Understanding a way of life from the inside.
11 topics · 9 curated works
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals
William Graham Sumner · 1906
Argues that a society's mores and folkways are self-justifying within it, coining ethnocentrism to describe the reflex of judging other societies by…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Mind of Primitive Man
Franz Boas · 1911
Argues that differences between peoples are cultural and historical rather than racial or biological, dismantling the ranking of societies that…
+2 more at this level
9 works
William Graham Sumner
Argues that a society's mores and folkways are self-justifying within it, coining ethnocentrism to describe the reflex of judging other societies by one's own standard.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Arnold van Gennep
Argues that rituals marking birth, initiation, marriage and death across cultures share a common three-part structure of separation, transition and incorporation, which is what makes them effective at moving a person between social states.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Franz Boas
Argues against reconstructing grand evolutionary sequences of culture from scattered comparisons, and for reconstructing the specific history of each culture from painstaking, detailed fieldwork before generalising at all.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bronisław Malinowski
Argues, through the Kula ring of ceremonial exchange, that economic life among the Trobriand Islanders is inseparable from social obligation, magic and prestige, and cannot be reduced to rational self-interest.
link checked 17 Sept 2026W. H. R. Rivers
Argues that so-called primitive medicine is a coherent system built on genuine theories of disease causation, not mere superstition, and traces how magical, religious and naturalistic practice diverge from a common root.
link checked 17 Sept 2026American Anthropological Association
Sets out the discipline's binding position that anthropologists' primary obligation is to the people and animals they study, and that this obligation can override a researcher's obligations to employers, funders or the discipline itself.
Franz Boas
Argues that differences between peoples are cultural and historical rather than racial or biological, dismantling the ranking of societies that anthropology had until then assumed.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Thorstein Veblen
Argues that humans carry an evolved propensity toward competent, efficient work that industrial institutions both exploit and frustrate, drawing on comparative accounts of labour across societies.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Marcel Mauss
Argues that gifts in archaic societies are never free — they bind giver and receiver in an obligatory cycle of giving, receiving and repaying that founds social solidarity itself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026