Books in the LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology series

Offers a detailed historical anthropology of Ayodhya, which argues that religious values can reflect political and economic processes.

The Iban or the Sea Dayaks of Sarawak have probably been the best known of the indigenous peoples of Borneo. There was little information on their methods of agriculture and their social system. This book studies the shifting cultivation and cognatic kinship organization. The field work on which this is based was undertaken from 1949 to 1951.

A detailed account by a social anthropologist of a pagan Polynesian ritual cycle. This book omits some of the Tikopia vernacular texts, but includes a theoretical introduction, and also includes postscripts comparing the performances of 1928-9 with those witnessed by the author on his second visit to Tikopia in 1952.

An anthropologist's field study of the court set up in Singapore to deal with matrimonial suits, chiefly divorce, among Muslims. This study is based on observation of the court in action, and analyses in detail the relationship between the reformist aims of the law and the values and expectations of litigants.

Examines the life and historical background of the Paez peasants of Colombia and their relationship with the land, including issues of tenure, inheritance, and the allocation of resources.

Presents a study of a substantial Japanese immigrant community in Brazil that concentrates on its development of a political organization to cope with internal problems of co-operation and conflict and to deal with the outside world of Brazilian politicians and merchants.

Presents the ethnographic study of a community with structured trading relationships, the nomadic forest community of the Hill Pandaram.

Contributes to social anthropology and discusses, as its central topic, the instability of Malay marriage. The causes and consequences of this phenomenon, which involve social, economic, and psychological considerations, are analysed in some detail. This book draws a sympathetic picture of behaviour within the family and between kinsmen.

An excursion into American Indian culture history by a British social anthropologist. This book examines theories of the development of different Pueblo social structures, paying attention to Eggan. It concludes that the theory that all Pueblos were derived from a common base is not tenable, and that a diversity of origins is more probable.

Describing the social and economic organization of the remarkable tribal peoples who inhabit the great marshes of the lower Euphrates, this book discusses on the one hand the process by which people have adapted themselves to difficult conditions, and on the other the effects upon them of submission to the central government.

Concerns primarily with the individual in his relations with the kinship structure. This book takes a Busama through a full span of life, from birth through infancy, childhood, adolescence, and marriage to maturity and death. It shows how each stage in the individual's life involves a change in his kinship relationships and responsibilities.

Presents an exploration of the moral use of knowledge among the Amuesga of Central Peru.

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.

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.

The Ma' Betisek are a group of aborigines who live on the mangrove coastal area of Selangor in peninsular Malaysia. This study is mainly focused on the Ma' Betisek communities on Carey Island, off the west coast of Selangor and in particular three villages - Sungei Sialang, Sungei Mata and Sungei Bumbun.

Explores the links between individuals, families, communities, and the state in China through ritual and myth.

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.

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.

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.

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.