Anthropology

by Ember, Carol R.; Ember, Melvin R.; Peregrine, Peter N.

• ISBN13: 9780205738823
• ISBN10: 0205738826
• Edition: 13th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-02-01
• Publisher: Pearson

Summary

Anthropology, provides its readers with a comprehensive and scientific introduction to the four fields of anthropology. It helps them understand humans in all their variety, and why such variety exists. This new thirteenth edition places an increased emphasis on immigration, migration and globalization. It also showcases how anthropological skill sets can be applied beyond academia.

Author Biography

Carol R. Ember started at Antioch College as a chemistry major. She began taking social science courses because some were required, but she soon found herself intrigued. There were lots of questions without answers, and she became excited about the possibility of a research career in social science. She spent a year in graduate school at Cornell studying sociology before continuing on to Harvard, where she studied anthropology primarily with John and Beatrice Whiting. For her Ph.D. dissertation she worked among the Luo of Kenya. While there she noticed that many boys were assigned "girls' work," such as babysitting and household chores, because their mothers (who did most of the agriculture) did not have enough girls to help out. She decided to study the possible effects of task assignment on the social behavior of boys. Using systematic behavior observations, she compared girls, boys who did a great deal of girls' work, and boys who did little such work. She found that boys assigned girls' work were intermediate in many social behaviors, compared with the other boys and girls. Later, she did cross-cultural research on variation in marriage, family, descent groups, and war and peace, mainly in collaboration with Melvin Ember, whom she married in 1970. All of these cross-cultural studies tested theories on data for worldwide samples of societies. From 1970 to 1996, she taught at Hunter College of the City University of New York. She has also served as president of the Society of Cross-Cultural Research and was one of the directors of the Summer Institutes in Comparative Anthropological Research, which were funded by the National Science Foundation. She is now executive director at the Human Relations Area Files, Inc., a nonprofit research agency at Yale University.

 

After graduating from Columbia College, Melvin Ember went to Yale University for his Ph.D. His mentor at Yale was George Peter Murdock, an anthropologist who was instrumental in promoting cross-cultural research and building a full-text database on the cultures of the world to facilitate cross-cultural hypothesis testing. This database came to be known as the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) because it was originally sponsored by the Institute of Human Relations at Yale. Growing in annual installments and now distributed in electronic format, the HRAF database currently covers more than 370 cultures, past and present, all over the world. He did fieldwork for his dissertation in American Samoa, where he conducted a comparison of three villages to study the effects of commercialization on political life. In addition, he did research on descent groups and how they changed with the increase of buying and selling. His cross-cultural studies focused originally on variation in marital residence and descent groups. He also conducted cross-cultural research on the relationship between economic and political development, the origin and extension of the incest taboo, the causes of polygamy, and how archaeological correlates of social customs can help draw inferences about the past. After four years of research at the National Institute of Mental Health, he taught at Antioch College and then Hunter College of the City University of New York. Heserved as president of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research and was president (since 1987) of the Human Relations Area Files, Inc., a nonprofit research agency at Yale University, until his passing.

Table of Contents

Anthropology , 13e

Brief Table of Contents

Part I Introduction

CHAPTER 1 What Is Anthropology?
CHAPTER 2 History of Anthropological Theory
CHAPTER 3  Research Methods in Anthropology

 

Part II Human Evolution

CHAPTER 4 Genetics and Evolution
CHAPTER 5 Human Variation and Adaptation
CHAPTER 6 The Living Primates
CHAPTER 7 Primate Evolution: From Early Primates to Hominoids
CHAPTER 8 The First Hominids

Part III  Cultural Evolution

CHAPTER 9 The Origins of Culture and the Emergence of Homo
CHAPTER 10 The Emergence of Homo sapiens
CHAPTER 11 The Upper Paleolithic World
CHAPTER 12 Origins of Food Production and Settled Life
CHAPTER 13 Origins of Cities and States

Part IV Cultural Variation

CHAPTER 14  Culture and Culture Change
CHAPTER 15 Communication and Language
CHAPTER 16 Getting Food
CHAPTER 17 Economic Systems
CHAPTER 18 Social Stratification: Class, Ethnicity, and Racism
CHAPTER 19 Culture and the Individual
CHAPTER 20 Sex, Gender, and Culture
CHAPTER 21 Marriage and the Family
CHAPTER 22 Marital Residence and Kinship
CHAPTER 23 Associations and Interest Groups
CHAPTER 24 Political Life: Social Order and Disorder
CHAPTER 25 Religion and Magic
CHAPTER 26 The Arts

Part V Using Anthropology

CHAPTER 27 Applied, Practicing, and Medical Anthropology
CHAPTER 28 Global Problems