Macmillan Dictionary of Anthropology

Book excerpt: 4e de couverture : Anthropology is one of the most challenging and rapidly expanding areas of human knowledge today. This Dictionary aims to be a useful guide to the subject for the student and interested layman as well as for the academic anthropologist. It is unique in the existing literature in providing in a single volume coverage of basic concepts, key theoretical issues and the work of some 250 British, American and European anthropologists. It covers the subject from the early ethnographers to the most recent research, offering clear definitions of such formidable topics as the work of Levi-Strauss or the influence of semiology. The 2000 entries are fully cross-referenced and are supplemented by an extensive bibliography. Aimed primarily at students, it should provide useful reference not only for anthropologists, but for students of related disciplines at a time when the academic reputation of the subject, and the need for historians, sociologists, political scientists among others to be familiar with its central concepts and thinkers has never been so great.