This book shares one curious characteristic with quite a lot of other specialised reference books: it does not define its own subject. There is no entry defining “anthropology”, there are entries for social this that and the other but no definition of “social anthropology”, and there is a clean jump from Crow‐Omaha Systems” to Cultural Materialism without any mention of cultural anthropology. From a public library or general reference perspective I like books that explain to the lay enquirer what they are about, either in a preface or in a main entry. Failing this we have to make do with Collins English Dictionary, which gives us “anthropology: the study of humans, their origins, physical characteristics, institutions, religious beliefs, social relationships etc.”. It also, incidentally, defines sociology as “the study of the development, organization, functioning and classification of human societies”. These two disciplines had quite distinct origins. Sociology was the study of modern western societies by members of modern western societies – usually, it has to be said, concentrating their efforts on their poorer or more unfortunate members. Anthropology was the study by members of modern western societies of exotic others – colonial subjects, undeveloped tribes people, etc. It is interesting, for example, to look at Japan. The first western examinations of its society were undertaken by anthropologists, but when Japan leaped into the modern world, studies of its society became the province of sociologists while its anthropologists concentrated on un‐westernised minorities like the Ainu and aboriginal groups in newly‐acquired colonial territories. This book continues the tradition, in that the editors are professors of “the anthropology of Southern Africa” and “the anthropology of South Asia” respectively, at the University of Edinburgh. Presumably the study of the people of Edinburgh is the province of the university's sociology department. I am not convinced that the distinction between these two disciplines can be maintained for very much longer. As remote tribes and colonial subjects decline, anthropologists have increasingly turned their attention to groups within modern western societies, while urbanisation in developing countries has become a legitimate research topic for their own sociologists.
“Social and cultural” is added to distinguish the topic from “physical anthropology” – the study of the human body and the examination of human evolution and development within the broader biological group of primates. Physical anthropology originated in eighteenth‐century studies in comparative anatomy and nineteenth‐century breakthroughs in genetics rather than from colonial observations. Here, again, boundaries are becoming blurred. In any controversy over “nature versus nurture”, physical or biological anthropology has been assumed to be on the side of nature, while cultural anthropology has been the study of nurture. New developments in genetics are making it clearer that there is no sharp dichotomy. Individual genes have a strong effect on the way you act within your community, and the way in which you act within your community has a strong effect on the way in which individual genes operate. The name “sociobiology” has already been taken by a narrower group of evolutionary biologists, but some similar term is needed to describe this newly developing discipline. The first edition of this book was published in 1996. I suspect that if there is a third edition in 14 years time it will need to be very different in scope and structure from the first two.
This volume is already substantially larger than its predecessor. Quite a few entries seem to be unchanged from the first edition, or, at most, have a few bibliographic references added, but there are a lot of new entries reflecting changes in the range of topics of anthropological interest, notably far more on bio‐medical topics. Among these I was glad to see a mention of pharmaceuticals. The traditional anthropologist lurked on some remote atoll studying the actions of witchdoctors, completely ignoring ritual healing behaviour carried on rather closer to home. The editors also noted a “fluorescence” of recent work around issues of gender and sexuality. I would have preferred “florescence” as a descriptor: the topic has certainly blossomed forth but I am not sure how much light has issued from it. The spread of western educational ideas has meant that anthropology departments have sprung up all around the world. There is now a substantial school of Latin American anthropologists for example, mainly devoted to studying indigenous groups within their own countries, thus further blurring the line between sociology and anthropology. These developments are reflected in new entries here.
The bulk of this book consists of just under 300 substantive signed entries averaging a page or two in length. Cross‐references to other main entries are indicated by bold type. Cross‐references to the glossary and brief biographies are indicated by obelisks. There are no see references from unused terms: “physical anthropology see biological anthropology” or “cinema see film” might have been useful. Each substantive entry is followed by a list of suggested further reading. The vast majority of these are references to printed English‐language resources that are likely to be easily available in western countries. I noticed one or two in French but not many in other languages. Curiously I did not notice any references at all to useful web sites. Even the entry on film mainly suggests further printed reading, plus a very short list of anthropological films with no indication of which of them are available online. Video has transformed the ways in which we can look at human behaviour. There was a researcher in my own institution who spent years developing a choreographic notation for recording the movements of deeply disturbed children. He had just brought his system to perfection when his department purchased its first video camera. There is now a huge amount of material of anthropological interest available online, which needs more than a bare mention under the general heading of “visual anthropology”.
As well as changing the way in which human behaviour can be recorded, new forms of information technology are changing human behaviour. I was astonished to find no mention of the internet or of the world‐wide web in the index. The ways in which FaceBook communities build up seem to me to be of absorbing anthropological interest, and ought to have been mentioned. My foster‐son plays computer games in a community of other people with whom he obviously has an enormous amount in common except that they do not live in the same country, speak to their parents in the same language, eat the same food or go to similar schools. There are tribes in the Trobriand Islands who have far less of a distinctive community than these groups of people.
Apart from the main entries there are two other separate alphabetical sequences in the book: a series of short biographical entries, and a so‐called “glossary” which is in fact a set of short, one‐paragraph descriptive definitions. I do not see the need for having three separate alphabetical sequences in a single‐volume reference work. In fact as a reference librarian I deplore this arrangement. I accept that Franz Boas is a more important figure for modern students of anthropology than, say, Sir James Frazer, and should therefore have a longer entry, but I cannot see why I should have to look for them in two different sequences. Similarly, War may be a major topic of anthropological interest, while Feuds are only of minor interest (though I am not entirely convinced) but if this is the case it could be reflected in the length of the entry rather than putting them into separate sequences. There are two indexes, one of subjects, and one of people and places, so that “Joking: Radcliffe‐Brown on” is in a different alphabetical sequence from “Radcliffe‐Brown: on joking … ”. I can see slightly more justification for this, but I am not convinced that the separation is essential. This book would be easier to use as a general reference tool if its arrangement was simplified.
This brings us round to the question of which libraries should invest a quite substantial amount in buying it. It should be emphasised that this is a book about anthropology, not a book of anthropological studies. The entry on Chinese Anthropology, just for example, tells us a lot about the development of anthropology in China, from the work of the early Western sinologists to the foundation of academic departments in Chinese universities, professional experts, national organizations, new journals, museums, etc. It does not set out to tell us about the indigenous peoples of China. There are discussions here of the methods for studying remote tribes, and of theories explaining tribal behaviour, but no descriptions of the tribes themselves. Public libraries buying this in the expectation of acquiring descriptions of the peoples of the world, their customs and beliefs, would be grievously disappointed. There are innumerable general reference books which do that job far more effectively: descriptive guides to individual communities, countries and regions are reviewed in the back pages of virtually every issue of Reference Reviews. What this is, is a thorough and detailed descriptive analysis of the current state of an academic discipline which, like many others, is in the process of rapid change and development. All university libraries catering for academic work in social anthropology will, of course, find this to be an essential reference tool. Academic libraries catering for related disciplines within the social sciences – sociology, cultural studies, area studies, politics and even economics will also find it worth considering. Libraries that found the first edition useful should note that this, while it still contains much of what was in the previous version, has been very substantially expanded, updated and rewritten, so they will probably find it worth upgrading.
