"If you want to know what anthropology is, look at what anthropologists do," write the authors of Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction. This engaging overview of the field combines an accessible account of some of the discipline's guiding principles and methodology with
abundant examples and illustrations of anthropologists at work.
Peter Just and John Monaghan begin by discussing anthropology's most important contributions to modern thought: its investigation of culture as a distinctively human characteristic, its doctrine of cultural relativism, and its methodology of fieldwork and ethnography. Drawing on examples from
their own fieldwork in Indonesia and Mesoamerica, they examine specific ways in which social and cultural anthropology have advanced our understanding of human society and culture. Including an assessment of anthropology's present position, and a look forward to its likely future, Social and
Cultural Anthropology will make fascinating reading for anyone curious about this social science.

• 1. Fieldwork and Ethnography; 2. Culture; 3. Society; 4. Sex and blood; 5. Class and caste, village and city, home and the world; 6. Language and social life; 7. The culturally constructed self 8. The future of anthropology; Further reading; Index.

Peter Just is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. His research and teaching interests include law and dispute settlement, religion and magic, and the cross-cultural study of personality and emotions. He is the author of Dou Donggo Justice: Conflict and Morality in an Indonesian Society (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).
John Monaghan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University, and author of The Covenants With Earth and Rain: Exchange, Sacrifice, and Revelation in Mixtec Sociality (University of Oklahoma Press, 1995).