Books by Robert Parkin

South Asia in Transition is an introductory book on the anthropology of South Asia, including India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. This work is suitable for students and scholars at all levels.

A translation of Louis Dumont's lectures on kinship, which provide a comprehensive overview of descent theory and alliance theory for students. This work features these two theories of kinship which are associated with the British and French schools of social anthropology, as well as the theoretical tendencies of functionalism and structuralism.

The work of Louis Dumont, who died in 1998, on India and modern individualism represented certain theoretical advances on the earlier structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. One such advance is Dumont''s idea of hierarchical opposition, which he proposed as a truer representation of indigenous ideologies than Lévi-Strauss''s binary opposition. In this book the author argues that, although structuralism is often thought to have gone out of fashion, Dumont''s greater concern with praxis and agency makes his own version of structuralism more contemporary. The work of his followers and fellow travelers, as well as his own, indicates that hierarchical opposition is capable of taking structuralism in new and more realistic directions, reminding us that it has never been the preserve of Lévi-Strauss alone.

Hertz's work on sin and his ethnographic study of the cult of St Besse, in northern Italy are becoming better known. This work provides a reading of each of these texts before going on to show their subsequent influence on anthropologists in particular.

First time in paperback: A unique portrait of American military action through the stories of the seventy-one U.S. destroyers sunk in World War II.