Cultural Anthropology: Global Forces, Local Lives

by Jack David Eller

Cultural Global forces, local lives is an accessible ethnographically rich cultural anthropology textbook which gives a coherent and refreshingly new vision of the discipline and its subject matter―human diversity. The fifteen chapters and three extended case studies present all of the necessary areas of cultural anthropology, organizing them in conceptually and thematically meaningful and original ways. A full one-third of its content is dedicated to important global and historical cultural phenomena such as colonialism, nationalism, ethnicity and ethnic conflict, economic development, environmental issues, cultural revival, fundamentalism, and popular culture. The more conventional topics of anthropology (language, economics, kinship, politics, religion, race) are integrated into this broader discussion to reflect the changing content of contemporary courses. This well written and well organised text has been trialled both in the classroom and online. The author has extensive teaching experience and is especially good at presenting material clearly matching his exposition to the pace of students' understanding. Specially designed in colour to be useful to today's students, Cultural Global forces, local lives :

Genres: Anthropology, Science, Nonfiction, Textbooks, School

456 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2009

About the author

Prof. David Eller is a cultural anthropologist who has conducted field research among Aboriginal societies in Australia and now teaches anthropology in Denver, Colorado. His recent college textbook Introducing Anthropology of Religion is being hailed as the most significant introduction to the scientific study of religion in a decade. His previous AAP book Natural Atheism showed him to be as good a philosopher as scientist. Now we see he is equally skilled as a linguist and semanticist and can show that for knowledgeable atheists "atheism" means more than the absence of god-beliefs: it is the absence (indeed the rejection) of belief altogether.

Reviews

[Lexie]

Interesting enough I suppose but a lot of it really wasn’t engaging enough. Anthropology turned into a pretty dull subject for me, my least favourite by far. There was also a lot of unnecessary stuff, reading the super short summaries compared to the long chapter just showed how little actually relevant stuff there was and that was annoying, ended up skimming through the later chapters I had to read for uni. Wasn’t horrible but, wouldn’t exactly recommend. I also have no desire to keep this like I have some of my other textbooks.

[Trinity]

Read for Michael Rodgers Anth 201 course. Cultural Anthropology

[Jaime T]

ANT100 yeee. Boring but had some interesting parts. Read it and got the job done.