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.
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Liverpool, My World
Chapter 2. Cambridge and the Army
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Swahili – My Doorway to Africa
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Into India
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Demobilisation
Chapter 3. Peace and the Cold War
Chapter 4. Australia: Into the Lion’s Den
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The Aborigines of Groote Eylandt
Chapter 5. Out of Anthropology, into Sociology
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Mau Mau Hell
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Hull and Halifax
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Canadian Interlude
Chapter 6. Manchester University: Upheaval
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Champions!
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The Student Revolution
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Decline and Fall Into China
Chapter 7. Latin America
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Ecuador
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¡Qué Viva México!
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Brazil
Chapter 8. Globalisation
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Ethnomethodology
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New York, New York!
Chapter 9. London Town
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Peace and War
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New Life and the Third Age
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The Millennium Revisited
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The Fourth Age
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The End of the World?
Notes and References
About the Author :
Peter Worsley (1924-2013), winner of the Curl Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute, became first Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. He went to China a few months after Nixon and, upon retirement, taught in New York. His book, The Third World, introduced that term into the English language, while the Penguin edition of Introducing Sociology sold over half a million copies.
Review :
"Peter Worsley's vividly remembered and incisively told Autobiography is an important addition to the history of the social sciences. He is a major figure in both anthropology and sociology, whose work is widely read and discussed today. A formidable thinker who introduced 'The Third World' into English, he is not only an important theoretician and ethnographer, but also a central founding member of the 'New Left' in Britain. This is a book which captures with great honesty a rich and varied life and a major moment in British intellectual history." * Alan Macfarlane, Professor of Anthropological Science at the University of Cambridge
