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As I look back over my years of research, study and fieldwork, my overall feeling is one of sadness that so much community development effort has, on the whole, resulted in relatively so little actual betterment and more especially for the poor and underprivileged people who need betterment most. I know, of course, that powerful minorities in every country often succeed in influencing development policies in their own interests at the expense of the mass of ordinary people, and I accept that as a fact of life we have to live with. What concerns me much more is that the well-intentioned efforts of so many planners, administrators and field workers who really want to promote betterment have, on the whole, so often fallen so far short of realising their full potential. To give but two examples: in India great dissatisfaction was expressed at the 1969 National Seminar on Panchayati Raj 'that the social and economic benefits (of rural development) have flown to the more affluent sections of the rural communities.. .. The benefits it was expected to confer on the weaker and underprivileged sections of the rural population have not materialised in many cases'. 1 Again, although the Basic Democracies Works Programme in East Pakistan has resulted in great physical improvements in drainage, flood control and transportation, it has also been heavily criticized as having mainly benefited the larger landowners, widened the pre-existing gap between rich and poor, enlarged the number of landless labourers and worsened their condition.* Overall Development Objectives are Necessary Such examples could be multiplied indefinitely, which suggests that something is seriously wrong here. Basically, I believe, it is because each social and economic development agency, and there are many, pursues its own objectives with its own selected clientele and too readily assumes that by achieving such objectives it contributes its share to overall betterment. What is much needed, but in practice lacking, is any common agreed and overall purpose for development to which every agency aims to contribute and by which it continually assesses the results of its work. It seems to me that the current situation is well summed up by one student of development who writes: 'At the moment we are in an impasse. Recent theories of development. .. have certainly defined the problem areas, and very well too. But they have left the problem or problems largely unsolved, especially the problem of what constitutes development and how it is to be attained'. 3

Michigan, 1955. 205 pp. NPL. While for many years anthropologists were mainly interested in studying primitive man, they are now also applying their concepts to the study of the advanced societies in which they live. Nowhere is this process likely to bear more useful fruit than in the field of education.Education and Anthropology has 10 sections, each consisting of a paper, discussants' comments, and a verbatim report of the subsequent open discussion at a four-day conference of 22 university professors qualified in one or the other of these two fields. They deal with a wide range of topics and are more concerned with school education than with adult education.They explore the nature of the anthropologist's potential contribution to education, but strongly affirm that it is not so much the &dquo;hiring&dquo; of anthropologists for specific tasks that is needed, but that teachers should themselves learn and apply anthro-pological ways of thinking about culture, personality, and values to the classroom and community situations with which they deal.Reading this book, one can realize how valuable an experience this conference was to the highly competent people who attended it, but the book is written in their language and a great deal of it deals with highly abstract conceptions in very technical terms. It is not produced for the ordinary teacher and adult educator. Is it too much to hope that one outcome of this conference may be that shorter and much simpler books on this subject may be written for the rank-and-file layman and laywoman?A good third of the book contains the verbatim record of discussions.I personally found this a prolix and untidy way of presenting the relevant information. Still more irritating to me was the use of Christian names in the records of discussion. We are told that these were left in so that outsiders could get the friendly and informal feel of the conference from the book, but I doubt if this hope will be realized in the absence of those visual and affective elements which make or mar a conference but which cannot be recorded in print.

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