Oxford Very Short Introductions
by Alex
A colleague of mine finally got sick and tired of lousy anthropology textbooks and did a sweeping review of the available options. She finally decided that Oxford’s “Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0192853465/qid=1130009100/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-1728795-4172847?v=glance&s=books was the way to go and, having checked out the book, I must concur. It’s a marvel of concision, readability, and thoroughness — perfect to assign short chapter of while moving through ethnography with your students. In fact, the “entire series”:http://www.oup.co.uk/general/vsi/ seems to be absolutely splendid. I mean, they have a very short introduction to _Clausewitz_. The opening paragraph of the very short introduction to Judaism is:
Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable? To the botanist it is undoubtably a fruit, to the chef a vegetable, but what would the tomato itself say? if it thought about the matter at all, it would probably have the same sort of identity crisis Jews are apt to get when people try to strait-jacket them as a race, an ethnic group, or a religion. Neither tomatoes nor Jews are particularly complicated or obscure when left to themselves, but they also don’t fit neatly into the handy categories such as fruit or vegetable or nation or religion which are so useful for pigeonholing other fods and people.
What a wonderful little paragraph — exemplary of the concision and verve I urge on my own students. I think there are more of these pocket-sized volumes in my future.
I’m a big fan of the “Introducing …” and ” … for Beginners” books as well. “Introducing Semiotics” is better than 90% of the entire reading list for the graduate-level semiotics seminar I once took.
what about wendy james “the ceremonial animal”
or herzfeld’s “anthropology”
??
can’t match SCAAVSI on brevity, obviously…
actually i don’t know the herzfeld volume but i am curious to hear anthropologist’s views of intro textbooks, these two included.
Jonathan Culler’s VSI to literary theory and Germaine Greer’s VSI to Shakespeare are both excellent, and I believe previously published standalone. I have not managed to get through the VSI to the EU I bought, however. And am not crazy about the cover flaps, which Routledge has also been using in their Classics series.
Yes, very high standards for the very short intro series–the VSI to World Music is by U of C’s Philip Bohlman and does what you’d want–it produces a rich critique of “world music” as a marketing and production category even as it shows the crucial ways (music on trans-europe pilgrimage routes, traveling folk songs, linguistically and ethnically hybrid musical cultures) in which music has always been “world.”
Seth
right on — I´ll never use anything else. It´s well-written and students love it cause it´s cheap. I actually have become a bit of a VSI addict in general.
I do think the chapter on reproduction and kinship is a bit weak in the Monaghan and Just, startlingly so since the rest of it is so good. But surely there will be future editions and time to revise.
I concur, VSI is pretty great. The “Introducing” and “For Beginners” series are occasionally useful, though they are a bit too comic and are overall pretty hit or miss. Collecting concise outlines of subjects is a hobby of mine, actually. I’m interested in the wikibooks project, but it definitely needs more editors.