The best anthropology books, from a first read to the field's classics

For a first anthropology book, start with one of three. Kate Fox's Watching the English suits the curious reader with no course to pass, because an anthropologist turns the discipline's methods on her own country and you watch fieldwork think. Tim Ingold's Anthropology: Why It Matters suits anyone who wants a short, opinionated answer to what the field is for, in about 140 pages. Thomas Hylland Eriksen's Small Places, Large Issues suits the student starting a course, since it covers kinship, exchange, religion, politics and ethnicity in one volume.

The books below were picked from publishers' descriptions and tables of contents, journal and magazine reviews, and the reading lists university departments give new students, such as the pre-course list from Oxford's Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Each note covers what the book is about, who it suits and, where a reviewer raised one, the main objection. The selection leans toward kinship, this site's subject and a specialist topic in anthropology since Lewis Henry Morgan's survey of 1871.

Which book fits where you are

Start here

Watching the English

Kate Fox. Hodder & Stoughton, 2004; revised and updated edition 2014.

Fox, a social anthropologist and co-director of the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford, did her participant observation at home. She studies weather talk, queues and the small signals by which the English place one another by class, and she tests the rules by breaking them, jumping a queue and watching what follows. She explains the method as she goes, which makes this the easiest first look at how an anthropologist works. The limits: one country, written to amuse as well as inform, with broad generalizations. Read it for the method, not as a verdict on a nation. Her father is Robin Fox, whose kinship textbook appears below.

Anthropology: Why It Matters

Tim Ingold. Polity, 2018.

Ingold, a social anthropologist long based at the University of Aberdeen, wrote this for Polity's short Why It Matters series. In five chapters, from taking others seriously to anthropology for the future, he argues that anthropology is not the same thing as ethnography. Describing other people's lives is part of the work; the point is to think alongside them about how to live. He also traces how the field, once tied to ideas of progress and to colonial rule, remade itself. Felipe Trujillo Bilbao, reviewing it in Spanish for Cuadernos de Antropología Social, called it a brief manifesto, accessible and clear. That is also the caveat: it is an argument, so you learn what Ingold thinks the field should be more than what anthropologists have found.

A third route is Matthew Engelke's How to Think Like an Anthropologist (Princeton University Press, 2018), built around ideas such as culture, value and blood; Oxford lists it, under its British title, among basic introductions.

The Secret of Our Success

Joseph Henrich. Princeton University Press, 2016; paperback 2017.

Henrich, a Harvard professor of human evolutionary biology, argues that humans owe their success less to individual cleverness than to what he calls collective brains: groups that learn from one another and pile up know-how over generations. He opens with European explorers who starved where local people lived well. The Burke and Wills expedition in Australia, in his telling, ate nardoo, an aquatic fern that Aboriginal cooks made safe by careful processing the explorers never fully copied. Fire, cooking, plant knowledge and tools follow, as learned inventions that reshaped human bodies. Our explainer on transmission biases shows the simple maths behind this kind of social learning. The book argues one large thesis over 464 pages, so keep asking which steps are shown and which are inferred.

Going further

The WEIRDest People in the World

Joseph Henrich. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020; Picador paperback 2021.

The WEIRDest People in the World, shelved under psychology, is the book here most concerned with kinship. Henrich argues that the medieval Western Church's marriage rules, including bans on cousin marriage and polygamy, broke up the dense kin groups that organized life across much of Europe, and that people raised without them came to think differently: more individualistic, more trusting of strangers, more attached to impersonal rules. He puts numbers on what he calls kinship intensity, and the cousin-marriage material rewards anyone who has seen how the six classic kinship systems sort cousins. The caveat is serious. The historian Anne McCants, in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, argued that its quantitative methods are flawed and that its history of church and family law departs from what specialist historians accept.

Mothers and Others

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009; paperback 2011.

Hrdy argues that humans are cooperative breeders. Mothers in our evolutionary past raised children with help from grandmothers, older siblings, fathers and other alloparents (carers who are not the parents), and infants evolved to court that help by reading the people around them. From that, she proposes, came our knack for understanding other minds. The evidence runs from marmosets and langurs to foragers such as the Hadza and the Efe, and kinship readers should note her use of forager data against the old picture of early humans living in father-centered, patrilocal groups. Melvin Konner, in The New York Review of Books, accepted the case for shared child care but noted that its link to human cooperativeness cannot be tested directly, and that among foragers mothers still provide most early care.

Textbooks and classics

Small Places, Large Issues

Thomas Hylland Eriksen. Pluto Press, fifth edition 2023.

Its publisher calls it a long-standing staple of undergraduate courses, and its fourth edition sits on Oxford's pre-course list. In 22 chapters it runs from fieldwork and the history of the discipline through kinship as descent, marriage and relatedness, gender, caste and class, religion, politics, ethnicity and nationalism, and economic anthropology. The fifth edition adds chapters on medical anthropology and on climate change. Eriksen, who taught at the University of Oslo, died in 2024, the year after this edition appeared. One note for US students: American departments teach anthropology as four fields (cultural, biological, archaeological and linguistic), and this book covers social and cultural anthropology only.

Kinship and Marriage

Robin Fox. Penguin, 1967; later reissued by Cambridge University Press.

This remains the clearest short way into the classic kinship debates. Fox works through descent groups (patrilineal, matrilineal and the mixtures between) and then alliance, the view that marriage is above all a link between groups, and he reconciles the two schools that argued over them. His method is deductive: the variety of kinship systems is built up from what the publisher calls four universal premises. It suits a reader who wants the structure of the subject before the case studies. Its age shows. Written in 1967, it predates the feminist critiques and the later studies of chosen family, adoption and reproductive technology, for which Janet Carsten's After Kinship (2004) is a good next step.

Research Methods in Anthropology

H. Russell Bernard. Rowman & Littlefield, sixth edition 2017.

Bernard wrote the methods book many courses build on, in three parts: research design (questions, hypotheses, sampling), data collection (interviewing, questionnaires, participant and direct observation, field notes, cultural domain analysis and network data) and analysis (from thematic and narrative analysis to statistics, multidimensional scaling and clustering). It is the place to see how the techniques behind our explainer on cultural consensus analysis fit into a whole project. A seventh edition, with Amber Wutich as co-author, is listed by Bloomsbury for 2026, so check which edition a course asks for. At over 700 pages, it is a reference to read by chapter.

The Elementary Structures of Kinship

Claude Lévi-Strauss. Paris, 1949; English edition, Beacon Press, 1969.

With this book Lévi-Strauss made marriage exchange a central problem. He treats the incest prohibition as the rule that obliges groups to exchange spouses, and he separates restricted exchange between two groups from generalized exchange around a circle of three or more, a distinction anthropologists still use when they draw marriage systems. The book is also where the mathematician André Weil's short algebraic appendix on the Murngin marriage rules first appeared, the start of the mathematical anthropology this site covers. The English edition (translated by James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, edited by Rodney Needham) runs past 500 pages, and its Australian material in particular has been argued over ever since. Read Robin Fox first.

Four classics to read in part

• Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). The Trobriand Islands and the kula, a circuit of exchange of shell necklaces and armbands between islands. Its introduction on subject, method and scope is the founding statement of long-term fieldwork. His private diary, published in 1967, showed attitudes toward the islanders he never put in print.
• E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (1940). Cattle herders of the Upper Nile, in what is now South Sudan, as he documented them in the 1930s: lineages nested inside larger lineages, and how ecology shapes the sense of time. A kinship reader's classic.
• Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Essays on culture as meaning, including "Thick Description" and the essay on the Balinese cockfight.
• Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). A study of adolescent girls. In 1983 Derek Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa argued she had been misled; Paul Shankman's The Trashing of Margaret Mead (2009) went back over the dispute and found Freeman selective with his evidence. Read Mead as history, and read the argument too.

One path through the list

One order that works: Watching the English or Ingold first, Eriksen as the spine, Malinowski's introduction and a chapter of The Nuer for the classics, Hrdy and Henrich for the evolutionary questions, Robin Fox for kinship, Bernard for a project, and Lévi-Strauss last. Our book notes cover more titles on kinship, networks and cultural evolution, and the reading shelf groups every book on the site by topic.

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Sources and further reading

• Eriksen, Thomas Hylland (2023). Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, fifth edition. Pluto Press. Publisher page
• Henrich, Joseph (2016). The Secret of Our Success. Princeton University Press. Publisher page
• Ingold, Tim (2018). Anthropology: Why It Matters. Polity. Publisher listing
• Konner, Melvin (2011). "It Does Take a Village." Review of Hrdy, Mothers and Others. The New York Review of Books, December 8, 2011. Text
• McCants, Anne E. C. (2021). "Who Is He Calling WEIRD?" The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 52 (2). MIT repository
• Trujillo Bilbao, Felipe (2019). "Para la vida, con otros: Anthropology, why it matters?" Cuadernos de Antropología Social 49: 179-180. doi:10.34096/cas.i49.5271
• University of Oxford, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Social Anthropology: Suggestions for Pre-course Reading. PDF
• Arizona State University Library. "Research Methods in Anthropology" (note on the sixth edition). Shelf Life