This unusual and ambitious book will be welcomed by all who wish to understand exactly what anthropology is and what anthropologists do. It summarizes, compares, and contrasts the ideas of ten prominent anthropologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, revealing fundamental differences in their interpretations of human behavior and in the kinds of meaning they see in human affairs.

Where do we get our notions of social hierarchy and personal worth? What underlies our beliefs about the goals worth aiming for, the persons we hope to become? Elvin Hatch addresses these questions in his ethnography of a small New Zealand farming community, articulating the cultural system beneath the social hierarchy.

Hatch describes a cultural theory of social hierarchy that defines not only the local system of social rank, but personhood as well. Because people define respectability differently, a crucial part of Hatch's approach is to examine how these differences are worked out over...