From Hospitality to Grace

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.