This bibliography is a list of what the faculty consider
to be major ethnographic and/or theoretical contributions to the field during
the 20th century. The books on the list are important background
reading to help prepare you for the general MA exams. These books should
supplement what you are covering and learning in your course work. Indeed,
portions of some of these works may very well be assigned in your classes.
Classic Theory
Benedict, Ruth: 1934, Patterns of Culture. Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin Company.
Boas, Franz: 1940 Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan.
Douglas, Mary: 1966, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Durkheim, Emile: 1938, The Rules of the Sociological Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [orig. 1895].
Engels, Frederick: 1942, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in the Light of the Researches
of Lewis H. Morgan. New York: International Publishers. [orig. 1884].
Evans-Pritchard, E.E.: 1964, Social Anthropology and Other Essays, combining
Social Anthropology and Essays in Social Anthropology. New York: Free Press of
Glencoe.
Goffman, Erving: 1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Kuhn, Thomas S.: 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Levi-Strauss, Claude: 1963, Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books [orig. 1958].
Mauss, Marcel: 1954, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic
Societies. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. [orig. 1925].
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R.: 1952, Structure and Function in Primitive Society; Essays
and Addresses. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
Sahlins, Marshall D. and Elman R. Service (editors): 1960, Evolution and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Weber, Max: 1930, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
translated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. [orig. 1904].
TOP
Classic Ethnography/Theory (Pre 1970)
Cohen, Abner: 1969, Custom and Politics in Urban Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E.: 1940, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood
and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Foster, George M.: 1967, Tzintzuntzan: Mexican Peasants in a Changing World.
Boston: Little, Brown.
Leach, E.R.: 1954, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure. London: Athlone.
Lewis, Oscar: 1959, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of
Poverty. New York: Basic Books.
Liebow, Elliott: 1967, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men.
Boston, MA: Little, Brown.
Malinowski, Bronislaw: 1961, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of
Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea.
Waveland reprint edition. [orig. 1922]
Mead, Margaret: 1928, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of
Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. New York: W. Morrow & Co..
Rappaport, Roy: 1968, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual and Ecology of a New
Guinea People. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Redfield, Robert: 1941, The Folk Culture of Yucatan. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Turnbull, Colin: 1961 The Forest People. Simon and Schuster.
Turner, Victor: 1967, Forest of Symbols. Cornell University Press
TOP
Recent Theoretical Classics (Post 1970)
Anderson, Benedict: 1983, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Appadurai, Arjun: 1996, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Arizpe, Lourdes (editor): 1996, The Cultural Dimensions of Global Change : An
Anthropological Approach. Paris: UNESCO Publications.
Asad, Talal (editor): 1973, Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre: 1977, Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foucault, Michel: 1975, Discipline and Punish. London: Allen Lane.
Geertz, Clifford: 1973, The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Giddens, Anthony: 1973, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer: 1996, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental
Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Moore, Henrietta: 1988, Feminism and Anthropology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist and Louise Lamphere (editors): 1974, Woman, Culture, and Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press
Roseberry, William: 1989, Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture,
History, and Political Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Sahlins, Marshall: 1985, Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Said, Edward: 1978, Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Wolf, Eric R.: 1982, Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
