Adam Cooper humorously and accurately guides us through the figures and aspects of contemporary European anthropology.

He places particular emphasis on the British school of Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Firth, Fortes, Evans-Pritchard, and Leach, as well as their 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 territory of Western thought, incorporating their theories about exchange, kinship, or marriage, totemism, magic, or ritual violence into the worlds of Melanesians and Australians, Indians, or Africans, and the worlds of the East.

He also describes the impressive institutional development of anthropology in conjunction with its role in late and post-colonialism.

This book, a solidly grounded, insightful, and careful critical account of 50 years of anthropological activity, biography, and critical ethnography of the field, has, since its first edition, shaken the calm waters of Anglo-Saxon anthropology by presenting the sacred figures in their human dimensions.