For this collection, Stocking has written comments on each of the eight essays included, as well as an introduction providing autobiographical and historiographical context and an afterword reconsidering major themes of the essays in relation to the recent past and present situation of academic anthropology. The essays themselves address the work and influence of Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski; anthropology's powerfully mythic aspect and persistent strain of romantic primitivism; the contradictions of its relationship to the larger sociopolitical sphere; its problematic integration of a variety of natural scientific and humanistic inquiries; and the tension between its scientific aspirations and its subjectively acquired “data.”