Critical anthropology now - an introduction, George E. Marcus; virtual social science and the politics of family values, Judith Stacey; generation X - anthropology in a media-saturated world, Sherry B. Ortner; figuring David Koresh, James D. Faubion; new lexicon, old language - negotiating the "global" at the National Science Foundation, Donald Brenneis; blurred boundaries, hybrids and changelings - the fortunes of nonprofit organizations in the late 20th century, Peter Dobkin Hall; locating corporate environmentalism - synthetics, implosions and the Bhopal disaster, Kim Fortun; worldling cyerbspace - toward a critical ethnography in time, space and theory, Michael M.J. Fischer; American moderns - on sciences and scientists, Paul Rabinow; postmodernist critique in the 1980s, nuclear diplomacy and the "prisoner's dilemma" -probing family resemblances, George E. Marcus; merchants in the temple of scholarship - the American university press at century's end, T. David Brent.

This is an enjoyable and stimulating collection of essays dealing from very diverse angles with a wide variety of social and cultural events and institutions. Though centred primarily on the USA, the authors offer analytical insights that are easily transposable for research in other Western capitalist societies.' -