He has conducted important fieldwork and made significant theoretical contributions through his application of insights from social anthropology in development studies.
Norman Long grew up in Surrey, UK, and attended Wallington County Grammar School (1950–55).
He entered the University of Leeds after completing British National Service with the Royal Air Force in Malaya (1955-1957).
Norman Long was the last representative of a group of scholars at the Rhodes Livingstone Institute in Lusaka who later formed the core of the Manchester School of Anthropology.
An interpretative framework, studying small communities as traditional, was replaced by attention for history and the wider world.
His fieldwork in Serenje, Zambia, during the early 1960s is a prime example of anthropology moving away from a major concern with kinship and static societies to applying ethnographic methods widely in the study of social change.
Whereas dependency theory posits a strictly hierarchical extraction of surplus for the benefit of world capitalism, Long saw a much more complicated structure of power brokerage.
The term 'interface' is mostly associated with the world of information technology, but refers here to social interfaces: the confrontation of different lifeworlds and particularly in development interventions.
The latter uses terms like target populations and limited evaluations of interventions, ignoring the wider social and political environment.
The interconnections between its various branches of activity have broken apart; it is undercapitalised and will undoubtedly be dissolved on Eustaquio's death when his children attempt to claim their inheritance".