This early work by Franz Boas was originally published in 1920 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Methods of Ethnology' is a work on the techniques of anthropology. Franz Boas was born on July 9th 1958, in Minden, Westphalia. Even though Boas had a passion the natural sciences, he enrolled at the University at Kiel as an undergraduate in Physics. Boas completed his degree with a dissertation on the optical properties of water, before continuing his studies and receiving his doctorate in 1881. Boas became a professor of Anthropology at Columbia University in 1899 and founded the first Ph.D program in anthropology in America. He was also a leading figure in the creation of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Franz Boas had a long career and a great impact on many areas of study. He died on 21st December 1942.

This volume presents an insightful critical analysis of the culture history approach to Americanist anthropology. Reasons for the acceptance and incorporation of important concepts, as well as the paradigm's strengths and weaknesses, are discussed in detail. The framework for this analysis is founded on the contrast between two metaphysics used by evolutionary biologists in discussing their own discipline: materialistic/populational thinking and essentialistic/typological thinking. Employing this framework, the authors show not only why the culture history paradigm lost favor in the 1960s, but also which of its aspects need to be retained if archaeology is ever to produce a viable theory of culture change.

Anthropological literature has traditionally been static and synchronic, only occasionally according a role to historical processes. but recent years have seen a burgeoning exchange between anthropology and history, each field taking on a powerful new dimension in consequence. Just what this means for anthropologists has not been clear, and this collection (eight core papers plus introduction and final commentary) introduces focus and direction to this interface between anthropology challenges several basic assumptions long held by anthropologists. Researchers can no longer be satisfied with approaches epitomized in 'the ethnographic present'. Society may be a bounded entity, but culture cannot be treated as such; a culture should be examined as it has interacted with other cultures and with its environment over time. Many traditionalists in anthropology, faced with these disturbing new challenges, fear the disintegration of the discipline; but these thoughtful papers demonstrate, on the contrary, its vitality, growth, and promise. In this volume, major figures in symbolic/semiotic anthropology offer various approaches to examining culture through time - culture mediated by history and history mediated by culture - in its complexity and dynamics. The eight core papers focus on particular cultures in various locales: Hawaii, Nepal, Spain, Japan, Israel, India, and Indonesia. No artifical unity - theoretical, thematic, or epistemological - has been imposed. The strength of the volume derives from a complementary diversity and tension, as each player, drawing on a particular culture, offers an original way of penetrating that culture's historical dimensions.

This updated edition of Professor Ian Hodders original and classic work on the role which anthropology must play in the interpretation of the archaeological record.There has long been a need for archaeologists and anthropologists to correlate their ideas and methods for interpreting the material culture of past civilisations. Archaeological interpretation of the past is inevitably based on the ideas and experiences of the present and the use of such ethnographic analogy has been widely adapted and criticised, not least in Britain.In this challenging study, Ian Hodder questions the assumptions, values and methods which have been too readily accepted. At the same time, he shows how anthropology can be applied to archaeology. He examines the criteria for the proper use of analogy and, in particular, emphasises the need to consider the meaning and interpretation of material cultures within the total social and cultural contexts. He discusses anthropological models of refuse deposits, technology and production, subsistence, settlement, burial, trade exchange, art form and ritual; he then considers their application to comparable archaeological data.Throughout, Professor Hodder emphasises the need for a truly scientific approach and a critical self-awareness by archaeologists, who should be prepared to study their own social and cultural context, not least their own attitudes to the present-day material world.

History of Anthropology is a new series of annual volumes, each of which will treat an important theme in the history of anthropological inquiry. For this initial volume, the editors have chosen to focus on the modern cultural anthropology: intensive fieldwork by "participant observation." Observers Observed includes essays by a distinguished group of historians and anthropologists covering major episodes in the history of ethnographic fieldwork in the American, British, and French traditions since 1880. As the first work to investigate the development of modern fieldwork in a serious historical way, this collection will be of great interest and value to anthropologist, historians of science and the social sciences, and the general readers interested in the way in which modern anthropologists have perceived and described the cultures of "others." Included in this volume are the contributions of Homer G. Barnett, University of Oregon; James Clifford, University of California, Santa Cruz; Douglas Cole, Simon Frazer University; Richard Handler, Lake Forest College; Curtis Hinsley, Colgate University; Joan Larcom, Mount Holyoke College; Paul Rabinow, University of California, Berkeley; and the editor.