The book contains 19 essays which provide an overview of the state of the art in various areas of anthropology, including applied anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, social anthropology, and economic anthropology. Most of the authors are professors and researchers from departments of anthropology in United States colleges, universities, and museums. Topics of the essays include political anthropology; social organization of behavior; the question of distribution in anthropological economics; ethnicity as a problem in anthropology; lexical universals; and context in child language. Some of the essays focus on specific regions of the world and cover the following topics: African religious movements; community development and cultural change in Latin America; ecology and culture in New Guinea; and archaeology in Oceania. The book includes subject and author indexes. (AV)