I think this is an important work that has received too little attention. The author gives examples of societies that have dysfunctional customs, such as making certain nutritious foods taboo for pregnant women, chopping off a finger joint to mourn a relative's death, food binding. Anthropologists of the functionalist school have assumed that all of a society's customs fit together in a functional whole. Edgerton feels that this attitude is part of Western culture's tendency to idealize the primitive--a reaction we can see as far back as the Roman Tacitus' comments on the Germans. He argues that we need to learn how to recognize and change harmful customs without dismantling the entire culture. I actually wrote a much longer and more detailed review of this book when I read it in 1996, but, alas, changes in computer systems result in unintended losses of material.