The Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology

This two-part handbook surveys the last few decades of social-anthropological research, while also seeking to recuperate anthropology's disciplinary coherence after having been straddled across countless sub-disciplines and deconstructed by postmodernists in the 1980s. Dozens of chapter-length entries are neatly organized into four sections, two per volume, each with an editorial introduction. After the editors' over-all introduction, a section on "interfaces" explores several areas of anthropological collaboration in the form of "Anthropology and...". They include: law, gender-studies, literature, archeology, linguistics, public policy, biomedicine & bioscience. The second section on "places" focuses on questions of and issues in ethnography and the relationship between field-work and fields of research. The locales are from all over the world, but focus on areas no smaller than the islands of Japan and New Zealand up to whole continents, and include considerations for transnational and migratory fieldwork. In volume 2, section three turns to "methods" and the entries range from archival research, to questions of textuality in anthropological research, to anthropological ethics, to interfacing with public policy, to participatory collaboration. The final section on "futures" speculates on lines of research and unanswered questions in four major areas: biology and the brain-sciences; environmental, food and energy; demographics, health and transforming bodies; and technological societies. The contributors are academics from around the world with backgrounds in anthropology and sociology. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)