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.

Brief Table of Contents

Part I Introduction

CHAPTER 1 What Is Anthropology?
CHAPTER 2 History of Anthropological Theory
CHAPTER 3  Research Methods in Anthropology

Part II Human Evolution

CHAPTER 4 Genetics and Evolution
CHAPTER 5 Human Variation and Adaptation
CHAPTER 6 The Living Primates
CHAPTER 7 Primate Evolution: From Early Primates to Hominoids
CHAPTER 8 The First Hominids

Part III  Cultural Evolution

CHAPTER 9 The Origins of Culture and the Emergence of Homo
CHAPTER 10 The Emergence of Homo sapiens
CHAPTER 11 The Upper Paleolithic World
CHAPTER 12 Origins of Food Production and Settled Life
CHAPTER 13 Origins of Cities and States

Part IV Cultural Variation

CHAPTER 14  Culture and Culture Change
CHAPTER 15 Communication and Language
CHAPTER 16 Getting Food
CHAPTER 17 Economic Systems
CHAPTER 18 Social Stratification: Class, Ethnicity, and Racism
CHAPTER 19 Culture and the Individual
CHAPTER 20 Sex, Gender, and Culture
CHAPTER 21 Marriage and the Family
CHAPTER 22 Marital Residence and Kinship
CHAPTER 23 Associations and Interest Groups
CHAPTER 24 Political Life: Social Order and Disorder
CHAPTER 25 Religion and Magic
CHAPTER 26 The Arts

Part V Using Anthropology

CHAPTER 27 Applied, Practicing, and Medical Anthropology
CHAPTER 28 Global Problems

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