What does it mean to live in Britain and to be ‘British’, and is an anthropology of Britain even a legitimate undertaking? Ranging across subjects as diverse as achieving collective identity on the Isle of Man, the London dance scene, leisure and change in a post-mining mining town, and Armenian and other diasporas, this volume of 15 essays establishes that an anthropology of Britain can set excellent standards of subtle ethnography and complex analysis.

Anthropologists have traditionally viewed a coupling of aggression and predation as the evolutionary milestone that brought about ambush hunting approximately two million years ago. But Rough and Tumble challenges this view, since aggressive attack was a hopeless tactic for humans who were smaller and slower-footed than their prey. The author uses fossils, archaeological evidence and studies of humans and other primates to argue that it was the advent of new hunting technologies that allowed humans to stalk and kill large game.

The Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth (1928–2016) was one of the most influential social theorists of the 20th century. This biography by his friend and colleague Thomas Hylland Eriksen – himself a distinguished ethnographer – charts the development of Barth’s groundbreaking ideas on ethnicity in his untiring fieldwork. In its exploration of big issues such as unity and diversity, culture and relativism, art and science, the book compellingly communicates the magic of ethnography to the non-specialist reader.