Bücher der Reihe LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology

The Ma' Betisek are a group of aborigines who live on the mangrove coastal area of Selangor in peninsular Malaysia. This study is mainly focused on the Ma' Betisek communities on Carey Island, off the west coast of Selangor and in particular three villages - Sungei Sialang, Sungei Mata and Sungei Bumbun.

This book brings together recent work by Maurice Bloch which explores the highly controversial territory between the cognitive and social sciences. The essays are of broad, theoretical interest and aim to combine naturalistic approaches to cognition with a recognition and respect for the cultural and historical specificity of ethnography.

Contributes to social anthropology and discusses, as its central topic, the instability of Malay marriage. The causes and consequences of this phenomenon, which involve social, economic, and psychological considerations, are analysed in some detail. This book draws a sympathetic picture of behaviour within the family and between kinsmen.

Relates the evolution and the structure of the Cambodian Chinese community to the evidence from other overseas Chinese communities, and moves on to a comparison between overseas Chinese social organization and the organization of cities in China. Cambodia, the overseas Chinese, and traditional China all stand illuminated.

Illness is a matter of concern in every society. This study of the occurrence, recognition and explanation of illness amongst the Gnau makes use of its author's dual training in medicine and anthropology to show why, and in what respects these people of a forest village turn to their religious and magical knowledge in the distress of illness.

Presents an exploration of the moral use of knowledge among the Amuesga of Central Peru.

Provides an analysis of the political organization of the traditional government of the Malay Sultans before the introduction of British rule in 1874.

The Iban or the Sea Dayaks of Sarawak have probably been the best known of the indigenous peoples of Borneo. There was little information on their methods of agriculture and their social system. This book studies the shifting cultivation and cognatic kinship organization. The field work on which this is based was undertaken from 1949 to 1951.

Whether initiating girls or healing cattle, many in Africa share a vision of a world where the cultural, symbolic and cosmic categories of 'male' and 'female' serve, through ritual, to reimagine and transform the world. This work provides a framework with which to evaluate previous ethnographic material on Africa.

Explores the links between individuals, families, communities, and the state in China through ritual and myth.

Anthropology seems to shy away from the big, comparative questions that ordinary people in many societies find compelling. This title contains essays that explore birth, death and sexuality, puzzles about the relationship between science and religion, questions about the nature of ritual, work and genocide, and our personal fears and desires.

China presents an alternative model of social transformation in the age of globalization; therefore, its path to development may have particular implications for the developing world. This work reveals how individual agency has been on the rise since the 1970s and how this has affected everyday life and Chinese society more broadly.

This volume provides an international analysis of the core metaphors and practices of human sexual and social reproduction in their personal, social and cosmological contexts.

Collects the author's writings. This title demonstrates his theoretical and empirical interests and his distinctive contribution to several key areas of anthropological enquiry. It is suitable for art historians, sociologists and geographers, and includes ideas about exchange, representation, aesthetics, and spatial and temporal processes.

Takes the argument set out in "Lineage Organization in South-Eastern China" a step further. This book incorporates some of Professor Freedman's field data. The author seeks to analyse certain crucial institutions of Chinese society within the framework of contemporary anthropological theory.

Contains fourteen lectures and essays dealing with mainly, though not exclusively, with Africa, and among the topics discussed are land tenure, chieftainship, 'clientship', messianic movement, witchcraft, and 'race, tribalism and nationalism'.

A collection of some of Maurice Bloch's most important work, including essays on power, hierarchy, death and fertility.

A collection of essays from Edmund Leach, one of the original voices in the social anthropological tradition.