Cultural anthropology

As some of you may know, I've been toying with the idea of grad school. I say toying because I'm still unsure what exactly I want to study. To date, it's been a choice between a traditional MBA and cultural anthropology. But lately I've been considering a relatively new field called behavioral economics. I was an econ major in college and so it would build upon what I learned oh those many years ago.

Anyways, I've started reading some books and papers about both social science fields. I started a classic from the godfather of anthropology in the U.S. called Anthropology and Modern Life [Amazon link] from Franz Boas. He went on establish cultural anthropology at Columbia, one of my target schools. He was also the one that brought empirical discipline to the field. It's amazing that some of the concepts that we take for granted now – e.g. location plays as large a role in values and and even physical development as ethnicity – were 'out there' back then. I'll report back as I spend more time with the tome.

As a side note, you can buy the book on Amazon but it's also available as a public domain book if you have a good eReader, such as Stanza on the iPhone and iBooks on the iPad.