Review Article

Anthropology 101

Barnard, A. 2000. Social anthropology. A concise introductionfor students. Taunton: Studymates. 160 pp. Pb.: £9.99. ISBN: 1 84285 000 8.

Monaghan, J., and P. Just. 2000. Social and culturalanthropology. A very short introduction. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press. 156pp. Pb.: £5.99. ISBN: 0 19 285346 5.

Kottak, C. P. 2000. Anthropology. The exploration of humandiversity, 8th edition. Boston: McGraw Hill. xxvii + 694pp.Hb.: £33.95. ISBN: 0 07 229852 9.

Have you ever contemplated writing an introduction to anthropology, based either onyour own teaching or on the things you wished you’d been taught? If not, you maynot have noticed quite how many social anthropologists have already done so. Theyreceive little critical attention – it is hard to spot a review of such books in the aca-demic journals. Despite being a ubiquitous and influential anthropological genre, theygain more disdain than critical attention. They may have been avidly read as part ofour first encounter with the discipline, but we are unlikely to have looked at one since,save to recommend them to potential new student recruits. Yet introductions and text-books hold up a mirror to the disciplinary gaze and, read historically, reveal the chang-ing wrinkles of anthropologists’ self-perceptions. Under the guise of reviewing threerecently published introductions and textbooks, I revisit some older ones to explorehow the relationship between teacher and taught has changed over time. How do suchtexts conceptualise the discipline, their potential readers and students, and the learn-ing process itself? How do they lay out their wares – glossy and welcoming, or schol-arly and intense?

Popular and accessible introductions to academic debates have a long if not alwaysglorious history – E. B. Tylor’s Anthropology. An introduction (1881) was describedby one contemporary critic as ‘vulgarising’ anthropology (Lang, quoted in McClancy1993). On the other hand, Bronislaw Malinowski was proud of his skills in the art ofself-publicity, and gave his books such titillatory titles as Sex and repression in savagesociety (Malinowski 1927), famously leading one of his books to be shelved under‘Pornography’ in one Bloomsbury bookshop.

By the 1950s the discipline of social anthropology as imagined by protagonistslike Malinowski had an institutional foothold within British universities. In theintroductions written by that generation of academics one learns more about their

Social Anthropology (2003), 11, 3, 363–372. © 2003 European Association of Social Anthropologists 363DOI: 10.1017/S0964028203000259 Printed in the United Kingdom

ambitions for the discipline than about their likely readers. The authors assumed aconvergence of interest – that their readers would be committed to the project of aca-demic professionalisation. Many of the introductions written then largely resemblemonographs in their structural form, with each chapter devoted to one aspect of thesocial whole. All their authors may have been committed to the disciplinary project,but their views on how it should develop diverged widely, in part in line with theirinstitutional location. The introductions written by the London School of Economicscontingent – Raymond Firth (1957) and Lucy Mair (1965) – are pragmatic and factual,seeking to delimit the discipline through examples of empirical research and appli-cation.

On the other hand, the influential introduction written by Pocock (1961), whowas associated with the Institute of Social Anthropology in Oxford, tends towards themore philosophical, situating anthropology on a broader historical canvas of intellec-tual endeavours within social theory. An inspiring teacher, Pocock insisted that all stu-dents brought to the discipline their own ‘personal anthropology’ (1961: ix) that couldinteract with the formal anthropologies of the discipline. For this reason he felt thatanthropology had to be ‘lived at the same time as it was learned’, and that its greatestvalue was in helping students develop a ‘sociological sensibility, an anthropologicalconsciousness’. He was disparaging about the risks of ‘petrification which can occurwhen an enquiry originally undertaken by adult individuals becomes a “subject” to betaught to the young and is reduced to “textbooks”, set courses and select bibliogra-phies’ (1961: ix). Yet this was exactly what was beginning to happen.

In the widely-read introductory textbooks by Lienhardt (1964), Beattie (1964)and Mair (1965) a convention begins to appear: each has a chapter (or more) on kin-ship, marriage, political organisation, economic relations and religious belief. But theytoo focused on the socialising role of the discipline, and sought equally to documenttheir author’s personal passions and scholarly commitments, with chapter titles suchas ‘How anthropologists think’ (Lienhardt), ‘What social anthropologists study’(Beattie) or ‘What social anthropology is’ (Mair). The attitude that anthropology wasnot for those with ‘unformed minds’, initially reinforced by the influx of newlydemobbed soldiers keen to study anthropology after formative war-time experiences,slowly began to change as the discipline began to be taught to undergraduate students.

Have disciplinary attitudes to ‘textbooks’ changed over time? When theAssociation of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth(ASA) was founded in 1946, E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s blueprint envisaged that theassociation would publish a journal ‘devoted solely to social anthropology’, modelledon L’Année sociologique.1 This required financial backing, and Evans-Pritchard hadreceived a quote of £500 for the publication of such a 500-page journal – a huge sumof money for an association with only £6 in hand. After unsuccessfully seeking sup-port from the Carnegie Foundation, the ASA committee eventually agreed to focussolely on a 150,000-word textbook with the provisional title Advances in socialanthropology. Gluckman had to relaunch the project in 1951, insisting that ‘we shouldaim at a book, or series of books, which would evaluate the development of Britishsocial anthropology into a specific distinctive discipline’. In his opinion this would be

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1 This and subsequent publication proposals were discussed and minuted in ASA committee meet-ings, accessible in the ASA archive file A1.7. The archive is deposited at the British Library ofPolitical and Economic Science at the London School of Economics.

the ‘most useful kind of textbook, since an unformed discipline is best taught throughits historical development’. This would not be, he was quick to add, ‘a textbook of theusual American model, handling social systems and culture in terms of standard cat-egories’. This negative attitude towards the American-textbook model continued to bea disciplinary commonplace, certainly in Britain, based on the view that a craft-baseddiscipline should not be taught in a formulaic way. Yet in a 2001 survey of Britishdepartments carried out by the Centre for Learning and Teaching Sociology,Anthropology and Politics (C-SAP), one of the most commonly used texts in first-year introductions proved to be the textbook by Keesing and Strathern (1998), a textsimilar in format and ambition to the one under review by Kottak.

How has the teacher-student relationship changed in the fifty years sinceGluckman first expressed his opinions about a textbook of social anthropology? Howmuch do we know about our students, and the way they learn? While there has beena history of initiatives within British anthropology to research and promote the teach-ing of anthropology in secondary schools (Mills 1999), culminating in an excellent setof RAI-sponsored resource guides published in the 1970s (for example, Sallnow 1978),the university itself has remained largely ‘out-of-bounds’ for ethnographic research.There has been little published work on the way that students learn (and teachersteach) anthropology, though this has begun to change with recent work byMascerenhas-Keyes (1995) and Coleman and Simpson (1999). In contrast, culturalstudies, partly through its roots in adult education, has prioritised attending to thepedagogic relationship and the contexts in which learning occurs. Within sociology,the sociology of education has been an important sub-discipline (Delamont 2000), aninterest which can be partly traced back to research initiatives started in MaxGluckman’s Manchester department in the 1950s; but again, this research focused pri-marily on secondary schools.

To ask about our knowledge of learning practices is not to advocate a narrowly‘student-centred’ approach, but rather to recognise the need to reconcile ourapproaches to our discipline with those of our students. Prosser and Trigwell (1999)summarise recent educational research that has come to a similar conclusion, arguingthat ‘good teaching is about bringing the teacher’s perceptions and understanding oflearning and teaching into closer relationship with the students, and that good learn-ing involves a focus on the meaning and understanding of the material students arestudying’ (1999: 11). Such an attention to context is an anthropological truism, yet itis often taken for granted by anthropologists when it comes to examining their ownconditions of work. Another debate within educational theory is the distinctionbetween ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ approaches to learning. The theory proposes that deeplearning occurs in contexts where students are able to make active, strategic and mean-ingful sense of their learning, whereas surface learning occurs in contexts where thereproduction of knowledge is prioritised, often for the strategic purpose of complet-ing essays or passing exams. Anthropologists pride themselves on pulling dichotomiesapart, and this one is no exception – one can see how students might use differentstrategies for different ends at the same time. But the distinction holds for long enoughto make one realise that some types of text, forms of assessment and course design canlead to students adopting one model of learning over another.

The majority of those students newly exposed to the discipline in Britain todayare undergraduates, predominantly products of secondary or further education. Whatknowledge, attitudes and resources do they bring to the discipline, whether studying

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it as a single honours course or, increasingly, encountering it as an optional module ina multidisciplinary degree programme? As well as having successfully jumped throughthe A-level hoops, they will also have become increasingly used to collaborativeapproach to learning – project work, working in groups, problem-solving and work-ing with a variety of resource materials. It is hardly a surprise that for some, the shiftto sitting attentively for 55 minutes in serried rows in Victorian lecture theatres cancome as a shock. Whatever its detractors may say, the lecture format can be incrediblyeffective, especially in the right hands. But it does require students to learn a new wayof learning: those unfamiliar with the didacticism inherent in this form of delivery mayeven be lead to think that, rather than learning through tackling problems, the prob-lems are being reviewed, represented and solved for them (which, of course, isn’t thecase!).

A study of teaching within British anthropology departments attempted to dif-ferentiate between courses that espoused a ‘substantivist’ as opposed to an ‘imagina-tionist’ philosophy to learning about the discipline (Mascarenhas-Keyes 1995). Theformer approach involved the ‘mastery of a substantive body of ethnographic materialand anthropological theory’, while the latter aimed to ‘imbue students with an anthro-pological imagination’ (ibid. 17). The dichotomy paralleled that between surface anddeep learning. It was a heuristically useful if somewhat simplified rendition of differ-ences existing within, as much as between, institutions. Yet what went unremarkedwas the way in which the imaginationist curricula, in a way similar to that invoked byPocock’s notion of ‘personal anthropology’ (1961), primarily focused on training stu-dents to ‘think like anthropologists’ (Crème 1999). This was not only a matter of gain-ing disciplinary skills, but also of developing an awareness of disciplinary habitus. Wenot only expect our students to learn in new ways, but also to think in new ways too.

This review leaves one with some guiding questions in assessing new textbooksand introductions to the discipline. Where do such texts position themselves on thepedagogic spectrum between didacticism and provocation? What model of learning isimplicit within them – surface or deep, imaginationist or substantivist? To what extentdo such books seek to provide answers to the problems students might be faced with,or simply to provoke, questions? Do they seek to cater for the needs of teachers, orprimarily for students? Do they focus on the process of doing ethnographic researchor on the anthropological knowledge that is the product? How do their authors envis-age them being used – as ‘course companions’ or more ‘self-contained’ learning pack-ages? Such questions bring us to a fundamental concern. How do we expect ourstudents to learn, and how much do we know about how they do so?

With these questions in mind I turned first to Alan Barnard’s Social anthropology.A concise introduction for students, part of the Studymates series. The forty or sobooks in this series, covering everything from GCSE chemistry to the English legalsystem, are unashamedly student-centred, with their on-line advertising publicitydescribing them as ‘Books for busy learners in education and the workplace’, and sug-gesting that ‘Studymates help you to write better essays, speak with more authority intutorials and seminars, and save you lots of time’ (www.studymates.co.uk). Barnard’saddition to this corpus is aimed at those studying anthropology within a broadersociological or social science curriculum as much as for those studying it as a singlesubject, but it too is very focused on the imagined needs of those who need a basicroute-map around the discipline, or seek to learn the basics in a hurry. It is full of whatsome might disparage as ‘pedagogic features’, with each of the ten chapters preceded

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by a ‘one minute summary’, the text broken up into lists and bullet points, and inter-spersed with sections compiled in question-and-answer format. At the end there arestudy tips and hints for writing examination answers, plus suggested questions andassignments for seminars and tutorials, indicative of the book’s ambition to supporttutors as well as students. The process of assessment is hardly discussed in any of thebooks under review, though Barnard comes closest to helping students with thisprocess by giving tips to students on what to say (and what not to say) in essays.

The book is designed for the British market, and begins with a ‘syllabus checklist’of universities where one can study social anthropology. Chapter themes include‘Studying social anthropology’, ‘Ethnography’ and ‘Applied and development anthro-pology’, not to mention the usual suspects – ecology, economics, politics, sex andgender, belief and ritual, kinship and theory. Each provide potted examples, key defi-nitions and discussions of key theoretical debates, inevitably influenced by theauthor’s own interests and previously published synthetic texts (Barnard 2000). Anexcellent list of anthropological web-resources, a useful glossary and up-to-date anno-tated ‘further reading’ complete the 160-page package. Without colour or visuals, it is– at £9.99 – an economical package too, and is marketed accordingly as ‘a practicalalternative to buying expensive textbooks’.

The book will provoke strong reactions. Many will bemoan the ‘dumbing-down’implicit within it, and the assumption that either students have short attention spansor will be reading their first anthropology textbook the night before an examination.Yet academics can hardly distance themselves from such texts. We get the textbookswe deserve, for they are simply intended to help students pass the courses and degreesthat we design for them. The book is admirable for exactly these reasons – it seeks tosimplify and widen access to a discipline that has often shrouded itself in mystiqueabout its methods and content. In cartographic terms, this is no fine-grained discipli-nary Ordnance Survey map, but a rough guide to help one get from module A to B.In an ironic – and probably deliberate – juxtaposition to the book itself, Tim Ingold’sforeword begins by suggesting that social anthropology is ‘a very odd subject’ because‘it is hard to say what it is the study of’, and ‘it is not at all clear what you have to doto study it’. Perhaps one of the end-of-chapter revision questions should be to resolvethe tension between this view of anthropology and that laid out within the book itself.

John Monaghan and Peter Just are joint authors of the pocket-sized Social and cul-tural Anthropology. A very short introduction, one of a well-received OxfordUniversity Press series of the same name. Others are on topics as diverse as ethics, theEU and opera, and all aim at providing a ‘stimulating and accessible’, not to mentioncheap, way into a new subject. Adopting a flowing narrative style, the book startsfrom the premise that the best way to introduce the discipline is to ‘emphasise not somuch what anthropologists have discovered, but how anthropologists think aboutwhat they have learned – concepts over facts’ (p. 1). This focus on key historical issuesand themes in the discipline is counterposed with examples drawn from the authors’own ethnographic research, in Mexico and Indonesia respectively. The book beginswith an introduction to their own research careers and periods of fieldwork, theirfield-sites, and the lives, economies and histories of the people they have worked with.Throughout, detailed maps and pictures of informants and friends bring theoreticalexamples alive. Broken into eight chapters, with catchy titles such as ‘Bee larvae andonion soup: culture’ and ‘Fernando seeks a wife: sex and blood’, the text is engaginglywritten, if sometimes rather breathless in its ambitious attempt to cover both classic

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debates and contemporary themes. Short attention spans, wandering minds andchanging academic literacies are catered for with occasional text boxes providingpotted summaries of key theorists (complete with mug-shots, including a priceless oneof Franz Boas dancing) or key issues (such as five different definitions of culture).

Discursively ranging from example to theorist to concept and back to example in142 small pages, the book is best read from beginning to end at one sitting, and is notreally designed for use as a teaching course-prop or learning short-cut. Indeed, itmight work rather well read in accompaniment to Barnard’s text. Both put the virtueof brevity to work to very different ends.

The text cleverly and subtly negotiates the publisher’s demand that it should besuitable for both an Americam and British audience. While the authors are both basedin American universities, they are attentive to the contributions that social anthro-pology has made. Indeed, they begin the book with a chapter on culture, described as‘traditionally an American preoccupation’ and one on society ‘traditionally a Britishone’ (p. 12). The authors are sympathetic to the culturalist turn within Americananthropology, but they are also eclectic in their ethnographic tastes, and in demon-strating the variety of locales in which ethnographers study, cite work on AmericanNew Age ‘chanellers’, high-energy physicists and British witchcraft practitioners.One of the strengths of the book is its illustration of theoretical debates with honestand sometimes amusing examples from fieldwork experience. The authors have skil-fully crafted an account of anthropological theory and practice that is revealing,nuanced and sometimes seductive. I only wonder whether the glancing references toHeidegger, Bourdieu and Foucault, or the fleeting discussion of postmodernism, willentice novice students, or just pass over them.

Conrad Kottak’s Anthropology. The exploration of human diversity is a brew witha very different vintage. Brevity now gives way to comprehensibility, and useful shortcuts are replaced by intriguing diversions. Covering almost 700 glossy pages, each infull colour, it is an all-encompassing textbook and ‘course-companion’ (what model ofsociality therein?) catering for the American four-fields tradition, with chapters oneverything from primates and genetics to applied anthropology and colonialism. Nomere textbook, it comes with a battery of teaching supplements, including a website,instructor’s manual and test bank, Powerpoint slides and a CD-Rom.

This is the eighth edition of a text first published in 1974. One gains a sense bothof the financial value of this market to the publisher and the speed at which it moveson discovering that two further editions have been prepared since this review waswritten. Kottak is not resting on his laurels as a populariser. The preface reveals a hintof pride at the revisions for the eighth edition being ‘the most extensive review processany introductory anthropology text has ever undergone’ (p. xii) as he describes exten-sive research and focus groups carried out with both students and ‘instructors’ toexplore their use of previous editions and make suggestions for revision. He notes,revealingly, that ‘instructors appreciate the fact that no single or monolithic theoreti-cal perspective orients this book’ (p. xii), testimony to the wide acceptance of the bookacross an often factionalised American disciplinary field. His solution is to constructa broad anthropological church, arguing that anthropology is both a humanistic fieldand a science. While this catholic approach is largely successful, the book does devoteat least four chapters to biological anthropology, and is inflected throughout by thecontinuing dominance of evolutionist theories of culture change within the Americandiscipline (as illustrated by one chapter entitled ‘The first farmers’).

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In his preface, Kottak describes his vision of anthropology’s mission as beingdefined by Kluckhohn’s dilemma: ‘How can peoples of different appearance, mutuallyunintelligible languages and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably together’(Kluckhohn 1944). One could read this partly as a personal plea for theoretical debateswithin universities to be conducted in a similar manner. While Kottak’s coverage ofcontemporary American anthropology is impressively exhaustive, a banal ‘we’re-all-different-we’re-all-the-same’ cultural relativism now and again creeps into the text,not helped by the occasional use of inappropriate photographs from stock librariesthat either trivialise or demean their subjects.

The book wears its theory lightly, perhaps as a way of not alienating its varyingconstituencies. As a result, discussions of key anthropological theorists or historicaldebates are hidden if not absent. Much of the discussion of social stratification and the‘means of production’ is carried out with no reference to Marx, and a one-line refer-ence to Foucault hardly helps students grapple with an influential strand of theoreti-cal debate. On the other hand, one might argue that the absence of internalistdisciplinary genealogies is refreshing. Yet another potted rehash of the differencesbetween ‘functionalism’ and ‘structural-functionalism’ is the last thing that studentsneed. The book does directly address questions of race, devoting a whole chapter toexploring the concept, comparing social constructions of race in Japan, the UnitedStates and Brazil. Kottak receives recognition for this in a discussion by Shanklin(1998) that is otherwise highly critical of the American discipline’s ‘color-blindness’ inits treatment of race within introductory texts.

The book, like that by Alan Barnard, is full of what the author himself refers to as‘pedagogical features’, often working as human-interest stories to get students to thinkabout current issues through an anthropological lens. Informed by a breezy writingstyle, the pages are broken up with extensive illustrations and text boxes bearing titlessuch as ‘Interesting issues’, ‘In the news’ and ‘Beyond the classroom’. Each providesan accessible but detailed case-study of a particularly newsworthy theme. The‘Interesting issues’ boxes in the chapter on ‘The modern world system’ include a dis-cussion of the impact of negative publicity on labour conditions within Nike factories,and an analysis of rural poverty in Tennessee. The ‘Beyond the classroom’ text-boxes,each written by final-year undergraduate anthropologists, describe their dissertationresearch. They help the student make links between disciplinary debates and practicalapplications, and – to this reader – offer useful ‘human-interest’ insights into learningand teaching the discipline.

There are, however, two problems with the abundance of eye-catching pictures,illustrations, maps and text-boxes: irrelevance and visual overload. Interestingly,Kottak justifies this increasing use of visual material as a response to student requestsand a ‘student audience that is increasingly visually oriented’ (p. xiv). The challenge ofresponding to changing textual and visual literacies among today’s students is one thatall teachers and writers need to address, but it isn’t solved simply by introducing pic-tures and fluorescent graphics that are not always germane to the arguments beingpursued in the text itself. If the purpose is to adopt a ‘user-friendly’ magazine-styleformat, then there is the risk that such books will be read much as magazines are –dipped into, flicked through and cursorily absorbed. A common theme throughoutthese introductory texts by comparison with their 1950s forebears is that none is writ-ten in unbroken text. Anyone attempting to read Kottak from cover to cover – ifanyone still does such a thing – would be nursing a headache by chapter 14. Perhaps

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this is a long overdue recognition that we all use a variety of reading styles in ourwork, and that textbooks do not have to emulate monographs to be successful or valu-able.

Another feature of the book are ‘Windows’ style icons in the text that cross-ref-erence to similar themes tackled elsewhere in the book and draw attention to resourceson the internet site related to the book (www.mhhe.com/kottak8). While this site,hosted by the publisher, is somewhat rudimentary (and now has a significant numberof broken links), it does offers exercises linked to each chapter and sets of further read-ings, plus sections of previous editions of the book that the author has removed fromthe current edition (including one revealing entitled ‘Personality and world view’).

The aim is to create a total learning package, but that also leads to problems. Theaccompanying reader ‘Culture sketches’, edited by Peters-Golden (2002), has somepotted ethnographies, conventional and one-dimensional in a way that the textbookitself is not. Students would be better served by being directed to other useful resources,a challenge that seems to have been partially met in the ninth and tenth editions with theprovision of further sets of visual resources, including the new ‘Kottak anthropologyatlas’ and ‘Annual editions’, a useful compilation of the year’s international press cov-erage of anthropological debates. Course teachers are not left out, for McGraw Hill alsomarket an extensive set of resources, including a ‘Lecture launcher’ VHS video andPowerWeb©, the publisher’s online resource centre (www.dushkin.com/powerweb/)intended to offer professors ‘a turnkey solution to adding the internet to a course’. Theability of students to make sense of their knowledge is also apparently enhanced in thetenth edition by the addition of new ‘Understanding ourselves’ themes that, accordingto the publicity, ‘help explain the relevance of facts and theories to students’ through‘paragraphs that answer the question “so what?”’.

Kottak’s volume (or all ten or of them) is the sort of book about which it is veryeasy to be dismissive. Knowledge comes in bite-size chunks, and no case study islonger than two pages. The on-line ethnographic case studies that accompany thebook are decontextualised and strangely flat; much more could be done with thisresource. Yet as well as providing students with lots of ideas, examples and debates,the book also provokes students into independent thinking by asking questions andconfronting them with pressing issues. In some ways, Kottak is encouraging studentsto develop their own ‘personal anthropology’, as Pocock phrased it more than fortyyears ago in relation to graduate student socialisation. The emphasis on undergradu-ates applying and making personal sense of disciplinary knowledge is just one indi-cator of the slow but tectonic shift in the way mass higher education is beingconceptualised. The teacher is no longer an authoritative source of disciplinary knowl-edge, but rather a well-resourced guide and facilitator. Kottak’s textbook could be readas pandering to ‘surface learning’, but it also offers a good deal of anthropological sub-stance and scope for interpretation. It is unlikely to appeal to those sympathetic to thesocial anthropological tradition, but that is partly because of its wide-ranging subjectmatter and the types of assessment for which it aims to prepare American undergrad-uates, rather than simply because it is a textbook.

Like all texts, these books are best judged by their own ambitions. For Kottak theintention is to support students in large introductory courses; over thirty years ofteaching Anthropology 101, his own courses have had between 375 and 600 studentsa year. The book’s very longevity – thirty years and ten editions – suggests either thathe must be doing something right, or that the publishers are making money from the

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brand. The two are not synonymous. Oddly for such a successful marketing phenom-enon, it does not follow that the students/customers like it, for the student does notget much choice in the matter; such texts are usually set by course instructors. Giventhe huge undergraduate market that exists in the United States for textbooks, it comesas no surprise that the publishers are investing in research with students. One wondershow the market research and student focus-group insights – more pictures, less text,to be blunt – are reconciled with the demands on teachers and instructors. Each newedition comes with further visual aids.

Does the need to attract and interest students who may just be doing a singleoptional course in the discipline also preclude the presentation of certain types ofargument or ‘difficult’ theoretical ideas? It is one thing exploring how anthropologystudents might or might not be learning the tenets of the discipline, and how thesetypes of text might be helping them do so, but quite another to test that knowledge.As taught in Britain, knowledge in social anthropology today is still primarily assessed– and therefore expressed – through the essay, a genre that has very specific demandsand expectations. None of these books dwell upon the crafting and shaping of anthro-pological essays, a skill that is nonetheless addressed by most departments early instudents’ university lives. An open and explicit discussion of disciplinary writing prac-tices would be an invaluable contribution that a disciplinary introduction could make.While Ingold is right to note in his foreword to Barnard’s Concise introduction thatsuch guides are ‘absolutely no substitute for reading at first hand what anthropologistshave written’ (p. 15), a diet of monographs alone will not help students craft goodessays. There is more to learning than osmosis.

To what extent are these books introductions, textbooks or both? At first glance,one might imagine that within a discipline, introductions and textbooks lie at oppositeends of a pedagogic spectrum, fulfilling rather different functions. Yet on the evidenceprovided here, any clear distinction between textbooks (supposedly comprehensive,authoritative and formulaic) and introductions (supposedly personal, idiosyncratic,inspiring) is invidious. The books under review challenge conventional academicwisdom and demonstrate the very different textual approaches open to those writingdisciplinary introductions and textbooks. There is no one ‘right’ way to learn aboutanthropology, or to write about it for new learners.

For those who continue to disparage the art of writing textbooks, Boyer’s insist-ence that there are four different but interrelated types of scholarship – discovery,integration, teaching and application – acts as a refreshing rejoinder (1990). Thesetextbooks are not based on cutting-edge, discipline-based research – what Boyer callsthe ‘scholarship of discovery’ – but they do offer illuminating approaches to bothintegrating and teaching scholarly knowledge. Read against the grain, they also offer prescient insights into the ways in which learning and teaching, and the relation-ship between teacher and taught, are changing. There is more than one path todiscovery.

D AV I D M I L L SUniversity of Birmingham

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Boyer, E. 1990. Scholarship reconsidered. The priorities of the professoriate. Princeton: CarnegieFoundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

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cation. London: SRHE.Sallnow, M. 1978. Peru. The Quechua. Oxford: Blackwell.Shanklin, E. 2000. ‘Representations of race and racism in American anthropology’, Current

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