Product Description: Salzman's clear, well-organized treatment demonstrates how comparative analysis is a valuable tool in observing and understanding people in all social and cultural situations. He points out that there is no single, correct way to do comparative analysis, a central approach to anthropological knowledge, and describes four useful strategies to advance diverse anthropological purposes: (1) find similar patterns in historically distinct cases; (2) examine different, contrasting patterns in different places; (3) look at closely related communities, societies, and cultures, which share many common features and differ only in a few; and (4) examine all cases known of a particular type of society, or a representative sample of all cases...read more

Product Description: Postcolonial theory is one of the main frameworks for thinking about the world and acting to change the world. Arising in academia and reshaping humanities and social sciences disciplines, postcolonial theory argues that our ideas about foreigners, ‘the other,’ particularly our negative ideas about them, are determined not by a true will to understand, but rather by our desire to conquer, dominate, and exploit them...read more

Product Description: Drawing upon the author's extensive field research among pastoral peoples in the Middle East, India, and the Mediterranean, and on more than 30 years of comparative study of pastoralists around the world, Pastoralists is an authoritative synthesis of the varieties of pastoral life...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: A study of the nomadic Baluch of the highland Sarhad region of southeastern Iran and how they respond to the unpredictability of their physical, political, and economic environments. Drawing upon twenty-seven months spent among the Yarahmadzai tribe of Iranian Baluchistan, Philip Carl Salzman relates the details of the group's life—from tent living and the division of daily labor to kinship ties, lineage organization, and religion...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Anthropology of Real Life is about people living their lives through the flow of events in the world. Real life is the events to which people respond from day to day and year to year: droughts and migrations, new state regulations and local violation of established norms, deaths and marriages, forest fires and job opportunities, murders and social contracts...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)