Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (a John Hope Franklin Center

Some of the essays reflect explicitly on theoretical concerns: the relationship between agency and power, the problematic quality of ethnographic studies of resistance, and the possibility of producing an anthropology of subjectivity. Others are ethnographic studies that apply Ortner’s theoretical framework. In these, she investigates aspects of social class, looking at the relationship between race and middle-class identity in the United States, the often invisible nature of class as a cultural identity and as an analytical category in social inquiry, and the role that public culture and media play in the creation of the class anxieties of Generation X. Written with Ortner’s characteristic lucidity, these essays constitute a major statement about the future of social theory from one of the leading anthropologists of our time.

• Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology, 2nd Edition
• Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"
• Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 20th Anniversary Edition
• Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory, Fifth Edition
• The Division of Labor in Society
• Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History
• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
• Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology)
• Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences
• Understanding Culture : An Introduction to Anthropological Theory