Compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier's urban planning theory realized in Brasilia, the Great Leap Forward in China, agricultural "modernization" in the Tropics -- the twentieth century has been racked by grand utopian schemes that have inadvertently brought death and disruption to millions. Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not -- and cannot -- be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge. The author builds a persuasive case against "development theory" and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. He identifies and discusses four conditions common to all planning disasters: administrative ordering of nature and society by the state; a "high-modernist ideology" that places confidence in the ability of science to improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large-scale interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans. "A broad-ranging, theoretically important, and empirically grounded treatment of the modern state and its propensity to simplify and make legible a society which by nature is complex and opaque. For anyone interested inlearning about this fundamental tension of modernity and about the destruction wrought in the twentieth century as a consequence of the dominant development ideology of the simplifying state, this is a must-read". -- Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners

Deep China investigates the emotional and moral lives of the Chinese people as they adjust to the challenges of modernity. Sharing a medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry perspective, Arthur Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei, and Guo Jinhua delve into intimate and sometimes hidden areas of personal life and social practice to observe and narrate the drama of Chinese individualization. The essays explore the remaking of the moral person during China’s profound social and economic transformation, unraveling the shifting practices and struggles of contemporary life.

Deep China investigates the emotional and moral lives of the Chinese people as they adjust to the challenges of modernity. Sharing a medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry perspective, Arthur Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei, and Guo Jinhua delve into intimate and sometimes hidden areas of personal life and social practice to observe and narrate the drama of Chinese individualization. The essays explore the remaking of the moral person during China’s profound social and economic transformation, unraveling the shifting practices and struggles of contemporary life.

Rarely do science and literature come together in the same book. When they do -- as in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, for example -- they become classics, quoted and studied by scholars and the general public alike.

Margaret Mead accomplished this remarkable feat not once but several times, beginning with Coming of Age in Samoa. It details her historic journey to American Samoa, taken where she was just twenty-three, where she did her first fieldwork. Here, for the first time, she presented to the public the idea that the individual experience of developmental stages could be shaped by cultural demands and expectations. Adolescence, she wrote, might be more or less stormy, and sexual development more or less problematic in different cultures. The "civilized" world, she taught us had much to learn from the "primitive." Now this groundbreaking, beautifully written work as been reissued for the centennial of her birth, featuring introductions by Mary Pipher and by Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson.

《艺术人类学》是莱顿教授于20世纪70年代在伦敦大学人类学系所授课程教案的基础上完成的。莱顿为读者介绍了非西方社会艺术形式的丰富性和多样性，强调了跨文化的审美赏析问题，讨论了多样化的使用艺术的种种形式，进而提出一个基本问题：是什么构成了艺术？莱顿将特定的艺术产品和仪式、神话与权力的关系联系在一起，他还探讨了人类学和社会学当代理论的艺术观。

A world classic. The Golden Bough describes our ancestors' primitive methods of worship, sex practices, strange rituals and festivals. Disproving the popular thought that primitive life was simple, this monumental survey shows that savage man was enmeshed in a tangle of magic, taboos, and superstitions. Revealed here is the evolution of man from savagery to civilization, from the modification of his weird and often bloodthirsty customs to the entry of lasting moral, ethical, and spiritual values.

在这部内容新颖的著作中，罗伯特·莱顿回顾了曾经启发过世界人类学者之研究工作的各种观点，对理论提供了简明扼要的分析，并回顾了这些理论被导入人类学争论的过程。开篇便阐释了由霍布斯、卢梭、马克思和涂尔干等人提出的经典理论观点；随后的章节讨论了功能主义、经构主义、互动理论和马克思主义人类学；概要最后还描述了社会生态学与后现代主义争论的范例。莱顿教授有详细的案例研究勾勒出了各种理论观点何以形成对特定的人类社会充分而有说服力的描述。

"The Predicament of Culture" is a critical ethnography of the West in its changing relations with other societies. Analyzing cultural practices such as anthropology, travel writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art, Clifford shows authoritative accounts of other ways of life to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in postcolonial contexts. His critique raises questions of global significance: Who has the authority to speak for any group's identity and authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? How do self and "the other" clash in the encounters of ethnography, travel, and modern interethnic relations? In discussions of ethnography, surrealism, museums, and emergent tribal arts, Clifford probes the late-twentieth century predicament of living simultaneously within, between, and after culture.

A remarkable introduction to cultural studies as relevant today as it was in 1934, Ruth Benedict's groundbreaking study is the book that first brought the concept of "culture" to lay readers. In this fascinating work, Benedict compares the cultures of three peoples: the Kwakiutl of western Canada, the Zuni of the southwestern United States, and the Dobuans of Melanesia. Featuring an introduction by Franz Boas, a preface by Margaret Mead, and a foreword by Mary Catherine Bateson, Patterns of Culture shows the importance culture has on everyday life.

《社会文化人类学的关键概念》是人类学学科一本理想的指南，清晰而可信地界定并讨论了一些具有持久价值的核心概念，包括：相异性、流言蜚语、控制、亲属制度、阴性书写、家与无家、人权、深描、叙事、暴力。 每一个关键概念的条目都配有相应的交叉参考说明以及详细的参考书目。本书讲述了以往和当前以及未来可预见的讨论，将人类学置身于一个宽广而变化的人文视野之中加以审视，并汲取和借鉴了其他相关学科的大量资源，如哲学、心理学、社会学、文化学、文学批评以及语言学等等。对于学习和教授人类学的人来说，这是一本级好的参考书，亦可为有兴趣了解“人类学智慧”的人提供一个问题式的研究性路标。

In essays covering everything from art and common sense to charisma and constructions of the self, the eminent cultural anthropologist deepens our understanding of human societies through the intimacies of "local knowledge."

This exciting new text teases out the common core of the cultural anthropological way of thinking, makes it explicit in a set of eleven questions, and uses those questions to enhance learning. Each question receives treatment in a brief chapter, accompanied by several exercises and classroom demonstrations. The textbook is intended to be accompanied by - and applied to - a reader, a few ethnographies, or a monograph with topical focus such as language, globalization, technology, art, or gender. The eleven questions that organize the text can be applied singly and cumulatively to address the cultures presented in the ethnographies or case studies chosen by each instructor. A comprehensive guide written by John Omohundro assists instructors who adopt this novel approach and suggests numerous examples of ethnographies and readers that would be effective companions for the text.

本书获得国内外学者的热烈推荐！ 完整记录人类学家深入一个未经现代社会“污染”的原住民村；鬼、灵魂、巫术、捕猎、剃头礼、饮食等原始的异文化，让你大开眼界！ 这本书标识了一个具有民族志天赋之人的出现。 ──罗伯特・田丹（美国纽约大学水牛城分校人类学系教授） 嘉运的研究成果将留给我们，并教导我们一个原生社群如何在一个更广的社会脉络下，思考食物的角色。 ──拿督胡德・萨雷（马来西亚国民大学环境及发展中心名誉教授） 本书内容属小品，文笔轻松，却能畅快地阐述文化相对、相处及相调侃的趣味。这份趣味代表人类学家具有的一份福气。作者受到善待，于是，生动的田野点滴，方得以细述有料。 ──谢世忠（国立台湾大学人类学系教授） 这本书不只是一个有关Semaq Beri人民族志的纪录，更重要的是这本书将提高读者对这群人及其处境的警觉。 ──科林・尼古拉斯（原住民关怀中心協调员）

Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels and card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals. Addiction by Design takes readers into the intriguing world of machine gambling, an increasingly popular and absorbing form of play that blurs the line between human and machine, compulsion and control, risk and reward. Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the "machine zone," in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible--even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and "ambience management," player tracking and cash access systems--all designed to meet the market's desire for maximum "time on device." Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers' everyday lives, from gambling industry conventions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings to regulatory debates over whether addiction to gambling machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two. Addiction by Design is a compelling inquiry into the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance, offering clues to some of the broader anxieties and predicaments of contemporary life.