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Anthropologists have shown an interest in architecture since at least the end of the nineteenth century, though not to the extent that may be expected given the prominent position that...

Palliative care has been developing since the 1960s as a form of caregiving that focuses on the relief of suffering when there is no prospect of a cure or when a patient is at the end of...

Ethnicity is a concept that marks social belonging as much as it does difference, and that lies at the heart of political debates as well as debates across academic disciplines today. Rooted...

There are many universal assumptions about what care is and how it ought to be provided. Such assumptions are widely embedded in public debates, government policies, and institutional forms...

Children, as the youngest members of our species, exist in all human societies across space and time. But societies differ widely in their understandings of childhood as a distinctive stage...

If asked to imagine home, most of us will come to think of a particular house or building. And, for many of us, the quintessential image of home remains the place we grew up in. This close...

Once a slur, the term ‘queer’ now is used to critique restrictive, dominant norms of respectable conduct and to recast sexual and gender variations in positive terms. With roots in twentieth...

What is adoption? To answer this question is to jump directly into one of the key controversies of anthropology: anthropologists, associated for over a century with the close study of...

To make a topic from one of anthropology’s principal means and objects of study, investigating relations through relations, is offered in the spirit of reflexive enquiry. The entry is not...

Ethnographic fieldwork, carried out according to the method of long-term participant-observation, is what defines social anthropology. The method is inductive and open-ended. As such, the...

The concept of ‘tribal society’ is one of the most prominent and popular ‘anthropological’ notions of our time, yet within western social and cultural anthropology it has been largely...

Matriliny is a way of reckoning kinship descent and belonging through the female line. This entry discusses some of the forms matrilineal kinship may take in practice before considering how...