ABSTRACT
Public reputations do not always do full justice to their subjects. So the old image of the anthropologist as a bearded professor, stalking skulls with his callipers at the ready, is gradually yielding ground to that of the professional explorer and chronicler of exotic tribal customs. The latter is indeed the traditional role of the social anthropologist (in contrast to the physical anthropologist) and provides our subject with most of its romantic appeal and much of its intellectual force and academic rigour. Social anthro pology, however, is more than this. Social anthropologists are in deed dedicated to the study of distant civilizations, both in their traditional and changing, contemporary forms, but we have also a larger aspiration : the comparative study of all human societies in the light of those challengingly unfamiliar beliefs and customs which expose our own ethnocentric limitations and put us in our place within the wider gamut of the world's civilizations. It is in this spirit that this introduction to social anthropology is offered, and this is why I make so many deliberate comparisons between esoteric alien customs and more familiar native practices and be liefs. M y theme throughout is the social setting and cultural ex pression of identity.
