I am hoping that some people can help with books with an anthropological theme. I am looking for mostly fiction, with some being for people with lower reading skills. So far I have come up with:
Clan of the Cave Bear
Eight
Mendell’s Dwarf
Possibly Elizabeth Peters first Amelia Peabody book ( I forget the name at the moment. I plead caffine defficency.)
Ursula K. LeGuin has been writing anthropological science fiction for ages. Read The Left Hand of Darkness (imagine researching a planet of unisexual beings) or Always Coming Home (which was packaged with a casette of the society’s songs). The “K” stands for Kroeber – she’s related to the professor who worked with (and wrote the book about) Ishi.
I remember enjoying Go and Come Back, by Jean Abelove. It’s about a South American tribe and two anthropologists who come to live with them, told from the perspective of a teenage girl. It’s not very difficult to read.
He received his doctorate under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901.
Kroeber was father of the academic Karl Kroeber and the fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin by his second wife, Theodora.
His second wife, Theodora Kroeber, wrote a well-known biography of Ishi, Ishi in Two Worlds.
Not from the Wiki
When Ishi became ill, Dr. Saxton Pope was called to provide his medical care.
Ishi and Dr. Pope became close friends. Ishi taught Dr. Pope to shoot the bow and hunt in the Indian way.
Pope and his friend Art Young are considered the fathers of modern bowhunting.
Go to amazon.com. Type in “clan of the cave bear” and look for the part where they tell you what other books you might be interested in. I’ve found a few good books using that technique.
Look up material by Chad Oliver (e.g., NESFA recently issued a couple volumes of reprints). He was a professor of anthropology who wrote science fiction on the side.
While Alfred Kroeber was certainly hugely influential in the genesis of American Anthropology, that distinction really belongs to his mentor, Franz Boas.
To the OP, I’d recommend Return to Laughter by Elenor Smith Bowen: a (barely) fictionalized account of doing ethnographic fieldwork in Africa.
well, in that case, although not a book, there’s [Krippendorf’s Tribe](Krippendorf’s Tribe) , which, while it does have Jenna Elfman, is, safe to say, not Richard Dreyfuss’ best work…