ABSTRACT
This book has grown from the same concerns as those that, over thirty years ago, led me to embark upon the study of anthropology. At school I had done well in mathematics and, thanks to a wonderful teacher, I had been fired by a passion for physics. It was assumed that I should go to university to read natural science. But my initial enthusiasm soon gave way to disillusionment. Like so many of my contemporaries I was appalled by the extent to which science had reneged both on its sense of democratic responsibility and on its original commitment to enlarge the scope of human knowledge, and had allowed itself to become subservient to the demands of the military-industrial complex. The scientific establishment, it seemed to me, was so massively institutionalised, internally specialised and oppressively hierarchical that as a professional scientist one could never be more than a small cog in a huge juggernaut of an enterprise. Towards the end of my first year at university I went to see my tutor, and politely informed him over a glass of sherry (this was Cambridge!) that natural science was not for me, and that I was seeking a discipline where there was more room to breathe. It would be exciting, I thought, to join in a subject still on the make – one, perhaps, that was in the same formative stage that physics was in at the time of Galileo.
