Inequality and the return to structure in anthropology

The four books under review are all more or less explicitly critical of the impact of post-modernism on socio-cultural anthropology and archaeology. They all call for the building of anthropology by reconnecting to the earlier traditions of structural and comparative analysis. Although spanning both socio-cultural anthropology and archaeology, they set the focus clearly on the pervasive influence of inequality on social processes. The different authors demonstrate the explanatory power of concepts such as class, surplus, inequality, and structure for a multitude of contexts from prehistoric foragers to neo-liberal market ideologies.