INVITATION TO ANTHROPOLOGY BY LUKE ERIC LASSITER

Invitation to Anthropology by Luke Eric Lassiter

Invitation to Anthropology by Luke Eric Lassiter

Introduction

Invitation to Anthropology by Luke Eric Lassiter (Associate Professor of Anthropology, Ball State University) is an accessibly presented introductory text to the science of cultural anthropology, written especially for students considering this field of scholarship as a part of their overall academic studies. Individual chapters address the study how human cultures are shaped, beginning with the meaning of ethnography, and then moving on to issues of adaptation throughout history, gender issues, the role of family and kinship, the role of religion, and much, much more.

Discussion

American undergraduate textbooks in anthropology tend to be large-format, glossy, and lavishly illustrated, often peppered with boxes and diagrams. Lassiter's Invitation to anthropology is a more modest affair with little to distract from the qualities of the text, sparingly illustrated with a few black-and-white pictures and a handful of diagrams that look like scans of the author's lecture transparencies.

Although it is common to deny the continuing existence of systematic differences between American and European/British anthropology, and although such differences are frequently not evident in scholarly work, textbooks inevitably remind us that the enterprise of anthropology is not identical everywhere. Lassiter's book begins with a lengthy, and convincing, discussion of the critique of racism, relating it to the Boasian origins of modern American anthropology, before moving on to a description of the four fields that make up the discipline. Both archaeology and, to some extent, linguistics feature in the book, and an all-encompassing, proto-Tylorian concept of culture is employed. Culture remains the key concept throughout; politics and economics do not feature prominently; and the Durkheimian problematique of social integration is neither presented nor criticized. Mauss is not mentioned anywhere. It is perhaps symptomatic that Malinowski, the ...