Understanding Cultures
Subtitle: Perspectives in Anthropology and Social Theory
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing Limited
Published: September 1, 2001
Language: eng
Number of pages: 278
ISBN-13: 9780631221142
First sentence: Any time an author revisits old theoretical grounds in producing a new edition of a book it is a welcome opportunity to reflect on intellectual directions that he or she pursued over the years as well as the more general state of theory in contemporary anthropology and beyond.
Description: "Understanding Cultures confronts the major theoretical issues involved in cross-cultural interpretation. The book introduces students to rationality among the ancestors of anthropology before proceeding to a wide-ranging evaluation of the Anglo-American rationality debates. At issue is the opposition between scientific models of understanding human action and those models that emphasize human action as symbolic and meaningful, thus privileging an interpretive framework.

This long-awaited second edition concludes with a chapter on globalism and cultural diaspora that challenges conventional notions of bounded culture and bounded self and has important implications for refiguring the rationality debates, fieldwork, and cross-cultural interpretations more generally."--BOOK JACKET.