While he was serving with the British army in North Africa, he met soldiers who had been sold by their tribal chiefs to the South African military.
At the outbreak of World War II, Diamond joined the British Army Field Service and served in North Africa.
In the 1960s, Diamond was a member of the research team, the first to study schizophrenia from a cultural perspective, at the National Institute of Mental Health.
His published books are several volumes of poetry, including Totems and Going West and a collection of essays called In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization (1974).
[4] In memoriam in the journal which he founded, his legacy was recognized thus: "Diamond was one of the first anthropologists to insist that researchers both acknowledge and confront power relations, often colonial and neocolonial, that form the context of their work.
His sympathetic portrayal of the Arab mountain villages, and analysis of psychodynamics on the Israeli kibbutz — as stemming from an incomplete critique of shtetl life — was as much against the grain of contemporary research then as it is today.
His concern for countering racism found its way into a number of trenchant popular and scholarly writings and, always, in his teaching" (Dialectical Anthropology, vol.