Through a fascinating analysis of seminal works in anthropology, classical studies and law, this book reveals how wholly mistaken theories can become the basis for academic research and political programmes.
What follows is the story of how the idea fared within American anthropology, the discipline that took on culture as its special subject.
What really matters is to be found in what they left behind: the books and papers and intellectual arguments that testify to what they made of the world they lived in.
. . . Required reading.” –Financial Times (UK) In this deeply researched, immersive history, Adam Kuper tells the story of how foreign and prehistoric peoples and cultures were represented in Western museums of anthropology.
Adam Kuper takes the story up to the present day, and a new final chapter traces the emergence of a modern European social anthropology in contrast with developments in American cultural anthropology over the last two decades.
The Chosen Primate ends by looking forward to the next millennium, noting that our future depends on our response to another fundamental question: Will our culture, which has given us the means to adapt successfully to nature, ultimately ...
These marriage strategies were the staple of novels, and contemporaries were obsessed with them. But there were concerns. Ideas about incest were in flux as theological doctrines were challenged.
Both a critical history of anthropological theory and methods and a challenging essay in the sociology of science, The Invention of Primitive Society shows how anthropologists have tried to define the original form of human society.
"In Anthropologists and Anthropology, Adam Kuper, one of the most gifted of the younger generation of British social anthropologists, traces the growth of the subject over these fifty years, the development of its theoretical framework and ...
Among the Anthropologists analyses the central theoretical arguments of Anthropology by turning the discipline's methods on those who practise them the anthropologists themselves.