ABSTRACT
Social anthropologists are, in general, concerned with social relations expressed in behaviour - verbal behaviour as well as non-verbal behaviour; words as well as acts. The notion of values is clearly complex. But much anthropological treatment seems to agree in essence though the wording may differ. When an anthropologist is thus describing the values of a particular society he usually has an implicit comparative approach. At the broad comparative level, even those who argue strongly for cultural relativism can hardly avoid giving marks at times to the values and institutions they examine, as Ruth Benedict did, in terms of a scale of social costs or social waste. Anthropologists have often talked about the degree of detachment they can really bring to their value studies. The anthropological definition of values in its widest meaning is an operational one. As yet, too, anthropologists have made little attempt to classify values in any very systematic way.
