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How are different cultures to be described and compared? This book provides a clear and concise discussion of the theoretical issues involved in ethnographic description and comparative study.

Smith's compelling and convincing analysis of contemporary Japanese society has far-reaching implications for our understanding of the nature of the modern industrial world.

In this book, Sally Falk Moore examines a hundred years in the history of an African people, the Chagga of Kilimanjaro, in order to understand how their present system of 'customary' laws came to be and how the idea of custom was used in Tanzania's experiment with African socialism.

In the Western tradition, the boundaries between magic, science and religion have been continually contested. In this straightforward text, Professor Tambiah shows that modern anthropological theorists drew upon the classical sources but introduced new, ethnographic case materials.

Law has often been seen as a relatively autonomous domain, one in which a professional elite sharply control the impact of broader social relations and cultural concepts. By contrast this study asserts that the analysis of legal systems, like the analysis of social systems generally, requires an understanding of the concepts and relationships encountered in everyday social life.

First published in 1993, this book is a comprehensive analysis of the role of cultural factors in the experience of illness, countering the scientific view of folk medicine as superstitious practice.

In this book Maurice Bloch synthesises a radical theory of religion. Rituals inmany societies deny the transience of life and of human institutions. Bloch argues that they enact this denial by symbolically sacrificing the participants themselves, so allowing them to participate in the immortality of a transcendent entity.

After Nature is a timely account of fundamental constructs in English kinship at a moment when advances in reproductive technologies are raising questions about the natural basis of kinship relations.

The Indian city of Banaras attracts pilgrims and mourners from across the Hindu world. It is a place to die, to dispose of the physical remains of the deceased, and to perform various mortuary rites. This book is about the various sacred specialists who serve the dead: how they organise their business, represent death, and interpret the rituals over which they preside.