After graduating from Columbia College, Melvin Ember went to Yale University for his Ph.D. His mentor at Yale was George Peter Murdock, an anthropologist who was instrumental in promoting cross-cultural research and building a full-text database on the cultures of the world to facilitate cross-cultural hypothesis testing. This database came to be known as the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) because it was originally sponsored by the Institute of Human Relations at Yale. Growing in annual installments and now distributed in electronic format, the HRAF database currently covers more than 370 cultures, past and present, all over the world. He did fieldwork for his dissertation in American Samoa, where he conducted a comparison of three villages to study the effects of commercialization on political life. In addition, he did research on descent groups and how they changed with the increase of buying and selling. His cross-cultural studies focused originally on variation in marital residence and descent groups. He also conducted cross-cultural research on the relationship between economic and political development, the origin and extension of the incest taboo, the causes of polygamy, and how archaeological correlates of social customs can help draw inferences about the past. After four years of research at the National Institute of Mental Health, he taught at Antioch College and then Hunter College of the City University of New York. Heserved as president of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research and was president (since 1987) of the Human Relations Area Files, Inc., a nonprofit research agency at Yale University, until his passing

Table of Contents

Part I   Introduction

CHAPTER  1   What Is Anthropology

CHAPTER  2   Culture and Culture Change

CHAPTER  3   History of Theory in Anthropology

CHAPTER  4   Explanation and Evidence

Part II Cultural Variation

CHAPTER 5    Communication and Language

CHAPTER 6    Getting Food

CHAPTER 7    Economic Systems

CHAPTER 8    Social Stratification: Class, Ethnicity, and Racism

CHAPTER 9    Culture and the Individual

CHAPTER 10  Sex, Gender, and Culture

CHAPTER 11  Marriage and the Family

CHAPTER 12  Marital Residence and Kinship

CHAPTER 13  Associations and Interest Groups

CHAPTER 14  Political Life: Social Order and Disorder

CHAPTER 15  Religion and Magic

CHAPTER 16  The Arts

Part III  Using Anthropology

CHAPTER 17  Applied, Practicing, and Medical Anthropology

CHAPTER 18  Global Problems

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