Description:
"The Pitt-Rivers Omnibus" brings together the definitive essays and lectures of the influential social anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers. Until now, Pitt-Rivers corpus has remained scattered, untranslated, and unedited. This omnibus brings his reflections to new life, illuminating the themes and topics that preoccupied this great thinker for a lifetime: hospitality, grace, the symbolic economy of reciprocity, kinship, the paradoxes of friendship, ritual logics, the anthropology of dress, Andalusia, the Mediterranean, the French countryside, the logic of the social sciences, and more. With a wide diversity of subjects and ethnographic focii spanning almost fifty years of work this omnibus reveals a theoretical unity, iconic of the wit and brilliance of its author. Here is a work that strikes at the heart of anthropological theory: the relationship between the mental and the material, between what is thought and what is done. Definitive, classic, and extraordinarily relevant for contemporary anthropology, this omnibus will provide a new generation of anthropologists with an invaluable resource for reflection both ethnographic and theoretical.
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Brief description: Andrew Shryock is the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.
Review Quotes: "Despite his passion for promoting the anthropological study of the Mediterranean, [Pitt-Rivers'] stage was not the narrow one of "area studies" alone; he had much broader goals. The Zeitgeist of his era did not make it easy for a Europeanist to break into the Africanist-dominated world of British anthropological theory-making, even if that was the tradition in which he had been trained. But no man of honor (for it is clear that in much of his analysis he is musing on his own values and predilections) would have refused the challenge. . . . Far from being an antiquarian curiosity, as its period-specific style might initially suggest, his work is resonant with implications for the anthropology we practice today. . . . This collection is indeed an act of grace."--Michael Herzfeld, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences Department of Anthropology, Harvard University