About the Book

This new edition of the highly-acclaimed Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology provides a unique guide to the ideas, arguments and history of the discipline. Combining anthropological theory and ethnography, it includes 275 substantial entries, over 300 short biographies of important figures in anthropology, and nearly 600 glossary items.

The new entries reflects the move into the centre of traditional subdisciplines like medical anthropology; recent work around issues of gender and sexuality; and anthropology’s new ethnographic engagement with central institutions of the modern world including finance and science. Anthropology is now a global discipline, so the second edition celebrates other traditions of anthropological work (Japanese anthropology, Latin American anthropology) as well as the complex processes of globalization itself.

Authoritative entries have been commissioned from among the world’s leading anthropologists. Alphabetically organized, the main entries contain clear, concise and provocative explanations of key anthropological themes and ideas, as well as surveys of the most important ethnographic regions and regional traditions of ethnographic research. Each major entry contains cross-references and a list further reading.

Areas covered include, among others:

• AIDS, ethics, violence, war
• Affect, emotions, the body
• Kinship, relatedness, the person, gender, the body
• Politics, nationalism and the state
• Cosmopolitanism, migration, race, transnationalism
• Art, language, aesthetics, film, text
• Relations with other disciplines
• History of anthropology and national traditions