Unlike textbooks that emphasize the memorization of facts, Asking Questions About Cultural Anthropology: A Concise Introduction, Third Edition, teaches students how to think anthropologically, helping them view cultural issues as an anthropologist might. This approach demonstrates how anthropological thinking can be used as a tool for deciphering everyday experiences. The book covers the essential concepts, terms, and history of cultural anthropology, introducing students to the widely accepted fundamentals and providing a foundation that can be enriched by the use of ethnographies, a reader, articles, lectures, field-based activities, and other kinds of supplements. It balances concise coverage of essential content with a commitment to an active, learner-centered pedagogy.

Between the 1870s and the 1930s competing European powers carved out and consolidated colonies in Melanesia, the most culturally diverse region of the world. As part of this process, great assemblages of ethnographic artefacts were made by a range of collectors whose diversity is captured in this volume. The contributors to this tightly-integrated volume take these collectors, and the collecting institutions, as the departure point for accounts that look back at the artefact-producing societies and their interaction with the collectors, but also forward to the fate of the collections in metropolitan museums, as the artefacts have been variously exhibited, neglected, re-conceived as indigenous heritage, or repatriated. In doing this, the contributors raise issues of current interest in anthropology, Pacific history, art history, museology, and material culture.

." . . a most welcome book . . . Reading this book should irrevocably change how one looks at an ethnographic exhibit . . . These wide-ranging articles . . . augment our understanding of museums and their objects . . . Overall, this is a rich collection of essays, brimming with data and, for the most part, cogently analysed." . JRAI Between the 1870s and the 1930s competing European powers carved out and consolidated colonies in Melanesia, the most culturally diverse region of the world. As part of this process, great assemblages of ethnographic artefacts were made by a range of collectors whose diversity is captured in this volume. The contributors to this tightly-integrated volume take these collectors, and the collecting institutions, as the departure point for accounts that look back at the artefact-producing societies and their interaction with the collectors, but also forward to the fate of the collections in metropolitan museums, as the artefacts have been variously exhibited, neglected, re-conceived as indigenous heritage, or repatriated. In doing this, the contributors raise issues of current interest in anthropology, Pacific history, art history, museology, and material culture. Michael O'Hanlon is Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Robert L. Welsch teaches at the Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth, New Hampshire."