This is a list of important publications in anthropology, organized by field.

Some reasons why a particular publication might be regarded as important:

• Topic creator – A publication that created a new topic
• Breakthrough – A publication that changed scientific knowledge significantly
• Influence – A publication which has significantly influenced the world or has had a massive impact on the teaching of anthropology.

According to Clifford Geertz, "anthropology is perhaps the last of the great nineteenth-century conglomerate disciplines still for the most part organizationally intact. Long after natural history, moral philosophy, philology, and political economy have dissolved into their specialized successors, it has remained a diffuse assemblage of ethnology, human biology, comparative linguistics, and prehistory, held together mainly by the vested interests, sunk costs, and administrative habits of academia, and by a romantic image of comprehensive scholarship."^[1] Among published compilations of important thinkers in anthropology are Key Debates in Anthropology edited by Tim Ingold and Fifty Key Anthropologists edited by Robert J. Gordon, Harriet Lyons, and Andrew Lyons.

• Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 1777
• Johann Jakob Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J.J. Bachofen, 1861 (English translation: 1967)
• Lewis H. Morgan, Ancient Society, 1877
• Anténor Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, 1885
• James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1890
• Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 1909
• Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man, 1911
• Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, 1913
• Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922
• Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders, 1922
• Marcel Mauss, The Gift, 1925
• Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, 1928
• Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 1934
• E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, 1937 (abridged edition published in 1976)

• Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, African Political Systems, 1940
• Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944
• Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 1946
• Clyde Kluckhohn, Mirror for Man: The Relation of Anthropology to Modern Life, 1949

• Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 1955
• Leslie White, The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome, 1959

• Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, 1966
• Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 1966
• Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamö: The Fierce People, 1968
• Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 1969

• Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972
• Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1972
• Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973
• Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 1974
• Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State, 1974
• John W. Cole and Eric Wolf, The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley, 1974 (republished in 1999 with a new introduction by Eric Wolf)
• Claude Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community, 1975 (English translation: 1981)
• Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 1975
• Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978

• Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 1982
• Maurice Godelier, The Making of Great Men, 1982
• Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities, 1983
• Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, 1983
• Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective, 1983
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, 1985
• David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, 1988

• Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality, 1990
• Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 1991 (English translation: 1993)
• Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 1991
• Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, 1992
• Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, 1993
• Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994
• Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time
• Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 1996
• Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, 1997^[2]
• Stefan Helmreich, Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, 1998
• Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, 1999

• Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, 2000
• Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado, 2000
• Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, 2003
• Jean Rouch, Cine-Ethnography, 2003
• Marcel Detienne, The Greeks and Us: A Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece, 2005 (English translation: 2007)
• Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 2005 (English translation: 2013)
• Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 2005
• Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, 2007
• Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, 2009
• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years, 2011
• Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, 2011
• Napoleon Chagnon, Noble Savages: My life among two dangerous tribes - The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists, 2013 (to be published)

• Eric Wolf, Anthropology, 1964
• Peter Just and John Monaghan, Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction, 2000
• Alan Barnard, History and Theory in Anthropology, 2000
• Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What is Anthropology?, 2004

• David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739
• Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 1798
• Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 1923-29
• Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, 1928
• Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, 1928
• Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 1966
• Tzvetan Todorov The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, 1982
• Nicholas Rescher, Human Interests: Reflections on Philosophical Anthropology, 1990
• Michael Jackson, Minima Ethnographica, 1998
• Joseph Margolis, The Arts and the Definition of the Human: Towards a Philosophical Anthropology, 2008

• Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 1916
• Edward Sapir
• Benjamin Lee Whorf
• Umberto Eco
• Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, 1957
• Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1967

• Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859
• Rudolf Virchow, The Freedom of Science in the Modern States, 1877
• Rudolf Virchow, Anthropological Papers, 1891
• Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man, 1971
• Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976
• E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature, 1979
• Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 1981
• Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee, 1991
• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 1997
• E. O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth, 2012

• Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science, 1996
• Chris Gosden, Archaeology & Anthropology: A Changing Relationship, 1999
• Richard Bradley, An Archaeology of Natural Places, 2000
• Alison Wylie, Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology, 2002

• Paul Bahn, Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction, 1996

• List of important publications in philosophy
• List of important publications in economics
• List of important publications in biology