I recently had to re-read The Innocent Anthropologist and it was a strange experience.  I didn’t choose the title but I now find it wholly appropriate – none of the cringing political correctness you find in the current anthropology that has lost its cutting edge, the boundless optimism of those times, the faith in the subject itself and the value of human contact that it entails but alongside an awareness that one of the great universals is the ability to laugh at ourselves when we are at our most serious.  When I showed it to my ex-tutor he warned me never to publish it as it would end any hope of an academic career.  At a meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, a motion was proposed that I should be thrown out. It was not passed and nowadays it is often the first book prescribed on undergraduate reading lists.  I feel a nostalgia for that lost me – so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

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