This book engages young scholars, teachers and students in a critical dialogue with past and present directions in cultural-historical studies. More particularly, it prepares prospective anthropologists, as well as readers interested in human cultures for understanding basic theoretical and methodological ethnographic principles and pursuing further what has been known as cultural anthropological perspectives. The book discusses key, field-based studies in the discipline and places them in dialogue with related studies in social history, linguistics, philosophy, literature, and photography, am.

• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Exploring Cultures
  • Chapter One
• Part II: Writing the Other
  • Chapter Two
  • Chapter Three
  • Chapter Four
  • Chapter Five
• Part III: Reading the Other or On Visual Communication
  • Chapter Six
  • Chapter Seven
  • Chapter Eight
  • Chapter Nine
• Part IV: Institution versus Meaning
  • Chapter Ten
• Part V: Economy and Exchange
  • Chapter Eleven
• Part VI: Signs, Communication, and Performance
  • Chapter Twelve
  • Chapter Thirteen
  • Chapter Fourteen
• Part VII: Cognitive Systems
  • Chapter Fifteen
  • Chapter Sixteen
• Part VIII: Symbolic Systems
  • Chapter Seventeen
  • Chapter Eighteen
• Part IX: Ritual Passage
  • Chapter Nineteen
  • Chapter Twenty
  • Intersection
• Part X: Gender and the Cultural Construction of Difference
  • Chapter Twenty One
  • Chapter Twenty Two
  • Chapter Twenty Three
• Part XI: Emotions and the Senses
  • Chapter Twenty Four
  • Chapter Twenty Five
• Author Index