Description:
Social anthropologists have been conspicuously absent from debates about the origins of modern humans. Human Origins explores why that is, and how social anthropology can shed light on early kinship and economic relations, gender politics, ritual, cosmology, ethnobiology, medicine, and the evolution of language.
Brief description:
Camilla Power is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of East London. Her research has focused on the evolutionary emergence of symbolic culture, language, art and religion.
Review Quotes:
"As a biological anthropologist, I welcomed the opportunity to read this book, and found it to be thoughtful and relevant to my work and interests. I will certainly encourage my colleagues to read it." - Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI)
"...makes a substantial contribution to what Alan Barnard in his afterword refers to as 'a new configuration of anthropological ideas, ' a 'larger' and more comprehensive anthropology. The volume's two major goals are to reengage social anthropology with research on human origins and, in so doing, to apply insights from sociocultural studies to evolutionary interpretations of symbolic culture, sociality, and cultural variation." - Choice
"This work provides an important link between social anthropology and evolutionary anthropology, developing a cross-disciplinary approach to understanding human origins." - Dimitri Bondarenko, The Russian Academy of Sciences