Designed to meet the scope and sequence of your course, OpenStax Introduction to Anthropology is a four-field text integrating diverse voices, engaging field activities, and meaningful themes like Indigenous experiences and social inequality to engage students and enrich learning. The text showcases the historical context of the discipline, with a strong focus on anthropology as a living and evolving field. There is significant discussion of recent efforts to make the field more diverse—in its practitioners, in the questions it asks, and in the applications of anthropological research to address contemporary challenges. In addressing social inequality, the text drives readers to consider the rise and impact of social inequalities based on forms of identity and difference (such as gender, ethnicity, race, and class) as well as oppression and discrimination. The contributors to and dangers of socioeconomic inequality are fully addressed, and the role of inequality in social dysfunction, disruption, and change is noted.

Primary Navigation

This version of the open textbook, Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology was created by Nadine Fernandez and Deborah Amory to support the teaching of the online course, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, at SUNY Empire State College in the spring of 2018. We made only minor modifications to the chapters we selected from the original Perspectives textbook to be included here, and so owe a debt of gratitude to the original authors, who are still credited for their work. We would also like to thank the Joyce S. McKnight OER Academy at Empire State College for providing support for this work, as well as SUNY OER Services for their sound advice and amazing technological support. We look forward to the day when all educational resources are open and free to the public.

You know that experience when you learn about something new, and then suddenly, you’re aware of that thing all over the place? That's the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.