An Academic Skating on Thin Ice

Download or read book An Academic Skating on Thin Ice written by Peter Worsley and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Worsley’s studies at Cambridge were interrupted by war service as a communist officer in the colonial forces in Africa and India, and it was here that he developed a keen interest in anthropology. He work in mass education in Tanganyika and then studied with Max Gluckman at Manchester University. Banned from re-entering Africa, Worsley went to Australia where he was banned once more, this time from New Guinea, yet he did succeed in completing field-research for his Ph.D. on an Australian Aboriginal tribe. His subsequent book on ‘Cargo’ cults in Melanesia is now regarded as a classic, but his left-wing politics ensured that he could not get a job in anthropology, so he switched to sociology, on his return to Manchester.