This new edition of the highly acclaimed Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology provides a unique guide to the ideas, arguments and history of the discipline. Combining anthropological theory and ethnography, it includes substantial entries, short biographies of important figures in anthropology, and glossary items. The new entries reflect major changes in anthropology in the past decade: subdisciplines like medical anthropology have become more central to mainstream work in the discipline; recent work includes issues of gender and sexuality, and anthropology's new ethnographic engagement with the central institutions of modernity like finance and science. Anthropology is now an unequivocally global discipline, so the second edition explores other traditions of anthropological work (Japanese anthropology, Latin American anthropology) as well as the processes of globalization itself. Authoritative entries have been commissioned from among the world's leading anthropologists. Alphabetically organized, the main entries contain clear, concise and provocative explanations of key anthropological themes and ideas, as well as surveys of the most important ethnographic regions and regional traditions of ethnographic research. Each major entry contains cross-references and a list of further reading.