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This year's Reith lecturer is the British social anthropologist Professor Edmund Leach. He is the current Provost of King's College, Cambridge and throughout his academic career he has challenged received notions about cultural change. He explores the notion of 'relational structures' in his Reith series entitled 'A Runaway World?'

In his second lecture entitled 'Men and Machines', Professor Leach explores the structural system of the body in order to question the human relationship with machines. Technology may be the stamp of civilisation but, he argues, the crossover between man and machine is blurring. Professor Leach explores how the human mind tries to rationalise this difference by creating a division between the man-made world and the natural one.

He goes on to ask why humans are so upset by the idea that they might also be nothing more than a machine.