Paula G. Rubel Bücher

This text provides students with a clear and concise statement of the basic concepts of cultural anthropology and shows their interrelationships within a larger conceptual framework. This fifth edition provides current research and updated discussion reflecting postmodernist influences on anthropology in the 1990s. It discusses societal changes due to technological advances, effects of computerization on the work force, the impact of new reproductive technologies on motherhood and parenting, and changes in the conceptualization of gender/gender role and of family organization. A new chapter is devoted to issues of ethnicity, race and nationalism, focusing on the US, Sri Lanka, Quebec and the former Soviet states.

This book provides students with a statement of the basic concepts of cultural anthropology with a view to helping them to understand the literature in the discipline. This brief text is designed to be used with ethnographic material. Competing theoretical explanations are presented in an unbiased fashion. Many ethnographic examples are presented as is anthropological work in politics, economics, gender, art, mythology, cultural transformation and anthropology in the modern world. There is new material on fieldwork reflecting the new view of the field work experience as a joint venture of fieldworker and informant and the concern with reflexivity. There is also an expanded discussion on gender including material from recent books which deal with conceptualization of gender roles, women and ritual power. An instructor's manual/test bank is also available.