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  3. Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology

The monograph series Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology publishes analytical ethnographies, comparative works and contributions to theory. All combine an expert and critical command of ethnography and a sophisticated engagement with current theoretical debates.

  • General Editors: Meyer Fortes, Edmund Leach, Jack Goody, Stanley Tambiah

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68 results in Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology

Page 3 of 4

Kinship and Class in the West Indies
  • A Genealogical Study of Jamaica and Guyana
  • Raymond T. Smith
  • Published online:
    29 October 2009
    Print publication:
    21 July 1988
  • Is a family system that permits freedom to enter, dissolve, and re-enter sexual unions, that tolerates high illegitimacy rates, and allows a large proportion of households to be headed by women, viable, natural and healthy? This is an appropriate question to ask of many modern industrial societies in the 1980s. Yet a system with just those factors has been in place in the West Indies for 150 years. In this book, Raymond T. Smith explores the extensive family and kinship ties of West Indians in Jamaica and Guyana, and in so doing dispels many of the myths that exist about West Indian family life.

People of the Zongo
  • The Transformation of Ethnic Identities in Ghana
  • Enid Schildkrout
  • Published online:
    29 October 2009
    Print publication:
    31 March 1978
  • Dr Schildkrout probes questions of ethnicity, religion, cultural change and the African national identity in this study of the immigrant community of Kumasi, Ghana's second largest city. She compares first- and second-generation immigrants - those born in their rural homelands, and those born in Ghana - in terms of their orientation to politics, to kinship, and to community participation. The author explores the meaning of ethnic identity for rural- and urban-born immigrants, and establishes certain generalizations about ethnicity based on these comparisons. The book discusses the issues of migration, particularly interregional migration; the position of the 'stranger'; questions of cultural change in modern Africa; the 'generational gap' in the African context; the questions of citizenship and national identity in Africa today, and the emergence of new identities, regional, national and religious. This book has importance not only as a local case study that gives a full description of West African urban life, but also as a theoretical reconsideration of ethnicity that has application outside the African context.

Women and Property in Morocco
  • Their Changing Relation to the Process of Social Stratification in the Middle Atlas
  • Vanessa Maher
  • Published online:
    27 October 2009
    Print publication:
    16 January 1975
  • This is a study of the effects of 'modernization' on the social and economic world of women in Morocco. Vanessa Maher suggests that three systems of social stratification modify one another: a system of classes based on relation to the means of production; a system of estates, differentiated by inherited status; and a system of segmentary tribal groups, based on territorial rights. Although all Moroccans use all these systems on different occasions it is the women who, faced with their own exclusion from wage-earning, along with the instability of marriage and the inadequacy of most family incomes, respond by perpetually reconstituting the groups on which they must depend, those based on territorial rights and putative kinship. By observing these social networks, Maher has been able to identify part of what inhibits the development of class consciousness, and what favours a clientistic political structure.

Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India
  • Sara Dickey
  • Published online:
    24 October 2009
    Print publication:
    23 September 1993
  • This study of the Indian cinema is concerned particularly with cinema-goers in Madurai, a city in Tamil Nadu, South India. Sara Dickey reviews the history of Tamil film, explains the structure of the industry, and presents the perspective of the filmmakers. However, the core of the book is an analysis of the films themselves and the place they have in the lives of poor people, who organize fan clubs, discuss the films and the actors, and in various ways relate these fantasy worlds to their own lives. Dickey argues that the effect of these films is ultimately conservative, for they glorify poverty while holding out the hope of a better future. Her rich ethnography makes an interesting contribution to the study of film in India and, more generally, to the understanding of popular culture in an Indian city.

The Making of the Basque Nation
  • Marianne Heiberg
  • Published online:
    19 October 2009
    Print publication:
    07 September 1989
  • Set against the historical background of Spain's unification as a modern state, this book is a study of a complex, frequently violent, political phenomenon - Basque nationalism - which after ninety years continues to constitute a major challenge to Spain's established political order. It examines the origins of Basque nationalism in the Basque industrial heartland of Bilbao in the 1890s and analyses its development up to 1980 when the Basque country finally achieved home rule. In particular, the book shows how Basque nationalism operated upon the residents of the Basque country, divided by culture, loyalties, divergent economic and political aspirations and history, to create a new and exclusive political entity - the Basque nation. The main fieldwork was conducted during the two years surrounding the death of General Franco in 1975, a period of exceptional violence in the Basque country that marked Spain's transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one. Using a theoretical approach, the book provides an empirical analysis of one of Spain's most intractable political problems during a decisive period of Spanish history.

Traders Without Trade
  • Responses to Change in Two Dyula Communities
  • Robert Launay
  • Published online:
    15 October 2009
    Print publication:
    09 December 1982
  • The word dyula means 'trader' in the Manding language. It is also the name of certain Manding-speaking ethnic minorities in parts of northern Ivory Coast, who, for centuries before the advent of colonial rule, enjoyed a virtual trading monopoly over the local region. In the first part of this book Robert Launay describes two Dyula communities prior to the twentieth-century colonial period: he discusses the regional symbiosis between Dyula traders and Senufo farmers; the organization of Dyula activity; and the division of the communities into relatively small clan wards with high rates of in-marriage. The second part examines the ways in which both communities have adapted to the recent loss of their trading monopoly, and the strategies they have employed, such as emigration, the assimilation of Western education and the adoption of new occupations, to carve out a new economic niche for themselves. As an account of the incorporation of 'traditional' community into a modern town, the book will be of interest to anthropologists and others concerned with development and modernisation in Africa and the Third World.

The New Racism in Europe
  • A Sicilian Ethnography
  • Jeffrey Cole
  • Published online:
    12 October 2009
    Print publication:
    27 November 1997
  • In the last twenty years, immigration has become one of the most contested issues in Western Europe. The arrival of Africans, Asians, Eastern Europeans and others in Italy has reversed earlier trends of emigration. Debate, political activity and violence have raised questions of rejection and integration, of anti-racism and the new racism. Studies of these issues commonly focus on political activity and the plight of minorities, but this book breaks new ground in its emphasis on the everyday reactions of Italians to immigration and related issues. Drawing on research carried out in Palermo, Jeffrey Cole considers the role of class, culture, local history and political economy in the ambivalent responses of Sicilians to immigrants. He places Italian attitudes in a European context, and investigates why anti-immigrant politics are concentrated in the wealthy Italian North.

Social Inequality in a Portuguese Hamlet
  • Land, Late Marriage, and Bastardy, 1870–1978
  • Brian Juan O'Neill
  • Published online:
    11 October 2009
    Print publication:
    25 September 1987
  • The traditional image of northern Iberian mountain settlements is that they are largely egalitarian, homogeneous, and survivals of archaic forms of 'agrarian collectivism'. In this book, based both on extensive fieldwork and detailed study of local records, Brian Juan O'Neill offers a different perspective, questioning prevailing views on both empirical as well as theoretical and methodological grounds. Through a detailed examination of three major areas of social life - land tenure, cooperative labour exchanges, and marriage and inheritance practices - in one particular hamlet, the author demonstrates the predominance of forms of institutionalized economic inequality and social differentiation within the peasantry. Situating the local study within a wider European and Mediterranean ethnographic and geographical framework, O'Neill offers a refreshing and challenging way of combining the research methods of anthropology with those of social and economic history. His book will appeal to anthropologists, historians, sociologists, geographers and demographers interested in the present and past social structure of European village communities, as well as to those concerned with the growing links between anthropology and history.

From the Milk River: Spatial and Temporal Processes in Northwest Amazonia
  • Christine Hugh-Jones
  • Published online:
    07 October 2009
    Print publication:
    17 January 1980
  • Since its first publication in 1979, this book, together with its companion volume, The Palm and the Pleiades by Stephen Hugh-Jones, has become established as 'the most competent and sophisticated ethnography to date of any South American tropical forest people' (The Times Higher Education Supplement). Both are now available for the first time in paperback. The book is an integrated account of a Northwest Amazonian society, which elucidates the structural models that underlie and unify the domains of kinship, religion, politics and economics. These dynamic models are built from a rich corpus of ethnographic data drawn from extensive field research, and are developed in such a way that, as far as possible, they reproduce an Indian theory of society. Besides enhancing anthropological understanding of a fascinating culture area, the book's highly original approach makes it an important contribution to the general theory of social and cultural structures.

Individual and Society in Guiana
  • A Comparative Study of Amerindian Social Organisation
  • Peter Riviere
  • Published online:
    01 October 2009
    Print publication:
    28 December 1984
  • The Amerindian peoples of Guiana, the geographical region of north-east South America, have long been recognized as forming a distinct variety of the tropical forest culture. In this book, Peter Rivière employs a comparative perspective to reveal that Guianan societies, generally characterized as socially fluid and amorphous, are in fact much more highly structured than they first appear, and he identifies certain common patterns of social organization that result from sets of individual choices and relationships. By contrasting the characteristics of Guianan society with those from elsewhere in Lowland South America, he constructs a spectrum of complexity of Amerindian social structure, and argues that the Guianan variant represents the logically simplest form of organization in the area.

Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas
  • The Political Economy of North Andean Chiefdoms
  • Frank Salomon
  • Published online:
    01 October 2009
    Print publication:
    25 July 1986
  • By the time of Columbus, the people of Ecuador's tropical highlands had created small but remarkably complex and interlinked political societies. These small societies for many years proved able to fight off the overwhelming might of the Inca state. But around 1500 they fell to Inca invaders who, in turn, soon lost their dominion to Spanish warlords. Frank Salomon draws on large stores of sources to reconstruct the political and economic institutions of pre-Inca societies. Their structure before and during the Inca interlude reveals diversity in the Andean world. Salomon provides remarkable insight into the functioning of these 'chiefdoms', emphasizing their importance for the understanding of rank, inequality, privilege and central power in stateless societies. He also contributes to our understanding of expansion, colonization, and the adaptive relationships between indigenous and imposed regimes in a context of precapitalist statecraft.

The Abandoned Narcotic
  • Kava and Cultural Instability in Melanesia
  • Ron Brunton
  • Published online:
    30 September 2009
    Print publication:
    29 March 1990
  • Ron Brunton revives a problem posed by the great anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers in History of Melanesian Society (1914): how to explain the strange geographical distribution of kava, a narcotic drink once widely consumed by south-west Pacific islanders. Rivers believed that it was abandoned by many people even before European contact in favour of another drug, betel, drawing his speculations from the ideas of the diffusionist school of anthropology. However, Dr Brunton disagrees. Taking the varying fortunes of kava on the island of Tanna, Vanauta, as his starting point, he suggests that kava's abandonment can best be explained in terms of its association with unstable religious cults, and not because of the adoption of betel. The problem of kava is therefore part of a broader problem of why many traditional Melanesian societies were characteristically highly unstable, and Dr Brunton sees this instability as both an outcome and a cause of weak institutions of authority and social coordination.

Ecology and Exchange in the Andes
  • Edited by David Lehmann
  • Published online:
    29 September 2009
    Print publication:
    11 November 1982
  • For centuries Andean civilization and ecology has afforded a special fascination for European travellers and officials. In this volume, eight writers - anthropologists, economists and historians working in Bolivia, Britain, France, Ireland and Peru - describe and analyse aspects of rural society in various Andean regions. They focus on the impact of capitalist development on both the peasant economy and the landed elite in the Andes and the ways in which that impact has been shaped by a specific Andean culture and a characteristic Andean ecology and climate. Their discussion of Andean specificity centres on the notion of verticality, first developed by John Murra to describe political and economic adaptation to climatic variation in the Andean eco-system. The volume represents a substantial contribution to our understanding of Andean rural society and the nature of the Latin American peasantry and peasant economy. It will appeal to all those interested in economic anthropology, Latin America, peasant studies and the capitalist world-economy.

The Political Economy of West African Agriculture
  • Keith Hart
  • Published online:
    29 September 2009
    Print publication:
    31 May 1982
  • West Africa's agriculture has, for 150 years, been heavily geared toward export, yet the region is one of the world's poorest. Keith Hart examines this question, focusing particularly on how this situation has affected the indigenous peoples of West Africa. Commerce has grown impressively, but productivity remains low and capital accumulation is retarded. The reasons exist primarily in internal conditions shaping social institutions. Before, during, and since colonialism, the particular problems of these preindustrial states have shaped agricultural development more than the pressure supposedly emanating from the 'world system' of international capitalism. This book, following the classical economists as well as Marx and Lenin, argues for the necessity of rapid capitalist penetration into West African agriculture. The book is also a readable introduction to the history and ethnography of the region as a whole.

Age Class Systems
  • Social Institutions and Polities Based on Age
  • Bernardo Bernardi
  • Translated by David I. Kertzer
  • Published online:
    29 September 2009
    Print publication:
    27 November 1985
  • All societies are differentiated by age. But in some, this differentiation takes the form of institutionalized, formally graded age classes, the members of which share an assigned 'structural' age, if not necessarily the same physiological age. The nature of formal age group systems has become one of the classic issues in modern social anthropology, although until now there has been no comprehensive explication of these complex forms of social organization. In this book, Bernardo Bernardi, one of the pioneers of the anthropological study of age class systems, provides a way of making sense of the diversity of such systems by analysing cross-culturally their common features and the pattern of their differences, and showing that they serve a general purpose for the organization of society and for the distribution and rotation of power.

People and the State
  • Robertson
  • Published online:
    29 September 2009
    Print publication:
    18 October 1984
  • This book looks at the rise, during this century, of planned development. Most discussion has stressed differences in the style, content and organization of planning in various countries, but this book focuses on the similarities, arguing that it is done in much the same way everywhere, and for basically the same reasons. It begins by tracing the history of modern planning to the efforts of Russia and the western countries earlier this century to organize and control industrialization and economic growth. It looks at the characteristic structures, processes and organizations; of planning and the conflicts in intentions and aspirations of modern states and of ordinary people. A detailed case study of planning in Malaysia is also included.

Minangkabau Social Formations
  • Indonesian Peasants and the World-Economy
  • Joel S. Kahn
  • Published online:
    29 September 2009
    Print publication:
    04 December 1980
  • In this anthropological investigation of the nature of an underdeveloped peasant economy, Joel S. Kahn attempts to develop the insights generated by Marxist theorists, by means of a concrete case study of a peasant village in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra. He accounts for the specific features of this regional economy, and, at the same time, examines the implications for it of the centuries-old European domination of Indonesia. The most striking feature of the Minangkabau economy is the predominance of petty commodity relations in agriculture, handicrafts and the local network of distribution. Dr Kahn illustrates this with material on local economic organization, which he collected in the field in the highland village of Sungai Puar, the site of a blacksmithing industry, and with published and unpublished data from other parts of Indonesia. Dr Kahn's book is unusual for its combination of a theoretical analysis of underdevelopment with a detailed regional study. It will appeal to those interested in South-east Asian studies, in development, and in neo-Marxist approaches in anthropology.

Australian Kin Classification
  • Harold W. Scheffler
  • Published online:
    29 September 2009
    Print publication:
    29 September 1978
  • This study aims to resolve the century-old debate about the nature of Australian aboriginal societies and the comparability of their structures with the structures of other tribal and kinship-based societies. It begins with a critical evaluation and refutation of the claims that Australians are 'ignorant of physical paternity' and therefore cannot have systems of kin classification. Professor Scheffler then demonstrates that systems of kin classification are a common feature of Australian languages and that, contrary to the theory proposed by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and others, variation in the rules of interkin marriage does not account for variation in systems of kin classification. This was the first monographic treatment of the subject since Radcliffe-Brown's classic work, The Social Organization of the Australian Tribes, published in 1931, and is much more comprehensive and synthetic in its coverage of the range of variation in Australian systems of kin classification. It applies the concepts and methods of structural semantic analysis to a broad range of ethnographic and linguistic data, and demonstrates how they resolve one of anthropology's oldest and most perplexing theoretical puzzles.

Priests, Witches and Power
  • Popular Christianity after Mission in Southern Tanzania
  • Maia Green
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    06 March 2003
  • In the aftermath of colonial mission, Christianity has come to have widespread acceptance in Southern Tanzania. In this book, Maia Green explores contemporary Catholic practice in a rural community of Southern Tanzania. Setting the adoption of Christianity and the suppression of witchcraft in a historical context, she suggests that power relations established during the colonial period continue to hold between both popular Christianity and orthodoxy, and local populations and indigenous clergy. Paradoxically, while local practices around the constitution of kinship and personhood remain defiantly free of Christian elements, they inform a popular Christianity experienced as a system of substances and practices. This book offers a challenge to idealist and interpretative accounts of African participation in twentieth-century religious forms, and argues for a politically grounded analysis of historical processes. It will appeal widely to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology and African Studies; particularly those interested in religion and kinship.

The Huli Response to Illness
  • Stephen Frankel
  • Published online:
    14 September 2009
    Print publication:
    13 November 1986
  • Dr Frankel's study of the rapid transformation of traditional medical care among the Huli of New Guinea by Western treatments strikingly combines the methods of social anthropology and epidemiology. Until the 1950s the Huli used only their own form of therapy, including symptomatic treatments, specialist surgery and major ritual intended to enlist the support of spirits. Since then, superficially at least, there has been a rejection of many traditional measures and a corresponding enthusiasm for Western treatments underpinned by Christianity. The Huli Response to Illness analyses the rich network of traditional belief relating to the classification and causation of illness, patterns of disease, historical experience, and the organisation of society. The methodological approach presented is notable not only for the study of medical pluralism, but also for examining the conditions which may influence responses to programmes of health improvement. The study as a whole integrates material conventionally divided between anthropological and medical texts and powerfully demonstrates the limitations of this traditional separation.

Page 3 of 4