Abstract

Starry Nights: Critical Structural Realism in Anthropology offers nothing less than a reinventing of the discipline of anthropology. In these six essays – four published here for the first time – Stephen Reyna critiques the postmodern tenets of anthropology, while devising a new strategy for conducting research. Combative and clear, Starry Nights provides an important critique of mainstream anthropology as represented by Geertz and the postmodern legacy, and envisions a mode of anthropological research that addresses social, cultural and biological questions with techniques that are theoretically rigorous and practically useful.

“This is an important and timely collection of essays by one of the leading exponents of a scientific, materialist anthropology… I could see the usefulness of this collection in seminars on theory at the graduate and undergraduate level.” · David Sutton, Southern Illinois University

Stephen P. Reyna is a Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Salle and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Manchester.