[?] Collect Records

Need For Haste"

[?]F Primitive Man

Many people in New Guinea : inclined to think that anthro ogists are a useless breed, and t the scores and scores of m who now roam the Terri y measuring this and record that would be much better

ployed doing something else.

might be a good thing, therefore, if they got hold of and read the st publication of Dr. Margaret id, the noted American anthropo st, who is currently anthropologis on Manus Island, he book is called Anthropologists, What They Do. In it are in iews with 18 museum curators professors of anthropology on nature of their work, a couple of Jters on Dr. Mead’s own life as anthropologist, and a chapter on v you, too, can enter this ex ig field” (to quote the blurb on dust jacket). i her first chapter, Dr. Mead es it clear that in future there be more anthropologists rather i less, and that places such as r Guinea will be seeing a good y of them. n the near future,” she says, “we t hurry, hurry, hurry to get the rds in before the last primitive puts on clothes and starts paying

taxes; before the last rich deposit of early civilisation is flooded over by the waters of a vast new irrigation project or is dug up by little boys who do not know that they are destroying priceless relics; before the rare fascinating languages spoken by a handful of people in some re mote valley are forgotten, as they are displaced by the languages that will be broadcast from the Telstars of the future.

“In the next quarter of a century, a tremendous amount of work must be done to rescue these vanishing traces of the past. Once the last primitive peoples enter the modern world—become members of one of the great religions, save their babies’ lives with antibiotics, follow the world’s news, and take part in its councils—there will be no way of ever finding out what their earlier life was like . . .

“Scientists in the future will need these records if they are to be trained to think broadly and deeply about men who, sharing a common basic biology, have yet learned to behave so differently in Chicago and Calcutta, in London and Tokyo and the Philippine Islands, in the Orkneys and Sardinia and Kazakhstan.”—RL.

(Anthropologists And What

THEY DO. Franklin Watts Inc. New York. U 553.95).