These books are textbooks and anthologies of social theory and sociocultural anthropology, and may be useful as an orientation to the social sciences as a field.

Adams, Bert, and R. A. Sydie. 2001. Sociological Theory. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press.

Berger, Peter L. 2011. Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective. New York: Open Road Media.

Cheater, Angela P. 2003. Social Anthropology: An Alternative Introduction. 2nd ed. Routledge.

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2001. Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropolog. 2nd ed. London: Pluto Press.

Lemert, Charles C. 2008. Social Things: An Introduction to the Sociological Life. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

If you would like to continue to read up on the big ideas and debates of social theory, why not start with one of these great books? Below is a short, somewhat selective, list of favorite works of the lecturers.

Barth, Fredrik. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. New York: Little, Brown.

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Anchor.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dumont, Louis. 1980. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Durkheim, Emile. 2014 [1893]. The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Fortes, Meyer. 2004. Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan. London: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel, Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. 1991. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2006. The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Goffman, Erving. 2008. Behavior in Public Places. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1932 [1922]. Argonauts of The Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd.

Marx, Karl. 1843. “Marx to Ruge: Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.” Marxists Internet Archive. September. https://www.marxists.org/.

———. 1887. Capital, Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers. https://www.marxists.org/.

Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1952. Structure and Function in Primitive Society. New York: The Free Press.

Simmel, Georg. 2011. The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge.

Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Edited by C. Wright Mills and H. H. Gerth. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.