Includes bibliographical references and index.

Culture and the contemporary world. Culture and ethnography. Ethnography and culture -- Eating Christmas at the Kalahari -- Shakespeare in the bush -- Lessons from the field -- Language and communication. The sounds of silence -- Converstion style : talking on the job -- The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis : worlds shaped by words -- Teleconditioning and the postmodern classroon -- Ecology and subsistence. The Hunters : scarce resources in the Kalahari -- Cultivating the tropical forest -- India's sacred cow -- Adaptive failure : Easter's end -- Economic systems. Reciprocity and the power of giving -- The Shadow economy : cleaners in Bombay -- Workaday world - crack economy -- Subsistence and market : when the turtle collapses -- Kinship and family. Mother's love, : death without weeping -- Family and kinship in village India -- Polyandry : when brothers take a wife -- Uterine families and the women's community -- Roles and inequality. Symbolizing roles : behind the veil -- Society and sex roles -- Culture, rank, and JQ : the Bell curve phenomenon -- The Vice lord phoenix -- Law and politics. Why women take men to magistrate's court -- Cross-cultural law : the case of the Gypsy offender -- Navigating Nigerian bureaucracies -- Government, oil, and political transformation : the Inupiat Eskimo case -- Religion, magic, and worldview. God's saviours in the Sierra Madre -- Baseball magic -- Revitialization drives American militias -- Cargo beliefs and religious experience -- Culture change and applied anthropology. Cocaine and the economic deterioration of Bolivia -- The Kayapo resistance -- Using anthropology -- The Medical anthropologist as consultant.