Reddit reviews Five Key Concepts in Anthropological Thinking

Yeah, anthropology definitely has it's hands in pretty much all other disciplines in some form of fashion. Mostly because knowledge production is a fundamental aspect of human life, so anthropologists are interested in it in all its forms.

> To be honest, the thing I'm most worried about is that the social justice approach to ethnography is a little left of where I want to be, but I've spoken with a U of M professor, Erik Mueggler, and he showed me the topics that were accepted from PhD candidates recently, and they all seem to have this element to them. Anthropology seems to be undergoing a penance for its ethnocentric theorizing and homogenizing in the past, but I feel that I fall much more in that vein (hopefully without the ethnocentrism).

I wouldn't call it penance, I would say anthropologists today are deeply concerned with how their work impacts the peoples, communities, and places where they conduct research. Yeah, that's partly a reaction to the early days of anthropology's role as colonialism's handmaiden, but it's also the result of theoretical and methodological shifts that occurred beginning in the 1970s. I don't think anthropology's theorizing historically has been overly ethnocentric, quite the contrary really, at least relative to other social science fields. But having some aspect of social justice in a project makes a lot of sense for most anthropological projects. After all, you have to live there for a year, you get to know people, you come to understand their struggles, and they become your friends. So you want to help them, and that often entails using whatever kinds of power and privilege you have to help improve their lives.

Some projects are more infused with social justice than others. It does not need to be a major component of your research, but you will certainly be asked at some point what positive effects your work has on the people you work with and how you will minimize the possibility that you're exploiting them. For example, I'm a medical anthropologist and most of my research questions are about medicine, knowledge production, and gender/sexuality. I don't have social justice all loaded up in my questions, but I do care about treating patients with respect and doing whatever I can to help them since they give their time to and share their lives with me.

> my main question is can you point me to a good undergrad style overview of current theory a la Max Weber's Basic Sociological Terms?

I highly recommend Richard Perry's "Five Key Concepts in Anthropological Thinking." You can get used copies on Amazon for around 1/3 the price of a new copy (https://www.amazon.com/Five-Key-Concepts-Anthropological-Thinking/dp/0130971405).

You might also check out Lavenda & Schultz "Core Concepts in Cultural Anthropology," which I think is in its 6th edition now. It's a concise and accessible introduction to the field of cultural anthro, including some basic discussion about methods. You might also check out Ottenheimer's "The Anthropology of Language" for a background on linguistic anthro, which seems like something you might be interested in.