Ruth Fulton Benedict was an American anthropologist and folklorist.
Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that facts in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. There are many different forms of relativism, with a great deal of variation in scope and differing degrees of controversy among them. Moral relativism encompasses the differences in moral judgments among people and cultures. Epistemic relativism holds that there are no absolute facts regarding norms of belief, justification, or rationality, and that there are only relative ones. Alethic relativism is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture. Some forms of relativism also bear a resemblance to philosophical skepticism. Descriptive relativism seeks to describe the differences among cultures and people without evaluation, while normative relativism evaluates the morality or truthfulness of views within a given framework.
Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages, and has grown over the past century to encompass most aspects of language structure and use.
Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher.
Bronisław Kasper Malinowski was an anthropologist whose writings on ethnography, social theory, and field research were a lasting influence on the discipline of anthropology.
The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 10,000 members, the association, based in Arlington, Virginia, includes archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, biological anthropologists, linguistic anthropologists, linguists, medical anthropologists and applied anthropologists in universities and colleges, research institutions, government agencies, museums, corporations and non-profits throughout the world. The AAA publishes more than 20 peer-reviewed scholarly journals, available in print and online through AnthroSource. The AAA was founded in 1902.
Marshall David Sahlins was an American cultural anthropologist best known for his ethnographic work in the Pacific and for his contributions to anthropological theory. He was Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.
Eric Robert Wolf was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxist perspectives within anthropology.
David Rolfe Graeber was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) and Bullshit Jobs (2018), and his leading role in the Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is one of a series of pamphlets published by Prickly Paradigm Press in 2004. With the essay, anthropologist David Graeber attempts to outline areas of research that intellectuals might explore in creating a cohesive body of anarchist social theory.
Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective is a book by Canadian psychologist and author J. Philippe Rushton. Rushton was a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario for many years, and the head of the controversial Pioneer Fund. The first unabridged edition of the book came out in 1995, and the third, latest unabridged edition came out in 2000; abridged versions were also distributed.
Roy Wagner was an American cultural anthropologist who specialized in symbolic anthropology.
Michael Silverstein was an American linguist. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago. He was a theoretician of semiotics and linguistic anthropology. Over the course of his career he created an original synthesis of research on the semiotics of communication, the sociology of interaction, Russian formalist literary theory, linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, early anthropological linguistics and structuralist grammatical theory, together with his own theoretical contributions, yielding a comprehensive account of the semiotics of human communication and its relation to culture. He presented the developing results of this project annually from 1970 until his death in a course entitled "Language in Culture." Among other achievements, he was instrumental in introducing the semiotic terminology of Charles Sanders Peirce, including especially the notion of indexicality, into the linguistic and anthropological literature; with coining the terms metapragmatics and metasemantics in drawing attention to the central importance of metasemiotic phenomena for any understanding of language or social life; and with introducing language ideology as a field of study. His works are noted for their terminological complexity and technical difficulty.
Tom Boellstorff is an anthropologist based at the University of California, Irvine. In his career to date, his interests have included the anthropology of sexuality, the anthropology of globalization, digital anthropology, Southeast Asian studies, the anthropology of HIV/AIDS, and linguistic anthropology.
Keith Hart is international director of the Human Economy Programme at the University of Pretoria and lives in Paris with his family. His main research has been on economic anthropology, Africa and the African diaspora. He has taught at numerous universities, most significantly at Cambridge where he was director of the African Studies Centre. He has contributed the concept of the informal economy to development studies and has published widely on economic anthropology. He is the author of The Memory Bank. One personal obsession has been the relationship between movement and identity in the transition from national to world society. But his written work focuses on the apparent impasse between the national limits of politics and the fact that the economy is now global.
Cultural materialism is an anthropological research orientation first introduced by Marvin Harris in his 1968 book The Rise of Anthropological Theory, as a theoretical paradigm and research strategy. It is said to be the most enduring achievement of that work. Harris subsequently developed a full elaboration and defense of the paradigm in his 1979 book Cultural Materialism. To Harris social change is dependent of three factors: a society's infrastructure, structure, and superstructure.
Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro is a Brazilian anthropologist and a professor at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Opuntia, commonly called prickly pear, is a genus of flowering plants in the cactus family Cactaceae. Prickly pears are also known as tuna (fruit), sabra, nopal from the Nahuatl word nōpalli for the pads, or nostle, from the Nahuatl word nōchtli for the fruit; or paddle cactus. The genus is named for the Ancient Greek city of Opus, where, according to Theophrastus, an edible plant grew and could be propagated by rooting its leaves. The most common culinary species is the Indian fig opuntia.
Huon Wardle is a social anthropologist teaching at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He is one of the key ethnographers of cosmopolitanism, and he draws both on philosophical and anthropological theory in his analyses. He is the author of An Ethnography of Cosmopolitanism in Kingston, Jamaica and, with Paloma Gay y Blasco of How to Read Ethnography. He is the editor with Nigel Rapport of A Cosmopolitan Anthropology?, with Moises Lino e Silva of Freedom in Practice: Governance Autonomy and Liberty in the Everyday and with Justin Shaffner of Cosmopolitics. He has written articles in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Social Anthropology, and others and was awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute's J.B. Donne Prize in 2014.
Matthew Engelke is an anthropologist and author specializing in religion, media, public culture, secularism, and humanism. Regionally, his ethnographic focus is on Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom.
United States