The fundamental perspectives of an academic discipline too often go unmentioned in textbooks. Texts aim to present orderly answers to every question and final solutions to every problem. But fundamental perspectives contain unsolved problems and unanswered questions. Such perspectives are difficult to articulate because the elemental ideas they contain are both extremely simple and extremely complicated. Basic perspectives and ideas are also the most controversial and therefore the most exciting ones. Because of this, they are precisely what should be available to the nonprofessional. In anthropology, they are views of and ideas about cardinal concerns of our own culture--the nature of human nature; the difference between theory and fact, or knowledge and beliefs; the connections between love and marriage, or scarcity and surplus, or power, honor, and glory; the relationship between individual will and the laws of the cultural and natural universes.
I have, therefore, written this book for the person who, in or out of a classroom, has perhaps heard of anthropology, does not really know what it is, and would like to find out. I have written the kind of book I myself would like to read to learn about an unfamiliar discipline.
I write about fundamental perspectives because they are the framework for theory, and, as I say repeatedly, only through theory can people see, grasp, make, and remake their worlds.
