As I see it, accessibility qua good story-telling is an excellent way to show what anthropology is capable of. Ergo, my list (for socio-cultural anthro, at least):

(1) Edmund Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma
(2) Victor Turner, Schism and Continuity in an African Society
(3) Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors, Mythical Realities
(4) Claude Lévi-Strauss The Story of Lynx
(5) Ruth Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword

and for good measure…

Franz Boas, “The Study of Geography” and “On Alternating Sounds”

For Japan — Dorinne Kondo’s Crafting Selves and Theodore Bestor’s Tsukiji:The Fish Market at the Center of the World.

For China — Ellen Oxfeld’s Blood, Sweat, and Mahjong: Family and Enterprise in an Overseas Chinese Community and Aiwha Ong Flexible Citizenship.

Ong’s prose can be a bit postmodern. But what all four of these books have in common is the use of ethnography to illuminate global issues, who we tell ourselves we are(Kondo), what we eat and where it comes from (Bestor), what it means to be an “us” in others’ place (Oxfeld), and how legal and cultural identities, class and country intersect to make the world a global field on which cosmopolitans play (Ong).

It is not, I think, accidental that three of the authors are women. Two are at least bicultural (Kondo, Japanese-American and Ong Malaysian-Chinese) and the third, Oxfeld, is an American Jew who married a Bengali man, conducted her initial research on a Hakka (Chinese minority) community in Calcutta and has followed its members both back to its founders home in China and, for some of them, their new home in Toronto. As an example of anthropology thoroughly involved in the modern world, it is hard to imagine a better example.

– El cultivo de la tierra y los ritos agrícolas en las islas Trobriand. Los jardines de coral y su magia (B. Malinowski)*
[Coral Gardens and Their Magic (…)] *ok, ‘Baloma’ as well

– Un pueblo de la Sierra, Grazalema (J. Pitt-Rivers)
[The people of the Sierra]

– Brujería, magia y oráculos entre los azande (E.E. Evans-Pritchard)
[Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande]

– Ensayo sobre el don. La forma y la razón del intercambio en las sociedades arcaicas (M. Mauss)
[Essai sur le don (…)]

– Hacia una teoría antropológica del Valor. La moneda falsa de nuestros sueños (D. Graeber) –my translation: forthcoming!
[Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value (…)]

I don’t think it’s necessarily a geographic focus for everyone. The only one I put geographically related to the region I study is Sweetness and Power, which I would have put regardless of whether my interests were in the Caribbean or elsewhere. I do think there is a tie to research interests though, not knowing what anyone else on here studies specifically, I know I can say that all of mine are related to environmental anthropology.

As for the lack of emphasis on social anthropology, though I do count more than just the one reference to Radcliffe-Brown, (I also see two Malinowski works and Evans-Pritchard) I think it has more to do with accessibility. Some of those older books can be difficult to read without a theoretical or historical background of anthropology to place them in context.

A few of the books are what I would personally consider new, or newer, classics. Sweetness and Power, Wisdom Sits in Places, and Debt are all powerful books with huge theoretical implications outside of a strict definition of culture.

Depending on how you define South or East Asia, to cover that region, I would happily swap Seeing Like a State with The Art of Not Being Governed by the same author in my own, personal list.

Michael Taussig (1991) Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing
Michael Taussig (2004) My Cocaine Museum
Alan Klima (2002) The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand
Steven Gregory (2006) The Devil behind the Mirror Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic
Sabrina C. Agarwal and Bonnie N. Glencross (2011) Social Bioarchaeology