In this text, Victorian intellectual Lewis Henry Morgan defines three major stages in the cultural and social evolution of mankind. In his introduction, Robin Fox reviews Morgan's thesis in the light of what we have learned in the 20th century.
Shows how the study of the micro-dynamics of power in everyday life, coupled with sensitivity to interactions between local and global processes, offers critical insights into such issues as state terror and ethnic violence, the emancipatory potential of social movements and the politics of rights, gender and culture.
Thirteen leading archaeologists have contributed to this innovative study of the socio-political processes - notably imitation, competition, warfare, and the exchange of material goods and information - that can be observed within early complex societies, particularly those just emerging into statehood. The common aim is to explain the remarkable ...
Anthropologists have a long tradition of prescient diagnoses of world events. Possessing a knowledge of culture, society, and history not always shared by the media's talking heads, anthropologists have played a crucial role in educating the general reader on the public debates from World War I to the second Gulf War. This anthology collects over ...
Challenging the prevailing assumption that border studies occurs refers only to the border between Mexico and the United States, the authors gathered in this volume examine the multiple borders that define the United States and the Americas, including the Mason-Dixon line, the U.S.-Canadian border, the shifting boundaries of urban diasporas, and ...
Shifting through the archaeological, epigraphic and artistic remains of early complex societies, this far-reaching work attempts to explain the links between spatial organization and politics from an anthropological point of view.
This book offers a comprehensive overview of political anthropology, including its history, its major research findings, and its theoretical concerns both past and present. The second edition has been significantly updated and expanded, with extensive changes in many chapters, three additional chapters, and a new conclusion. It serves as a basic ...
This scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series. In the interest of creating a more extensive selection of rare historical book reprints, we have chosen to reproduce this title even though it may possibly have occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark ...
This work, which involved the collaboration of leading figures in the field of social anthropology, undertakes the comparative study of African political systems, as an example of the wider field of the study of political institutions in traditional societies in general. The book is based upon file studies of eight African societies - the Zulu, ...
In recent years anthropology has rediscovered its interest in politics. Building on the findings of this research, this book offers a new way of analysing the relationship between culture and politics, with special attention to democracy, nationalism, the state and political violence. Beginning with scenes from an unruly early 1980s election ...
This collection of 28 essays by renowned anthropologist Eric R. Wolf is a legacy of some of his most original work, with an insightful foreword by Aram Yengoyan. Of the essays, six have never been published and two have not appeared in English until now. Shortly before his death, Wolf prepared introductions to each section and individual pieces, ...
This is the first study from an archaeological perspective of the elaborate system of chiefdoms found in the islands of Polynesia. While the growth and development of complex social and political systems in this region have long interested anthropologists and ethnographers, only recently have the islands' rich sources of archaeological data been ...
This revised edition offers a non-polemic and pragmatic multidisciplinary perspective called the "theory of blocked transitions". This theory works to answer the question "Why have some societies been successful in going through transitions, while others have been "blocked in"?
Based upon extended anthropological fieldwork and ethnohistorical reconstruction, this is a study of the precolonical political system of an acephalous society in West Africa. The Meta' are a sedentary farming people living in what is now the Republic of Cameroon. In the precolonial era, the Meta' had created a polity that was remarkable for its ...
This text offers a cross-cultural approach to conflict management. It identifies key features of constructive conflict management societies and evaluates three strategies of conflict management showing how each succeeds or fails, for example, the hostility in Northern Ireland.
The state has recently been rediscovered as an object of inquiry in a broad range of disciplines. New methodological and theoretical approaches have shed light on the meanings and practices that, for good and for bad, turn the state into the great enframer of our lives. States of Imagination draws together the best of this recent critical thinking ...
This account of politics and popular music develops the concept of "acting in concert," a metaphor for community based political action that is communicated in and around music. Through detailed case studies, the text explores how communities use popular music to understand democratic processes.
What can we learn from deceptively simple tribal societies about the ways in which man resolves his conflicts with other men? How can the social anthropologist aid in our understanding of the problems of power and social control common to all societies, from the simplest to the highly complex? What special tools of the anthropologist enable him to ...
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