Adam Kuper: 3 books

Adam Kuper’s iconoclastic intellectual history argues that the idea of “primitive society” is a western myth. The “primitive” is imagined as the opposite of the “civilised”. But this is a protean myth. As ideas about civilisation change, so the image of primitive society must be adjusted. By...

The Invention of Primitive Society, Adam Kuper’s best selling critique of ideas about the origins of society and religion that have been much debated since Darwin, has been hugely influential in anthropology and post-colonial studies. This topical new edition, entitled The Reinvention of...

Anthropology and Anthropologists provides an entertaining and provocative account of British social anthropology from the foundations of the discipline, through the glory years of the mid-twentieth century and on to the transformation in recent decades. The book shocked the anthropological establishment...