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Of all the great world religions, Islam appears to have the most powerful political appeal in the twentieth century. It sustains some severely traditional and conservative regimes, but it is also capable of generating intense revolutionary ardour and of blending with extreme social radicalism. As an agent of political mobilisation, it seems to be overtaking Marxism, arid surpassing all other religions. The present book seeks the roots of this situation in the past. The traditional Muslim society of the arid zone has, in the past, displayed remarkable stability and homogeneity, despite great political fragmentation, and the absence of a centralised religious hierarchy. The book explores the mechanisms which have contributed to this result - a civilisation in which (in the main) weak states co-existed with a strong culture, which had a powerful hold over the populations under its sway. A literate Great Tradition, in the keeping of urban scholars, lived side by side with a more emotive, ecstatic folk tradition, ill tile keeping of holy lineages, religious brotherhoods and freelance saints. One tradition was sustained by the urban trading class and periodically swept the rest of the society in waves of revivalist enthusiasm; the other was based on the multiple functions it performed in rural tribal society and amongst the urban poor. The two traditions were intertwined, yet remained in latent tension which from time to time came to tile surface. The book traces the manner in which the impact of the modern world, acting through colonialism arid industrialisation upset the once stable balance, and helped the erstwhile urban Great Tradition to become the pervasive arid dominant one, culminating in the zealous arid radical Islam which is so prominent now. The argument is both formulated in the abstract and illustrated by a series of case studies and examinations of specific aspects, and critical examinations of rival interpretations.

Frank Salomon draws on large stores of sources to reconstruct the political and economic institutions of pre-Inca societies, providing remarkable insight into the functioning of these 'chiefdoms', and emphasizing their importance for the understanding of rank, inequality, privilege and central power in stateless societies.

This is a study of the effects of 'modernization' on the social and economic world of women in Morocco. By observing social networks, Maher has been able to identify part of what inhibits the development of class consciousness, and what favours a clientistic political structure.

World Conqueror and World Renouncer is the first comprehensive and authoritative work on the relationship between Buddhism and the polity (political organization) in Thailand.

Examines development of domestic institutions, the family, marriage, conjugal roles, in relation to changes in the mode of productive activity, specifically the change from hoe to plough agriculture. In contrasts Africa, on the one hand, to Asia and Europe, on the other.

Anthropologists, in studying other cultures, are often tempted to offer their own explanations of strange customs when they feel that the people involved have not given a good enough reason for these customs. The question how the anthropologist can justify interpretations of customs which go beyond those offered by the people themselves runs through this book.

This collection of essays on the themes of social organization, kinship and religion provides an excellent guide for English-speaking scholars to the understanding of French structuralist thought. Upon publication, this was the first time that Luc de Heusch's important book Pourquoi l'epouser? (Editions Gallimard, 1971) had appeared in English.

In this book, drawing on ethnographic material from North America and Eurasia, Tim Ingold explains the causes and mechanisms of transformations between hunting, pastoralism and ranching, each based on the same animal in the same environment, and each viewed in terms of a particular conjunction of social and ecological relations of production.

Anthropology is both outside of history and within it. Histories of anthropology tend to summarise particular authors' intellectual differences; but, as Marc Auge argues in this book, first published in English in 1982, these differences may be intrinsically derived from intellectual divisions within anthropology as obvious as they are irreconcilable.

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.

Structural analysis in the social sciences has an extensive history. Frequently, however, it has been undertaken largely on the basis of intuition and common sense alone. In this book Per Hage and Frank Harary reveal the deeper insights into social and cultural structures that can be obtained through the application of graph theory.

The nature of social reality, and its availability to the observer, remains a fundamental methodological problem for the social anthropologist. In this book the authors argue that the difference between these two kinds of data is not merely a casual difference in the way in which the information comes to the anthropologist.

Godelier discusses both the power that certain men (the Great men) have over others through their control of war, shamanism, hunting, and rites of initiation, as well as the extraordinary power and domination that men in general exert over women.

In this book, Peter Riviere 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.

Using historical documents and evidence gathered in the field, Rubie Watson provides a social history of the 600-year-old Chinese lineage village of Ha Tsuen in the New Territories of Hong Kong, and demonstrates the crucial role that the lineage played in the evolution of the community from a few scattered households in the fourteenth century into a regional power from the 1700s onwards.

Most anthropological and sociological studies of Buddhism have concentrated on village and rural Buddhism. This is a systematic anthropological study of monastic organization and monk-layman interaction in a purely urban context in the countries where Theravada Buddhism is practised, namely, Burma, Cambodia, Ceylon, Laos and Thailand.

The author provides a detailed description and analysis of the Merina circumcision ritual today, offers an account of its history, and discusses the significance of his analysis for anthropological theories of ritual in general.

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.

Based both on extensive fieldwork and detailed study of local records, O'Neill offers a different perspective to the traditional image of northern Iberian mountain settlements.

Following a community of Breton peasants over fifteen generations, Martine Segalen traces the effects of economic changes on family life and analyses the strategies of marriage alliance and inheritance which were used to shore up social hierarchies. She thus reveals the importance of kinship networks in social intercourse, both today and in the past.

Numbers are an important feature of almost all known cultures. This detailed anthropological study examines how people from a wide range of cultures and historical backgrounds use and understand numbers. By looking at the logical, linguistical and psychological implications, the author analyses how numbers operate within different contexts.

This is an ethnographic investigation into the meaning of German selfhood during the Cold War. Borneman shows how ideas of kin, state, and nation were constructed through processes of mirror imaging and misrecognition. Using linguistics and narrative analysis he compares the autobiographies of two generations of Berlin's residents with the official versions prescribed by the two German states.

In her study of domestic organization in Gonja, Esther Goody has concentrated on tracing the interrelationships between political and domestic institutions in a bilateral kinship system.

In this book, Maia Green explores contemporary Catholic practice in a rural community of Southern Tanzania, and discusses how Christianity has come to have widespread acceptance in Southern Tanzania in the historical context of colonial mission. It will appeal to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology and African studies.

In an ethnographic study of a remote community in the Auvergne, Dr Reed-Danahay challenges conventional views about the French school system and demonstrates how parents subvert and resist the ideological messages of the teachers. This book offers fresh insights into the ways in which French culture is transmitted to the coming generation.

In many areas of the world destruction of natural resources and the rapid growth of populaton are among the most important problems facing individuals and governments. This book, first published in 1976, utilises the tools of social anthropology and population studies to examine the causes and consequences of populations growth.

Recalling life in a single household occupied by several Jewish and Muslim families, in the generation before Algerian independence, Joelle Bahloul's informants build up a micro-history of a period which came to an end in the early 1960s.

Pierre Bourdieu, a French anthropologist, develops his theory of symbolic power through a materialistic approach, which he analyses symbolic capital and the different modes of domination. The author draws on his fieldwork in Kabylia (Algeria) to illustrate his theoretical propositions.

This 1995 book describes learning and the process of childhood in Angang, a fishing community in south-eastern Taiwan, and the ways in which children learn, consciously and unconsciously, about forms of identification both as children within the family and as citizens of the nation.