Anthropology · 8 modules · 20 steps
Anthropology: Understanding Humanity
The comparative study of human life, taught through the fieldwork that made the discipline and the criticism that remade it. You start with what culture even means and how anyone claims to know it, then move through origins, kinship, ritual, exchange, empire and the modern city. Hurston, Benedict, Mead, Douglas, Mahmood, Das and Tuhiwai Smith are the spine here rather than the appendix. The promise is that you will find your own society strange, which is the whole point of the subject.
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What Culture Means
The discipline's central concept and its central method, before any of the material it was used on. Read these three and you have the tools the rest of the pathway uses.
Patterns of Culture
Ruth BenedictBenedict's argument that each culture selects a small arc from the range of possible human behaviour, and that what looks abnormal in one is unremarkable in another.
Benedict's life and the configurational approach she built.
Open companionThe Interpretation of Cultures
Clifford GeertzThick description: the claim that a wink and a twitch look identical and mean entirely different things, and that culture is the difference.
Open the core textThick description explained clearly, which the essay itself does not quite manage.
Open companionArgonauts of the Western Pacific
Bronislaw MalinowskiThe book that invented participant observation as a method. The kula ring makes no economic sense and that is exactly why it matters.
Open the core textThe kula exchange shown in two minutes. Short, and the clearest picture of what the ring actually was.
Open companionHuman Origins
Two accounts of the deep past that disagree fundamentally about whether agriculture and hierarchy were inevitable.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah HarariThe standard sweeping narrative: cognitive revolution, agriculture, empire, science. Read it, then read the next book, which was written partly against it.
The argument in summary, so you can hold the shape of it while reading.
Open companionThe Dawn of Everything
David Graeber and David WengrowAn archaeologist and an anthropologist argue that early humans experimented constantly with social forms, and that our story of inevitable hierarchy is simply wrong.
Wengrow presenting the case against the standard narrative.
Open companionFieldwork and Who Does It
Two ethnographies whose value is inseparable from who wrote them. Both were attacked, and the attacks are part of the education.
Mules and Men
Zora Neale HurstonHurston went home to Florida and collected the folklore of the people she grew up among, which raised the question of whether an insider can do fieldwork.
The book and Hurston's unusual position between anthropology and literature.
Open companionComing of Age in Samoa
Margaret MeadThe most famous and most contested ethnography ever written. Read it alongside the controversy rather than instead of it.
Open the core textMead's work and the Freeman controversy that followed it.
Open companionKinship and Family
How relatedness is organised, and what happens to families when ordinary life is torn apart.
Tristes Tropiques
Claude Levi-StraussPart travel writing, part theory, part confession that anthropology may be impossible. The most readable thing the structuralists produced.
Structuralism explained properly, which you will need before the theory chapters.
Open companionLife and Words
Veena DasDas on how survivors of Partition and the 1984 violence absorbed catastrophe into ordinary domestic life. Fieldwork on what cannot easily be said.
Das presenting her own approach to violence and the everyday.
Open companionRitual and Belief
Why people do things that make no practical sense, and three very different answers spanning a century.
Purity and Danger
Mary DouglasDirt is matter out of place. Douglas uses that one idea to explain taboo, pollution and the dietary rules of Leviticus.
Open the core textThe classification argument, worked through with the examples Douglas uses.
Open companionThe Golden Bough
James George FrazerA vast Victorian comparison of myth and ritual across the world. Its method is discredited and its influence is everywhere, which makes it worth reading critically.
Frazer's magic-religion-science progression, and why anthropologists abandoned it.
Open companionPolitics of Piety
Saba MahmoodMahmood studied women in the Egyptian mosque movement and asked why Western feminism could only read their piety as false consciousness.
Mahmood's reworking of agency, which is the book's hardest and most useful idea.
Open companionExchange and Value
What moves between people, and what the movement does. Two books a century apart, the second explicitly built on the first.
The Gift
Marcel MaussThere is no free gift. Mauss shows that giving creates obligation, and that obligation is the foundation of social order.
Open the core textGraeber explaining Mauss, which is the ideal pairing for the next step.
Open companionDebt: The First 5,000 Years
David GraeberGraeber's claim that debt precedes money and barter never happened. Ranging, argumentative, and disputed by economists in ways worth reading about.
Open the core textGraeber presenting the whole argument himself.
Open companionPower, Race and Colonialism
The discipline turning on itself. Anthropology grew up alongside empire, and these three books are about what that did to the knowledge it produced.
Orientalism
Edward SaidHow the West produced the East as an object of study, and how that knowledge served the power that funded it.
Open the core textThe argument in seven minutes, before you take on the book.
Open companionDecolonizing Methodologies
Linda Tuhiwai SmithWritten from the position of the researched rather than the researcher. Smith's opening line is that research is one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous vocabulary.
Tuhiwai Smith presenting her own framework at length.
Open companionEurope and the People Without History
Eric WolfWolf's argument that the societies anthropology called timeless had been reshaped by global trade for centuries before anyone arrived to study them.
The book's structure and its quarrel with the ethnographic present.
Open companionCities and Modern Life
The discipline comes home. Three books applying ethnographic attention to globalisation, an American city and a Mumbai slum.
Modernity at Large
Arjun AppaduraiAppadurai's five scapes, a vocabulary for describing how people, money, media, technology and ideas move without moving together.
Appadurai on the framework in his own words.
Open companionCity of Quartz
Mike DavisLos Angeles as a machine for sorting people, read through architecture, policing and property. Urban anthropology written like a prosecution.
Davis's method discussed by philosophers. Thin, and the best available on this specific book.
Open companionBehind the Beautiful Forevers
Katherine BooThree years of reporting inside Annawadi, a settlement beside Mumbai airport. Not written by an anthropologist, and a model of what the method can do.
Boo on how she worked, which is the part that makes the book trustworthy.
Open companion