From the time she was a small child, Cynthia Moss has been interested in animals and nature. As an adult, she became especially interested in elephants and since 1967 she has been studying them in the wild in Tanzania and Kenya. Through the years, her astute observations have revealed that female elephants live in small groups led by a single matriarch and that they have a complex social order based on familial relationships. Moss's own color photographs accompany this fascinating picture of a scientist at work. (Ages 7-11)

Tradition is a central concept in the social sciences, but it is commonly treated as unproblematic. Dr. Boyer insists that social anthropology requires a theory of tradition, its constitution and transmission. He treats tradition "as a type of interaction which results in the repetition of certain communicative events," and therefore as a form of social action. Tradition as Truth and Communication deals particularly with oral communication and focuses on the privileged role of licensed speakers and the ritual contexts in which certain aspects of tradition are characteristically transmitted. Drawing on cognitive psychology, Dr. Boyer proposes a set of general hypotheses to be tested by ethnographic field research. He has opened up an important new field for investigation within social anthropology.