ABSTRACT
All the essays collected in this volume began life as texts intended to be delivered out loud to audiences, mostly at seminars. They are not really essays for reading so much as scripts to be performed, I have been lucky enough to spend my entire anthropological career in departments large enough to support weekly 'Anthropological Theory' seminar series, with outside and departmental speakers, reasonably sized audiences of anthropology teachers and postgraduate students, and so on. I have also often been invited to speak at similar seminars in other departments of anthropology. My interest in my subject has been largely sustained by the existence of such weekly seminar series, in which I have always participated eagerly both as a member of the audience (entitled to question the speaker) and as a speaker myself.
