This bibliography of anthropology lists some notable publications in the field of anthropology, including its various subfields. It is not comprehensive and continues to be developed. It also includes a number of works that are not by anthropologists but are relevant to the field, such as literary theory, sociology, psychology, and philosophical anthropology.
Anthropology is the study of humanity. Described as "the most humanistic of sciences and the most scientific of the humanities", it is considered to bridge the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, and draws upon a wide range of related fields. In North America, anthropology is traditionally divided into four major subdisciplines: biological anthropology, sociocultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology and archaeology. Other academic traditions use less broad definitions, where one or more of these fields are considered separate, but related, disciplines.
Sociocultural anthropology
Chronological bibliography
From the beginnings to 1899 Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 1777 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 1798 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 1860 Johann Jakob Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J.J. Bachofen, 1861 (English translation: 1967) Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1871 Lewis H. Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871), Ancient Society, 1877 John Wesley Powell, The Arid Lands (originally published as Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions of the United States), 1878 Adolf Bastian, Der Völkergedanke im Aufbau einer Wissenschaft vom Menschen, 1881 (German; not yet translated into English) Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884 Anténor Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, 1885 James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1890 Edvard Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage, 1891 James Mooney, The Ghost-dance religion and the Sioux outbreak of 1890. US Bureau of American Ethnology, 1892-3 Annual Report, 2 vols., 1896.
1900s and 1910s Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, 1902 (republished by Mauss in 1950) Émile Durkheim, Primitive Classification, 1903 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905 (English translation: 1930) Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 1909 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 1910 Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man, 1911 Fritz Graebner, Methode der Ethnologie, 1911 (in German, not yet translated into English) Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, 1913 W. H. R. Rivers, Kinship and Social Organisation, 1914 Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, 1915 (English translation: 1951) B. R. Ambedkar, Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development, 1917
1920s and 1930s Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922 Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders, 1922 W. H. R. Rivers, Medicine, Magic and Religion, 1924 Marcel Mauss, The Gift, 1925 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 1925 Franz Boas, Primitive Art, 1927 Bronisław Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society, 1927 Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, 1928 Franz Boas, Anthropology and Modern Life, 1928 Richard Thurnwald, Die menschliche Gesellschaft in ihren ethnosoziologischen Grundlagen, 1931–35 (German; not yet translated into English) Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 1934 Robert Lowie, The Crow Indians, 1935 Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, 1935 Bronisław Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands, 1935 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, 1937 (abridged edition published in 1976) Leo Frobenius, African Genesis: Folk Tales and Myths of Africa, 1937 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, 1938 Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 1938 Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse, 1938 Wilhelm Schmidt, The Culture Historical Method of Ethnology, 1939
1940s and 1950s Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture, 1940 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, 1940 Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, African Political Systems, 1940 Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of The Negro Past, 1941 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944 Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 1946 Ernesto de Martino, Il mondo magico: Prolegomeni allo studio del magismo, 1948 Fei Xiaotong, From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society, 1948 (English translation: 1992) Clyde Kluckhohn, Mirror for Man: The Relation of Anthropology to Modern Life, 1949 Tarak Chandra Das, Bengal Famine(1943) : As Revealed in a Survey of the Destitutes in Calcutta, 1949 Alfred L. Kroeber, The Nature of Culture, 1952 Laura Bohannan, Return to Laughter, 1954 Edmund Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure, 1954 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 1955 Ralph Linton, The Tree of Culture, 1955 (posthumously) Julian Steward, Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution, 1955 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, 1956 Georges Balandier, Ambiguous Africa: Cultures in Collision, 1957 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, 1957 Leslie White, The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome, 1959 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 1958 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1958 Alfred Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 1958 Fredrik Barth, Political Leadership Among Swat Pathans, 1959 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, 1959
1960s and 1970s R. G. Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: the Religion of the Dinka, 1961 Robert Lowie, Empathy: Or 'Seeing from Within''', 1960 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961 (English translation: 1963) Colin Turnbull, The Forest People, 1961 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 1962 (English translation: 1966) Clifford Geertz, Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia, 1963 Peter Worsley, The Third World, 1964 Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society, 1965 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, 1966 Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 1966 George Devereux, From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences, 1967 Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols, 1967 Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamö: The Fierce People, 1968 Joseph Campbell, The Flight of the Wild Gander, 1968 Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 1969 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 1969 Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols, 1970 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972 H. R. Bernard and P. J. Pelto, Technology and Social Change, 1972 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1972 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973 (including "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight") Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, 1973 Giulio Angioni, Tre saggi sull'antropologia dell'età coloniale, 1973 Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, 1973 Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 1974 Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State, 1974 John W. Cole and Eric Wolf, The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley, 1974 (republished in 1999 with a new introduction by Eric Wolf) Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1974 (English translation: 1991) Claude Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community, 1975 (English translation: 1981) Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, 1975 (English translation: 1988) Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 1975 Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture, 1975 Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture, 1976 Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason, 1976 Giulio Angioni, Sa laurera: il lavoro contadino in Sardegna, 1976 Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings, 1977 Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, 1977 Jeanne Favret-Saada, Les Mots, la mort, les sorts : la sorcellerie dans le bocage, 1977 (Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage, 1980) Paul Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, 1977 Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978 Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture, 1979 Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 1979
1980s
Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weepings, Poetics and Sound in Kaluli Expression, 1982 Michelle Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion: Notions of Self and Society among the Ilongot, 1980 Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments, 1986 Ulf Hannerz, Exploring the City: Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology, 1980 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 1980 Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 1982 Maurice Godelier, The Making of Great Men, 1982 Nigel Barley, The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes From a Mud Hut, 1983 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1983 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (editors), The Invention of Tradition, 1983 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, 1983 Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective, 1983 Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, 1983 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 1983 Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, 1983 Maurice Godelier, The Mental and the Material, 1984 Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 1985 James Clifford and George Marcus (editors), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, 1986 Philippe Descola, La Nature domestique : symbolisme et praxis dans l'écologie des Achuar, 1986 Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, 1988 Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, 1988 David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, 1988 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, 1988 Bruce Kapferer, Legends of People, Myths of State, 1988 Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion, 1988 (republished as an expanded and revised new edition, entitled The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth in 2005) Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, 1988 Brackette F. Williams, "A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain", 1989
1990s James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development", Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, 1990 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 1990 Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality, 1990 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 1991 (English translation: 1993) Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 1991 Donald Brown, Human Universals, 1991 Helena Norberg-Hodge, Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, 1991 Sharlotte Neely, Snowbird Cherokees , 1991 Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination, 1992 (English translation: 2011) Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, 1992 Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience, 1992 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, From the Enemy's Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society, 1992 Jeremy Coote and A. Shelton (eds), Anthropology, Art and Esthetics, 1992 Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory, 1992 Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving, 1992.