Books in the Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology series

In many areas of the world destruction of natural resources and the rapid growth of populaton are among the most important problems facing individuals and governments. This book, first published in 1976, utilises the tools of social anthropology and population studies to examine the causes and consequences of populations growth.

Of all the great world religions, Islam appears to have the most powerful political appeal in the twentieth century. It sustains some severely traditional and conservative regimes, but it is also capable of generating intense revolutionary ardour and of blending with extreme social radicalism. As an agent of political mobilisation, it seems to be overtaking Marxism, arid surpassing all other religions. The present book seeks the roots of this situation in the past. The traditional Muslim society of the arid zone has, in the past, displayed remarkable stability and homogeneity, despite great political fragmentation, and the absence of a centralised religious hierarchy. The book explores the mechanisms which have contributed to this result - a civilisation in which (in the main) weak states co-existed with a strong culture, which had a powerful hold over the populations under its sway. A literate Great Tradition, in the keeping of urban scholars, lived side by side with a more emotive, ecstatic folk tradition, ill tile keeping of holy lineages, religious brotherhoods and freelance saints. One tradition was sustained by the urban trading class and periodically swept the rest of the society in waves of revivalist enthusiasm; the other was based on the multiple functions it performed in rural tribal society and amongst the urban poor. The two traditions were intertwined, yet remained in latent tension which from time to time came to tile surface. The book traces the manner in which the impact of the modern world, acting through colonialism arid industrialisation upset the once stable balance, and helped the erstwhile urban Great Tradition to become the pervasive arid dominant one, culminating in the zealous arid radical Islam which is so prominent now. The argument is both formulated in the abstract and illustrated by a series of case studies and examinations of specific aspects, and critical examinations of rival interpretations.

This book looks at the rise, during this century, of planned development. Most discussion has stressed differences in the style, content and organization of planning in various countries, but this book focuses on the similarities, arguing that it is done in much the same way everywhere, and for basically the same reasons. It begins by tracing the history of modern planning to the efforts of Russia and the western countries earlier this century to organize and control industrialization and economic growth. It looks at the characteristic structures, processes and organizations; of planning and the conflicts in intentions and aspirations of modern states and of ordinary people. A detailed case study of planning in Malaysia is also included.

Since its first publication in 1979, this book, together with its companion volume, The Palm and the Pleiades by Stephen Hugh-Jones, has become established as 'the most competent and sophisticated ethnography to date of any South American tropical forest people' (The Times Higher Education Supplement). Both are now available for the first time in paperback. The book is an integrated account of a Northwest Amazonian society, which elucidates the structural models that underlie and unify the domains of kinship, religion, politics and economics. These dynamic models are built from a rich corpus of ethnographic data drawn from extensive field research, and are developed in such a way that, as far as possible, they reproduce an Indian theory of society. Besides enhancing anthropological understanding of a fascinating culture area, the book's highly original approach makes it an important contribution to the general theory of social and cultural structures.

Anthropology is both outside of history and within it. Histories of anthropology tend to summarise particular authors' intellectual differences; but, as Marc Auge argues in this book, first published in English in 1982, these differences may be intrinsically derived from intellectual divisions within anthropology as obvious as they are irreconcilable.

In 1992, an explosion of 'stock fever' hit Shanghai. Ellen Hertz's anthropological 1998 study sets the stock market and its players in the context of Shanghai society, and probes the dominant role played by the state, which has yielded a stock market very different from those of the West.

A study of conjugal and kin relationships in a group of urban, educated West Africans, Akan Senior Civil Servants in Accra. As well as representing a contribution to the growing body of data on marriage and family life in West Africa, the book is an exercise in methodology.

Anthropologists, in studying other cultures, are often tempted to offer their own explanations of strange customs when they feel that the people involved have not given a good enough reason for these customs. The question how the anthropologist can justify interpretations of customs which go beyond those offered by the people themselves runs through this book.

In this book, drawing on ethnographic material from North America and Eurasia, Tim Ingold explains the causes and mechanisms of transformations between hunting, pastoralism and ranching, each based on the same animal in the same environment, and each viewed in terms of a particular conjunction of social and ecological relations of production.

Bernardo Bernardi, one of the pioneers of the anthropological study of age class systems, provides a way of making sense of the diversity of such systems by analysing cross-culturally their common features and the pattern of their differences, and showing that they serve a general purpose for the organization of society and for the distribution and rotation of power.

West Africa's agriculture has, for 150 years, been heavily geared toward export, yet the region is one of the world's poorest. Keith Hart examines this question, focusing particularly on how this situation has affected the indigenous peoples of West Africa.

The nature of social reality, and its availability to the observer, remains a fundamental methodological problem for the social anthropologist. In this book the authors argue that the difference between these two kinds of data is not merely a casual difference in the way in which the information comes to the anthropologist.

Structural analysis in the social sciences has an extensive history. Frequently, however, it has been undertaken largely on the basis of intuition and common sense alone. In this book Per Hage and Frank Harary reveal the deeper insights into social and cultural structures that can be obtained through the application of graph theory.

A study of the system of political stratification and the pattern of political alliances in rural Western Maharashtra. Based on fieldwork in a large village, a nearby market town and taluka headquarters, and political institutions in the surrounding countryside, Dr Carter's central concern is with the manner in which the pattern of political alliances is shaped by political stratification.

This collection of essays on the themes of social organization, kinship and religion provides an excellent guide for English-speaking scholars to the understanding of French structuralist thought. Upon publication, this was the first time that Luc de Heusch's important book Pourquoi l'epouser? (Editions Gallimard, 1971) had appeared in English.

Most anthropological and sociological studies of Buddhism have concentrated on village and rural Buddhism. This is a systematic anthropological study of monastic organization and monk-layman interaction in a purely urban context in the countries where Theravada Buddhism is practised, namely, Burma, Cambodia, Ceylon, Laos and Thailand.

Following a community of Breton peasants over fifteen generations, Martine Segalen traces the effects of economic changes on family life and analyses the strategies of marriage alliance and inheritance which were used to shore up social hierarchies. She thus reveals the importance of kinship networks in social intercourse, both today and in the past.

Using historical documents and evidence gathered in the field, Rubie Watson provides a social history of the 600-year-old Chinese lineage village of Ha Tsuen in the New Territories of Hong Kong, and demonstrates the crucial role that the lineage played in the evolution of the community from a few scattered households in the fourteenth century into a regional power from the 1700s onwards.

Frank Salomon draws on large stores of sources to reconstruct the political and economic institutions of pre-Inca societies, providing remarkable insight into the functioning of these 'chiefdoms', and emphasizing their importance for the understanding of rank, inequality, privilege and central power in stateless societies.

Based both on extensive fieldwork and detailed study of local records, O'Neill offers a different perspective to the traditional image of northern Iberian mountain settlements.

This is a study of the effects of 'modernization' on the social and economic world of women in Morocco. By observing social networks, Maher has been able to identify part of what inhibits the development of class consciousness, and what favours a clientistic political structure.

World Conqueror and World Renouncer is the first comprehensive and authoritative work on the relationship between Buddhism and the polity (political organization) in Thailand.

In this book, Raymond T. Smith explores the extensive family and kinship ties of West Indians in Jamaica and Guyana, and in so doing dispels many of the myths that exist about West Indian family life.

This ethnographic study of political life in the department of the Yonne, in the Burgundy region, explores a still richly Balzacian provincial world. The author, a French anthropologist, has extensive field experience in Ethiopia. Drawing on local history, interviews and participant observation, Abeles develops a fresh perspective on political life in France.

This book is the first modern ethnography of the Murik, a relatively large and important community settled on the Sepik River estuary in Papua New Guinea, and the only book of a non-Western culture drawing on the conceptual framework of the Russian literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin.

This study of religious change and cultural fragmentation in contemporary Sri Lanka focuses on a series of new Catholic shrines that attract hundreds of pilgrims. Their fame is based, among other things, on their efficacy as centres for demonic exorcism, alleviating suffering, and helping people to find jobs.

Among the people of Avatip, a community in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, the most prestigious and valued forms of wealth are personal names. In this intriguing study, Simon Harrison analyses the significance of names in the context of Avatip ritual, cosmology and concepts of the person.

The author provides a detailed description and analysis of the Merina circumcision ritual today, offers an account of its history, and discusses the significance of his analysis for anthropological theories of ritual in general.

Examines development of domestic institutions, the family, marriage, conjugal roles, in relation to changes in the mode of productive activity, specifically the change from hoe to plough agriculture. In contrasts Africa, on the one hand, to Asia and Europe, on the other.