Elephants have fascinated humans for millennia. Aristotle wrote of them with awe and Hannibal used them in warfare. This book is the summation of what's been learned from the Amboseli Elephant Research Project (AERP) - the longest continuously running elephant research project in the world.

The author, originally from England, served as a warden with the Royal National Parks of Kenya for many years, the great part at Amboseli. He records the seminal events at Amboseli in the 1950s which resulted in the formation of the National Park. He gives a factual account of the early history of the area, and this new revised edition looks at worrying trends over the last twenty years. The author enjoys the trust of the local Maasai community, and is seeking to right some of the wrongs they have suffered at the hands of intransigent wildlife authorities.

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.