An Academic Skating on Thin Ice

<p> 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.</p><p> 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.</p>