Adam Kuper guides us with humor and historical accuracy through the people and events of modern European anthropology. He places particular emphasis on the British school of Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Firth, Fortes, Evans-Pritchard, and Leach, as well as its exchanges with the major currents of French social theory from Durkheim, Mauss, and Levi-Strauss. With vividness and intensity, he narrates the adventures of the heroic generation of anthropologists as they expand the domain of Western thought, incorporating with their theories on exchange, kinship or marriage, totemism, magic, or ritual violence, the worlds of Melanesians and Australians, Indians or Africans, the worlds of the East. He also describes the impressive institutional development of anthropology in conjunction with its role in late and post-colonialism.

A solidly grounded, insightful, and careful critical account of 50 years of anthropological activity, a biography and critical ethnography of the field, this book, iconoclastic and sometimes unorthodox, from its very first edition stirred the calm waters of Anglo-Saxon anthropology, as it presented the sacred figures in their human dimensions from within.