Anthropology became a fully developed discipline with an agenda not only for the study of ‘other cultures’ and society but also as an applied science where the study of human behaviour was seen as a stepping stone towards the application of the same, for the betterment of human societies. The present volume is one the earliest and also one of the most read and referred volume on the subject of a scientific study of human behaviour and it application. It had served as a basic text book for many years in many departments all over the world and it would still serve its purpose as one of the most basic texts for the study of human behaviuor. Even in this era of post modernism, the positivistic elements have not entirely lost their value and a book such as this would be an essential reading for all those who need to understand the evolution of the discipline from its positivistic roots. The reader would have much to learn and understand as to how the discipline of anthropology learnt to distinguish commonsense behaviour from its scientific study and what were the assumptions and paradigms that underlay such an approach to the study of human behaviour. Any advanced study of the subject will remain incomplete unless one refers to this excellent and classic work where a scientific and objective view was taken of things that were earlier relegated to the realm of the natural. The idea of objectivism can not totally be lost if one has to maintain that such a discipline having as its subject matter the study of human social and cultural behaviour exists. It was only from such objective roots that the discipline grew and developed its myriad modes of explanations.
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