In this update of the 1987 and 1974 editions, Langness (anthropology, psychiatry, U. of California, Los Angeles) introduces the study of a ubiquitous concept in the social sciences that is only a century old. With liberal quotes from cultural anthropologists, he traces the history of "a human science of human beings". He reviews and critiques schools of thought on culture from evolutionists (who view civilized society as many steps removed from primitive man) to those arguing for cultural relativity and postmodernism.
Introduction: A human science of human beings
Chapter 1. Degeneration and progress:
Lewis Henry Morgan
Edward Burnett Tylor
James George Frazer, J.J. Bachofen, Henry Maine, and others
Questions and problems of early Evolutionism
Implications and Evolutionism
Chapter 2. Historicalism and diffusion:
Progress and degradation
Franz Boas
Invention and diffusion
Culture areas
Problems and implications
Superorganicism
Chapter 3. Structure and function:
Bronislaw Malinowski
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown
Chapter 4. American developments:
Culture and personality
Other American developments
Modern Evolutionists
Ethnoscience and folk models
Chapter 5. The Ethnographic present:
Structuralism
Structural Marxism
Symbolic Anthropology
Psychoanalytic Anthropology
French Symbolic Anthropology
British Symbolic Anthropology
American Symbolic Anthropology
Chapter 6. Psychological Anthropology
Chapter 7. Behavioral science and behavioral evolution:
Behavioral science
Evolution and behavior
Paleoanthropology
Ethology
Cross-cultural studies
Cybernetics
Characteristics of man as an animal
Summary
Further readings
Glossary
References