Human Culture: Highlights of Cultural Anthropology (2e)

Human Culture presents the highlights of the popular Cultural Anthropology, 13th edition by the same author team. It provides students with an empirical introduction to cultural anthropology, and helps them understand humans in all their variety - and why such variety exists.

This new 2nd edition places an increased emphasis on immigration, migration and globalization.  Additionally, the size of the book (13 chapters) makes it useful for quarter courses, as well as for courses that encourage a lot of supplemental reading.

Teaching and Learning Experience

Personalize Learning - MyAnthroLab delivers proven results in helping students succeed, provides engaging experiences that personalize learning, and comes from a trusted partner with educational expertise and a deep commitment to helping students and instructors achieve their goals.

Improve Critical Thinking - Throughout each chapter in Human Culture there are a number of critical thinking questions to encourage students to examine their assumptions, discern hidden values, evaluate evidence, assess their conclusions, and more!

Engage Students - Along with a detailed summary, each chapter ends with a listing of new terms that have been introduced; helping students to engage in major concepts and findings.

Support Instructors - Teaching your course just got easier!  You can create a Customized Text or use our Instructor’s Manual, Electronic “MyTest” Test Bank or PowerPoint Presentation Slides.  Additionally, the size of the book (13 chapters) makes it useful for quarter courses, as well as for courses that encourage a lot of supplemental reading.

Part I Introduction
Chapter 1: The Importance of Anthropology
Chapter 2: Culture and Culture Change
Chapter 3: Explanation and Evidence

Part II Cultural Variation
Chapter 4: Language and Communication
Chapter 5: Economics
Chapter 6: Social Stratification: Class, Ethnicity, and Racism
Chapter 7: Sex and Gender
Chapter 8: Marriage, Family, and Kinship  
Chapter 9: Political Life
Chapter 10: Religion and Magic  
Chapter 11: The Arts 
 

Part III Using Anthropology

Chapter 12: Global Problems  
Chapter 13: Applied and Practicing Anthropology 

1.      Overview of changes

A BRIEF EMPIRICAL INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

• New! Chapter 3 and Chapter 10.
• New! Refined and restructured text, with:
• • An expanded third chapter, “Explanation and Evidence” that integrates material formerly into the first two chapters.
  • A new focus on the importance of culture change and globalization—now integrated with the chapter formerly titled “The Study of Culture” and renamed "Culture and Culture Change". 
  • Reorganized aspects of culture change—economic, political, and religious—to their respective subject chapters to emphasize that all aspects of culture are constantly changing.

PERSONALIZE LEARNING WITH MYANTHROLAB

• New! MyAnthroLab is an online resource that contains book-specific practice tests, chapter summaries, learning objectives, flashcards, weblinks, MySearchLab, a complete E-book and media-rich activities that enhance topics covered in Human Culture, 2/e.
• The Pearson eText lets students access their textbook anytime, anywhere, and any way they want–including listening online or downloading to iPad.
• A personalized study plan for each student promotes better critical-thinking skills, and helps students succeed in the course and beyond.
• Assessment tied to every video, application, and chapter enables both instructors and students to track progress and get immediate feedback. With results feeding into a powerful gradebook, the assessment program helps instructors identify student challenges early–and find the best resources with which to help students.
• New! Class Prep collects the very best class presentation resources in one convenient online destination, so instructors can keep students engaged throughout every class.

IMPROVE CRITICAL THINKING

• New! Eight Boxes that highlight the significance of cultural anthropology in people's lives. 
• New! Three Boxes deal with gender issues and roles.

ENGAGE STUDENTS

• New! Greater emphasis on how cultural anthropology makes important contributions to the lives of people.

SUPPORT INSTRUCTORS

• New! Create a Custom Text: For enrollments of at least 25, create your own textbook by combining chapters from best-selling Pearson textbooks and/or reading selections in the sequence you want.  To begin building your custom text, visit www.pearsoncustomlibrary.com. You may also work with a dedicated Pearson Custom editor to create your ideal text–publishing your own original content or mixing and matching Pearson content. Contact your Pearson Publisher’s Representative to get started.

2. Chapter-by-Chapter Changes

Chapter 1

• New! Box discusses the work of an applied anthropologist

Chapter 2

• Revised! To emphasize that culture is always changing, bringing forward discussions on cultural change, ethnogenesis and globalization.

Chapter 3

• New! Box “There is Nothing Like Evidence to Shake Mistaken Beliefs,” discusses how cross-culture evidence on how potatoes are generally grown changed applied anthropologists ideas about potato cultivation.

Chatper 4

• New! Box tries to stimulate thinking about the possible impact of language on thought by asking whether the English language promotes sexist thinking.

Chapter 5

• Revised! New emphasis on recent change by incorporating material that used to be in a separate chapter on cultural change.
• New! Discussion on commericialization by way of migratory labor and remittances, nonagricultural commercial production, supplementary cash crops, and commercial and industrial agricultural.

Chapter 6

• New! Box discusses possible reasons for disparities in death by disease between African Americans and European Americans

Chapter 7

• New! Box that examines the impact of economic development on women’s status.

Chapter 8

• New! Research on the Hadza that supports one of the theories about marriage.
• Updated! Discussion on polygyny.
• New! Diagram explaining different types of family structures to better prepare students for understanding kinship charts.
• Rearranged! The  section on marital residence and kinship so that explanations of all types of residence can be found together
• New! Box on how variation in residence and kinship affects the lives of women

Chapter 9

• New! Box deals with the cross-national and cross-cultural relationship between economic developments and democracy.

Chapter 10

• New! Box raises the question of whether and to what degree religion promotes moral behavior, cooperation, and harmony

Chapter 11

• New Chapter! Focusing on body adornment, the visual arts, music, and folklore as well as review how some of the variations might be explained.

Chapter 12

• New! Box describes how the problem of the refugees has become a global problem.  

In This Section:

I. Author Bio

II. Author Letter

Carol R. Ember started at Antioch College as a chemistry major. She began taking social science courses because some were required, but she soon found herself intrigued. There were lots of questions without answers, and she became excited about the possibility of a research career in social science. She spent a year in graduate school at Cornell studying sociology before continuing on to Harvard, where she studied anthropology primarily with John and Beatrice Whiting. For her Ph.D. dissertation she worked among the Luo of Kenya. While there she noticed that many boys were assigned "girls' work," such as babysitting and household chores, because their mothers (who did most of the agriculture) did not have enough girls to help out. She decided to study the possible effects of task assignment on the social behavior of boys. Using systematic behavior observations, she compared girls, boys who did a great deal of girls' work, and boys who did little such work. She found that boys assigned girls' work were intermediate in many social behaviors, compared with the other boys and girls. Later, she did cross-cultural research on variation in marriage, family, descent groups, and war and peace, mainly in collaboration with Melvin Ember, whom she married in 1970. All of these cross-cultural studies tested theories on data for worldwide samples of societies. From 1970 to 1996, she taught at Hunter College of the City University of New York. She has also served as president of the Society of Cross-Cultural Research and was one of the directors of the Summer Institutes in Comparative Anthropological Research, which were funded by the National Science Foundation. She is now executive director at the Human Relations Area Files, Inc., a nonprofit research agency at Yale University.
 

After graduating from Columbia College, Melvin Ember went to Yale University for his Ph.D. His mentor at Yale was George Peter Murdock, an anthropologist who was instrumental in promoting cross-cultural research and building a full-text database on the cultures of the world to facilitate cross-cultural hypothesis testing. This database came to be known as the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) because it was originally sponsored by the Institute of Human Relations at Yale. Growing in annual installments and now distributed in electronic format, the HRAF database currently covers more than 370 cultures, past and present, all over the world. He did fieldwork for his dissertation in American Samoa, where he conducted a comparison of three villages to study the effects of commercialization on political life. In addition, he did research on descent groups and how they changed with the increase of buying and selling. His cross-cultural studies focused originally on variation in marital residence and descent groups. He also conducted cross-cultural research on the relationship between economic and political development, the origin and extension of the incest taboo, the causes of polygamy, and how archaeological correlates of social customs can help draw inferences about the past. After four years of research at the National Institute of Mental Health, he taught at Antioch College and then Hunter College of the City University of New York. Heserved as president of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research and was president (since 1987) of the Human Relations Area Files, Inc., a nonprofit research agency at Yale University, until his passing.

 II. Author Letter

Dear Colleague,

I have always viewed textbook writing as a special challenge. Most of us specialize, in some way, in the advanced courses we teach or are asked to teach, in our regional or topical fields of interest, and with the usual colleagues we see at conferences. It is refreshing to move outside the box. Working on the textbook does just that, it encourages you to read books and articles in fields you don’t normally read and to look at connections across subfields. And most important of all, it makes you think about the gaps in our collective knowledge.

But a textbook also presents other challenges, such as the style of writing, which is a particular challenge. How do you make something complex understandable but not sound patronizing or simple-minded? How do you make it interesting? How do you make it authoritative, but not authoritarian? And when describing other cultures, how do you convey respect for other people?

Human Culture, 2nd editionis an abridged version of the 13th edition of Cultural Anthropology that is specifically designed for shorter terms and for courses with a lot of supplementary material. Shortening a book presents even more challenges. What chapters are most essential for a good grounding in anthropology? What examples are more important than others? In general, we have found that writing less is actually harder than writing more!

We have always taken revisions seriously. It is a time to reflect on what needs to be added what needs to come out, and what needs to be rearranged. One of the most significant changes in the 13th edition of Cultural Anthropology, and in this abridged version, is a greater emphasis on how cultural anthropology has made important contributions to the lives of people. These contributions are highlighted in nine boxes new to this edition. Other new boxes deal with gender issues and roles.

To emphasize the importance of culture change and globalization, we have moved that material toward the beginning in an integrated chapter on culture and culture change. In response to requests, we have added a chapter on the arts. Finally, to make way for more culture change material to be added earlier, we combined material formerly from the first two chapters into an integrated chapter called "Explanation and Evidence."

If you have comments, suggestions, or criticisms, I would welcome them. My email address is Carol.ember@yale.edu.

Sincerely,

Carol R. Ember

Yale University