Foreword by the author
The Social Anthropology of Latin America is offered to Ralph Leon Beals to honor him as scholar, teacher, and colleague. Those of us who have enjoyed being part of the department he founded at UCLA, which he served for more than thirty years as founder and principal guide and counselor, know his unique value as an intellect and a person.
Beals’s contribution to anthropology is not easy to characterize. His catholic interests and his fairness to all points of view, which made him so successful in building a joint department of anthropology and sociology at UCLA, meant that he neither founded nor belonged to any « school » of anthropology. Although his primary interest has been in the social anthropology of Latin America, his concern with and knowledge of other subdivisions of anthropology and of related disciplines such as sociology, social psychology, and genetics have been well evidenced in his general writings, especially in several chapters of An Introduction to Anthropology, the textbook (now in its third edition) that he wrote with Harry Hoijer.