Investigating Culture: An Experiential Introduction to Anthropology

by Carol Delaney, Deborah Kaspin (With)

Investigating Culture offers an innovative approach to understanding culture as a constructed phenomenon open to investigation of its implicit premises and explicit forms.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Textbooks, College, School, Sociology, Social Science

456 pages, Paperback

First published December 19, 2003

About the author

Carol Lowery Delaney earned an A.B. in philosophy at Boston University, 1962.
After a ten year hiatus, she entered Harvard Divinity School and received an
M.T.S. 1976, and went on to the University of Chicago for a Ph.D. in cultural
anthropology, 1984.

Her anthropological fieldwork was conducted in Turkey, 1979-82, two years
of which were spent in a relatively remote mountain village. She won the
Galler prize for the most distinguished dissertation in the Division of the Social
Sciences at the University of Chicago. That dissertation was transformed into
a book, The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society.

After spending a year in Belgium on a Fulbright Fellowship conducting
research among immigrant Turks, she returned to Harvard where she became
Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, 1985-87, and
taught several courses at the Divinity School.

She taught at Stanford University in the Department of Cultural and Social
Anthropology from 1987-2006, now emerita. One popular course,
Investigating Culture, became the basis for an innovative textbook,
Investigating Culture: An Experiential Introduction to Anthropology,
third edition forthcoming, early 2017.

While at Stanford she wrote Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth, which was finalist for the National Jewish Book Award (category scholarship) and special mention for the Victor Turner Prize of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. It was also the inspiration for an opera of the same title, composed by Andrew Lovett, and had its world premier in England, 2005.

Her latest book is Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem. She writes that she had not thought much about Columbus until the fall of 1999 when she was teaching a course called "Millennial Fever" intended to observe the frenzy gripping the United States over the turn of the millennium and to study the history of apocalyptic, millennial thinking. In one of the readings, she came across a reference to Columbus's apocalyptic, millennial beliefs. Neither she nor any of her colleagues had ever heard of them. This drew her to the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University where she spent the summer of 2003 and then returned with an NEH fellowship in 2004-05. Her research was so compelling that she decided to retire from Stanford in order to work on her book about Columbus. For two years, she also taught half time in the Religious Studies Department at Brown.

In addition to numerous articles and invited lectures she has also had, as of this date, 48 letters published in the New York Times, and others in the San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, Providence Journal, Harvard Magazine, and Harper’s.

In the spring of 2014 she walked more than 500 miles on the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain and walked 280 miles in the spring of 2015. She walked the Coast to Coast path across England with her brother in May 2016. Carol volunteered at a hostel on the Camino de Santiago and then walked with her brother from Leon to Santiago in Sept-Oct, 2017.

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Im tempted to throw this across the room and yell "A Hah" because i have finally bested this book.
However this was actually a pretty good textbook as textbooks go. It had some very interesting and thought provoking points which make me glad i took this course.

Definitely one of the most enjoyable textbooks i have had to read (but it's still a textbook so take that with a grain of salt).

+ Now that I think about it this book sometimes presented opinions as fact and there are some that i disagreed with.

[Faiza · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was an informative and interesting read. However, it was way too opinionated for my taste. It sometimes seems as though the author just states her opinion and makes it seem factual, whether it is or not. There are a few instances where Delaney takes examples of cultural practices in Turkey (where she did her fieldwork) and uses those examples to make general (and false) statements towards other groups of people.

The upside is that the book isn't your typical dry, boring textbook and is a useful resource for anyone who is beginning to study cultural anthropology.

[Victoria]

My Honors Cultural Anthropology textbook. It certainly was not boring and provided a lot of information about the most important topics in cult. anth. but it definitely had a limited scope of knowledge based on the author's ethnographic experience. However, the main ideas of anthropology were covered and Delaney did try to add info about cultures other than those of the United States and
rural Turkey (subjects of her ethnographic study).

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This textbook is a great, very basic, beginner's look at anthropology. It's quick and fun reading and helps you understand what anthropologists do and why studying this stuff is so important. Complete with interesting exercises at the end of each chapter to get your little anthro feet wet. While mostly focused on the U.S. and the U.K., Carol also brings in examples from Turkey, her main area of expertise. This centering on our own culture is great because it helps dispel the idea that anthro is only about becoming familiar with unfamiliar cultures - rather, it is also about making the familiar seem unfamiliar, turning ourselves into the Other.

The second edition, however, is going to be even MORE baller, mainly because I'm helping her update it. Heh.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a textbook for a MIT Open Courseware class that I was doing. I've put it on hold for now, but the first 200 pages were fabulous! I loved every minute of this book. It was fascinating! I'll be getting back to the rest later this summer.

[Holland · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a book about the study of culture, this is an easy read that doesn't get caught up in dense language. It's incredibly informative while still being engaging, a hard find in the textbook world. If you have an interest in anthropology, this is definitely a great starter.

[columbialion · Rating 3 out of 5]

MIT course textbook

[kayla** · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a textbook, really good! Found myself really drawn to the areas that interested me because the writing flowed and it didn't become too political. It felt honest and informative.