• An anthropological understanding of race and ethnicity.

  • Provides students with the race and ethnicity issues that have had an immense effect on both U.S. and global political trends, and have created innumerable tensions and misunderstandings among different groups.

• State of the art, highly readable essays written by anthropologists, about ethnic minorities in the U.S.

  • Assembles first hand perspectives of various areas of the world to give students a foundation for critically assessing their own society, and assist them in building a global perspective on race and ethnicity relations.

• A global focus—Features essay contributions by anthropologists who have completed in-depth ethnographic fieldwork with different ethnic groups.

  • Helps eliminate simplistic outmoded stereotypes and naive characterizations and representations of different ethnic minorities in the U.S.

• Essay on the concept of race.

  • Provides students with a sound assessment of the paleoanthropological, archaeological, biological, and genetic research on race, and reveals the untruths of many unsophisticated and simplistic approaches to understanding race.

• A chapter devoted to ethnicity—Addresses concepts and theories of assimilation; pluralism; prejudice; discrimination; primordialist and circumstantialist approaches, and more.

  • Offers students an understanding of the anthropological concept of culture and how it provides for the basis of ethnicity, and introduces other concepts that serve as a foundation for understanding ethnic identity issues throughout the world.

• Treatment of the history of scientific racism—Demonstrates how these simplistic forms of scientific racism have been used to perpetuate racism in U.S. society and elsewhere.

  • Shows students how it emerged as a means of promoting simplistic understandings of race and culture—which have fostered forms of racism and misunderstandings throughout the world.

• A provocative essay on the research of psychological anthropologists—And others who have been investigating the universality or naturalism of ethnicity and ethnocentrism.

  • Requires students to engage in a great deal of critical thinking.

• Contemporary ethnographic research—On race and ethnic trends.

  • Presents students with a more general understanding of the race and ethnic trends throughout regions, rather than just providing historical detail of the region.

• Student-friendly writing style and content.

  • Provides students and instructors with a text that can be used by a diverse student population of non-anthropology majors.

Raymond Scupin is Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Lindenwood University. His research interests include Asia, Islam, religion, race and ethnicity issues, and political economy. He has done ethnographic research in Thailand and among American Indians in California. Recent publications include Cultural Anthropology: A Global Perspective and Religion and Culture: An Anthropological Focus, both published by Prentice Hall.