This book is a collection of anthropological essays about Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT)/Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), currently the world's largest Protestant missionary society in terms of members sent abroad (Dayton 1976:52). In contrast to other missionary societies, WBT/SIL considers its prime task to be that of translating the Bible into all the languages of the world. WBT is that branch of the organization responsible for raising funds in the US, while SIL carries out the actual mission work; this book focuses principally on SIL. The vast majority of the world's unwritten languages are spoken by ethnic groups without long histories of integration into statelevel societies. WBT/SIL's. expansion has thus meant that most of its work takes place among such tribal groups, though it works also with peasant populations. The goal of this book is to analyse some of the social and cultural implications of WBT/SIL's attempt to bring the Word to these tribal groups, or the »Bibleless tribes« as they are called by the organization (Townsend 1963:8). Since tribal and peasant populations have been the study objects of anthropologists, and since many anthropologists and linguists had carried out fieldwork in the same areas as SIL missionaries, it seemed natural to ask some of them to describe and analyze the consequences ofSIL's work.