation′. Levi-Strauss used to the lecture theatre as a workshop in which to try out and develop new ideas, and many of the familiar themes of his books will be found here: analysis of myth and ritual, totemism, kinship, marriage and social structure. Offering a unique glimpse of the genesis of such subjects throughout his teaching career, this book provides a sketchbook of the themes painted elsewhere in larger, more finished form, and thus forms a document of vital importance for the history of anthropological thought.

When Western scholars write about non-Western societies, do they inevitably perpetuate the myths of European imperialism? Can they ever articulate the meanings and logics of non-Western peoples? Who has the right to speak for whom? Questions such as these are among the most hotly debated in contemporary intellectual life. In How "Natives" Think , Marshall Sahlins addresses these issues head on, while building a powerful case for the ability of anthropologists working in the Western tradition to understand other cultures. In recent years, these questions have arisen in debates over the death and deification of Captain James Cook on Hawai'i Island in 1779. Did the Hawaiians truly receive Cook as a manifestation of their own god Lono? Or were they too pragmatic, too worldly-wise to accept the foreigner as a god? Moreover, can a "non-native" scholar give voice to a "native" point of view? In his 1992 book The Apotheosis of Captain Cook , Gananath Obeyesekere used this very issue to attack Sahlins's decades of scholarship on Hawaii. Accusing Sahlins of elementary mistakes of fact and logic, even of intentional distortion, Obeyesekere portrayed Sahlins as accepting a naive, enthnocentric idea of superiority of the white man over "natives"—Hawaiian and otherwise. Claiming that his own Sri Lankan heritage gave him privileged access to the Polynesian native perspective, Obeyesekere contended that Hawaiians were actually pragmatists too rational and sensible to mistake Cook for a god. Curiously then, as Sahlins shows, Obeyesekere turns eighteenth-century Hawaiians into twentieth-century modern Europeans, living up to the highest Western standards of "practical rationality." By contrast, Western scholars are turned into classic custom-bound "natives", endlessly repeating their ancestral traditions of the White man's superiority by insisting Cook was taken for a god. But this inverted ethnocentrism can only be supported, as Sahlins demonstrates, through wholesale fabrications of Hawaiian ethnography and history—not to mention Obeyesekere's sustained misrepresentations of Sahlins's own work. And in the end, although he claims to be speaking on behalf of the "natives," Obeyesekere, by substituting a home-made "rationality" for Hawaiian culture, systematically eliminates the voices of Hawaiian people from their own history. How "Natives" Think goes far beyond specialized debates about the alleged superiority of Western traditions. The culmination of Sahlins's ethnohistorical research on Hawaii, it is a reaffirmation for understanding difference.

This collection of essays explains and encourages new reflection on Paul Rabinows pioneering project to anthropologize the West. His goal is to exoticize the Western constitution of reality, emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal, and show how their claims to truth are linked to particular social practices, hence becoming effective social forces. He has recently begun to focus on the core of Western rationality, in particular the practices of molecular biology as they apply to our understanding of human nature. This book moves in new directions by posing questions about how scientific practice can be understood in terms of ethics as well as in terms of power.The topics include how French socialist urban planning in the 1930s engineered the transition from city planning to life planning; how the discursive and nondiscursive practices of the Human Genome Project and biotechnology have refigured life, labor, and language; and how a debate over patenting cell lines and over the dignity of life required secular courts to invoke medieval notions of the sacred. Building on an ethnographic study of the invention of the polymerase chain reaction--which enables the rapid production of specific sequences of DNA in millions of copies Rabinow, in the final essay, reflects in dialogue with biochemist Tom White on the place of science in modernity, on science as a vocation, and on the differences between the human and natural sciences.

The Savage in Judaism exposes and challenges the opposition between Judaism and "savage" religions that has shaped the conceptualization of Judaism in the discourses of modernity. Since the Enlightenment, Judaism has typically been regarded as superior to other religions. This judgment gave rise to the conviction that interpreters of Judaism had little if anything to learn from either the discipline of anthropololgy or comparative inquiry. This book, by contrast, aligns itself with a growing trend that is seeking to collapse the distinction between Judaism and savage religions. It does so, by recounting the history of that opposition and by a series of studies showing how differently Judaism appears when passed under the gaze of anthropological inquiry and cross-cultural analysis. Topics includes circumcision, impurity, and dietary restrictions.

According to the 1990 census, New York, for the first time in a century, had more foreign-born inhabitants than native-born residents. A city of continual immigration, New York's people have been documented by major artists and photographers from the earliest European settlers to the present. In this majestic illustrated history, with over 500 prints, paintings, and photographs, many never before published, we see the arrival of the first wave of Dutch and Anglo-Saxon settlers in the seventeenth century. We progress through Irish and German immigrations in the mid-nineteenth century, the immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of vast numbers of Italians and Eastern European Jews as well as Greeks and Slavs, followed by African Americans moving from the South after World War I. Finally, as the twentieth century comes to a close, Caribbeans, Latinos, Africans, and Asians have become the dominant new New Yorkers. As he did with Harlem on My Mind, The Lower East Side, American Jewish Album, and The Italian Americans, Allon Schoener has brought together wonderful images as well as documentary accounts from diaries, letters, news articles, and other sources, giving us the rich history and texture of this great city.

"Focusing on the former province of Galicia, this book tells the story of Europe's eastern borderlands, stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans, through the eyes of the diverse communities of migrants who settled there for centuries and were murdered or forcibly removed from the borderlands in the course of World War II and its aftermath. Omer Bartov explores the fates and hopes, dreams and disillusionment of the people who lived there, and, through the stories they told about themselves, reconstructs who they were, where they came from, and where they were heading. It was on the borderlands that the expanding great empires--German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman--overlapped, clashed, and disintegrated. The civilization of these borderlands was a mix of multiple cultures, languages, ethnic groups, religions, and nations that similarly overlapped and clashed. The borderlands became the cradle of modernity. Looking back at it tells us where we came from." -- Provided by publisher.

Mimesis: the idea of imitation. Alterity: the idea of difference, the opposition of Self and Other. In his most accomplished work to date, Michael Taussig explores these complex and often interwoven concepts. Arguing that mimesis is the nature that culture uses to create second nature, he maintains that mimesis - variously experienced in different societies - is not only a faculty but also a history. That history, Taussig writes, is deeply tied to "Euroamerican colonialism, the felt relation of the civilizing process to savagery, to aping, sensateness caught in the net of passionful images spun for several centuries by the colonial trade with wildness." For anthropologists, social scientists, cultural critics, artists and everyone else caught up in the enigma of the postmodern, framing the question "What is Reality" is crucial to gaining an understanding of what it is we know and who we are. Why is it important to understand that traditions are inventions and that social life is a construction when they grip us with all the force of the "natural"? And how is it that we understand reality as both real and really made up? In Mimesis and Alterity Taussig undertakes an eccentric history of the mimetic faculty. He moves easily from the nineteenth-century invention of mimetically capacious machines, such as the camera, backwards to the fable of colonial "first-contact" and alleged mimetic prowess of "primitives," and then forward to contemporary time, when the idea of alterity is increasingly unstable. Utilizing anthropological theory, Taussig blends Latin American ethnography and colonial history with the insights of Walter Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer. Vigorous and unorthodox, Taussig's understanding of mimesis in different cultures deepens our meanings of ethnography, racism and society.

"Her book is all about people. . . . The publishers say of it that 'field work in its personal and objective dimension is placed under a kind of microscope. The book is a must for all field workers in the social sciences.' That claim does not seem to me excessive." -Edmund Leach, New York Review of Books "There are few books which are as informative of what it means to be a field-worker in social science as Hortense Powdermaker's Stranger and Friend. This book should be must reading both for scholars and students." -Seymour M. Lipset, Harvard University "Stranger and Friend is a passionate plea for anthropology as a human discipline as well as a science, as an all-engrossing life experience as well as a profession, and increasingly as a subject in the curriculum of graduate and undergraduate studies." -Margaret Mead, American Museum of Natural History "This is just the kind of book needed in anthropology today. It tells objectively, but in warm and human terms, how important research was done. It contributes to methodology and to the history of the science of anthropology." -Charles Wagley, Columbia University "This is an essential book for anyone interested in the problems of an anthropologist at work." -Cornelius Osgood, Peabody Museum of Natural History

"Eric Wolf has literally set the terms for anthropological thinking about peasantries, culture and power, complex societies, and interactions between noncapitalist societies and capitalism. Every item in this excellent collection has stimulated and influenced both my own thought and that of many others in our field, as well as beyond it. "—Katherine Verdery, University of Michigan "This powerful body of work begins ('Anthropology') and ends ('Concepts') in a rather speculative vein, taking us into the ideas of others and then back to Wolf. In these two sections we get a picture of the development of currents in anthropology (and the social sciences more broadly) from the early fifties to the present and the way in which Wolf's intellectual and political development was threaded through those debates and controversies. In the middle two sections ('Connections' and 'Peasants') we get the pathbreaking pieces that made Wolf the major figure he is. "—Gavin Smith, University of Toronto "There is a large audience, to be found in anthropology and in related fields like history, cultural studies, gender studies, etc., who will receive the writings of Eric Wolf with appreciation. . . . His work is fully in the comparative anthropological tradition . . . [and] demonstrates the power of comparative historical analysis. "—Abraham Rosman, Barnard College, Columbia University

Looks at non-Arab and non-Muslim ethnic groups in the Middle East, describing their history, culture, and political struggles in the region.

Introduction -- Anthropology of China : history, regionalism and comparison -- Kinship as ideology and as corporation -- Relatedness and gender -- Love, emotion and sentiment -- The exchange of money, gifts and favours -- The localization and globalization of food -- Nature, environment and activism -- Ritual and belief -- Hospitality -- The stranger king and the outside of an imperial civilisation -- The anthropology of the modern state in China -- Conclusion.

A world-renowned anthropologist, Anatoly M. Khazanov offers a witty, insightful, and cautionary analysis of ethnic nationalism and its pivotal role in the collapse of the Soviet empire. “Khazanov’s encyclopedic knowledge of the history and culture of post-Soviet societies, combined with field research there since the 1960s, informs the case studies with a singular authoritative voice. This volume is destined to be an absolutely necessary reference for the understanding of ethnic relations and the politics of minorities in the ex-USSR into the next century.”—Leonard Plotnicov, editor of Ethnology First Paperback Edition