Using cultural anthropology to analyze debates that reverberate throughout the human sciences, George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer look closely at cultural anthropology's past accomplishments, its current predicaments, its future direction, and the insights it has to offer other fields of study.

In surveying the developments of anthropological writing, the authors consider the entire history of twentieth-century anthropology, from British social anthropology, functionalism, and naive realism to structuralism, interpretive and psychoanalytic anthropology to more literary ethnography and finally to cultural critique. The result is a provocative work that is important for scholars interested in a critical approach not only to anthropology, but also to social science, art, literature, and history.

This second edition considers new challenges to the field which have arisen since the book's original publication.