Books in the LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology series

This book brings together recent work by Maurice Bloch which explores the highly controversial territory between the cognitive and social sciences. The essays are of broad, theoretical interest and aim to combine naturalistic approaches to cognition with a recognition and respect for the cultural and historical specificity of ethnography.

From the mid-1500s to December 1999, Macao was the longest-standing site of economic, religious and political contact between the Chinese and European worlds. This book shows that as a rear window on China, Macao provides us with examples of marginality that allow us to study the limits of the systems that characterize the Chinese world.

Presents a critique of the globalisation of the culture principle, arguing that theory is dependent on the actual study of peoples.

When humans cooperate, what are the social and psychological mechanisms that enable them to do so successfully? Is cooperativeness something natural for humans, built in to our species over the course of evolution, or rather something that depends on cultural learning and social interaction? This book addresses these central questions.

Drawing on a wide range of anthropological case studies, this book focuses on ordinary ethics in contemporary China. The book examines the kinds of moral and ethical issues that emerge (sometimes almost unnoticed) in the flow of everyday life in Chinese communities.

China presents an alternative model of social transformation in the age of globalization; therefore, its path to development may have particular implications for the developing world. This work reveals how individual agency has been on the rise since the 1970s and how this has affected everyday life and Chinese society more broadly.

Presents an anthropological overview of industrialisation in both Western and non-Western societies. This book unpacks the 'world of industry' in the context of the shop floor, the family, and the city, revealing the rich social and political texture underpinning economic development.

Anthropology seems to shy away from the big, comparative questions that ordinary people in many societies find compelling. This title contains essays that explore birth, death and sexuality, puzzles about the relationship between science and religion, questions about the nature of ritual, work and genocide, and our personal fears and desires.

This volume provides an international analysis of the core metaphors and practices of human sexual and social reproduction in their personal, social and cosmological contexts.

Collects the author's writings. This title demonstrates his theoretical and empirical interests and his distinctive contribution to several key areas of anthropological enquiry. It is suitable for art historians, sociologists and geographers, and includes ideas about exchange, representation, aesthetics, and spatial and temporal processes.

In this volume Professor Firth has brought together and commented upon a number of his papers on anthropological subjects published over the last thirty years.

Takes the argument set out in "Lineage Organization in South-Eastern China" a step further. This book incorporates some of Professor Freedman's field data. The author seeks to analyse certain crucial institutions of Chinese society within the framework of contemporary anthropological theory.

Contains fourteen lectures and essays dealing with mainly, though not exclusively, with Africa, and among the topics discussed are land tenure, chieftainship, 'clientship', messianic movement, witchcraft, and 'race, tribalism and nationalism'.

This volume in honour of Professor Mair reflects the range of her interests, and those of the Department in which she taught, in many areas of social anthropology.

An ethnographic exploration of the rise of new forms of leadership at community and national levels with islanders are synthesising traditional and Western models.

Presents a description of everyday life in order to explore the concept of performance for an anthropology of gender. This title offers an account of the lives of men and women in a South Indian fishing community that reveals fresh ways of framing gender relations, the body and kinship.

A collection of some of Maurice Bloch's most important work, including essays on power, hierarchy, death and fertility.

In 1947 members of the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, under the leadership of Professor Firth, made a study of kinship in a South London borough.

Mrs van der Sprenkel was led to undertake this journey by her experiences while living in China. lt is a detailed sociological analysis of the whole complex of legal and quasi-legal institutions during the Manchu period.

A collection of essays from Edmund Leach, one of the original voices in the social anthropological tradition.