CEREMONY An Anthropologist’s Misadventures in the African Bush <i> by Nigel Barley (Henry Holt: $8.95) </i>

In the mid-1980’s, British anthropologist Nigel Barley visited Cameroon to study the elaborate circumcision ceremony of the Dowayo tribe. His account of his futile efforts provides often hilarious reading and a rare, honest portrait of the problems scientists face in the field. The greatest obstacles to Barley’s research were not the ravening beasts and native taboos of adventure movies but corrupt minor officials, the difficulties of travel in a country with few vehicles and fewer paved roads, and the fluid schedules of Third World people, for whom time is a function of organic processes rather than an inflexible standard. The ceremony was ultimately postponed for a year due to an “extraordinary plague of black, hairy caterpillars,” but Barley turns his defeat into a triumph of good humor.