This shorter, but comprehensive and academically sound, anchor text is an approachable, full-color introduction to cultural anthropology. This edition continues to give students the opportunity to explore anthropology's relevance to their own lives through stories, examples, and new, unique chapter-opening vignettes. The rich visual program allows professors to assign outside reading without sacrificing visual appeal in a concise text. A relaxed writing style offers students an accessible text, which is to-the-point and well-organized yet academically solid. Unique "Try This" pedagogy asks students to think critically and apply anthropological concepts, perspectives and methods, and the "Anthropology Around Us" boxes focus on the application of anthropological concepts featured in each chapter. An appendix on "How to Read Ethnography" gives students practical steps for getting the most out of reading and comparing ethnographies.

Roberta Edwards Lenkeit is currently professor of anthropology at Modesto Junior College, Modesto, California where she has taught since 1976. She earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of California at Santa Barbara where, as a teaching assistant, she first learned how fun it was to share anthropology with introductory level students. After graduation, she spent four years as a full time instructor at the College of Marin in Kentfield, California. She also taught as an adjunct faculty member for two years at Mount Royal College in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She is the recipient of many awards of recognition for outstanding teaching by the campus chapter of Alpha Gamma Sigma. Her special interests include comparative kinship, religion, applied anthropology, hominid evolution, lithic tool technology, and Upper Paleolithic cave art. She has done fieldwork in Spain, the Cook Islands, and French Polynesia. For relaxation Roberta gardens and raises banty hens. She is the author of Introducing Cultural Anthropology (2001, Mayfield Publishing).