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The Pitt-Rivers Omnibus brings together the definitive essays and
lectures of the influential social anthropologist Julian A.
Pitt-Rivers, a corpus of work that has, until now, remained
scattered, untranslated, and unedited. Illuminating the themes and
topics that he engaged throughout his life-including hospitality,
grace, the symbolic economy of reciprocity, kinship, the paradoxes
of friendship, ritual logics, the anthropology of dress, and
more-this omnibus brings his reflections to new life. Holding
Pitt-Rivers's diversity of subjects and ethnographic foci in the
same gaze, this book reveals a theoretical unity that ran through
his work and highlights his iconic wit and brilliance. Striking at
the heart of anthropological theory, the pieces here explore the
relationship between the mental and the material, between what is
thought and what is done. Classic, definitive, and yet still
extraordinarily relevant for contemporary anthropology,
Pitt-Rivers's lifetime contribution will provide a new generation
of anthropologists with an invaluable resource for reflection on
both ethnographic and theoretical issues.
Little has been written about honour in the social sciences and
almost nothing about grace. Yet honour has caused more deaths than
the plague and grace is what we all yearn for, whether in the form
of favor, luck, pardon, gratuity, or salvation. This collection of
essays develops a line of thought in anthropology which was opened
in the 1960s by the editors (and some of the same contributors) in
Honor and Shame: The Values of a Mediterranean Society. The essays,
half of them historical and half contemporary, deal with different
aspects of honor and grace, and the strategies and transactions by
which they can be obtained. They range from the French royal
rituals of the Middle Ages to the murderous feuds and peace-making
rites of the Rif; they show how different peoples and periods have
faced the problems of power, legitimacy, purity, divinity, and
personal destiny. The concluding chapter suggests that
anthropology, which ignored honor until a quarter of a century ago,
should no longer ignore grace, whose varied connotations provide
the basis of religious doctrines as well as the common coinage of
the exchange of favors and thanks.
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