The late anthropologist Valerio Valeri (1944–98) was best known for his substantial writings on societies of Polynesia and eastern Indonesia. This volume, however, presents a lesser-known side of Valeri’s genius through a dazzlingly erudite set of comparative essays on core topics in the history of anthropological theory. Offering masterly discussions of anthropological thought about ritual, fetishism, cosmogonic myth, belief, caste, kingship, mourning, play, feasting, ceremony, and cultural relativism, Classic Concepts in Anthropology, will be an eye-opening, essential resource for students and researchers not only in anthropology but throughout the humanities.

 

Fakes, forgery, counterfeits, hoaxes, frauds, knock-offs—such terms speak, ostensibly, to the inverse of truth or the obverse of authenticity and sincerity. Do all cultures equally spend an incredible amount of energy and labor on detecting differences between the phony and the genuine? What does the modern human obsession with fabrications and frauds tell us about ourselves? And what can anthropology tell us about this obsession?
 
This timely book is the product of the first Annual Debate of Anthropological Keywords, a collaborative project between HAU, the American Ethnological Society, and L’Homme, held each year at the American Anthropological Association meetings. The aim of the debate is to reflect critically on keywords and terms that play a pivotal and timely role in discussions of different cultures and societies, and of the relations between them. This volume brings together leading thinkers to interrogate the concept of fake cross-culturally, including insightful contributions by Giovanni da Col, Gabriella Coleman, Veena Das, John Jackson Jr., Graham Jones, Carlo Severi, Alexei Yurchak, and Jacob Copeman.

All HAU Books are OPEN ACCESS, through Knowledge Unlatched, and are available on the HAU Books website: Haubooks.org.

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.