An Academic Skating on Thin Ice

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. Peter Worsley, 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 Sociologysold over half a million copies.