Anthropology and Social Change : Volume 38

This book includes some essays that were earlier published with the title Studies in Applied Anthropology. The substitution of the phrase 'social change' for the label by which my teaching post at the London School of Economics was described is no accident, but rather an admission. Anyone who claims to apply a theoretical discipline is offering to do something with it. All I have ever been able to do is trace out the changes that European technical know-ledge, particularly under colonial rule, has brought to the societies which at different times have been called primitive, backward, underdeveloped, developing, and are at the moment officially, it seems, known as less developed