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FROM HOSPITALITY TO GRACE Hau BOOKS E xecutive Editor Giovanni da Col Managing Editor Katharine Herman Editorial Board Carlos Fausto Ilana Gershon Michael Lempert Stephan Palmié Jonathan Parry Joel Robbins Danilyn Rutherford Anne-Christine Taylor Jason Throop www.haubooks.com FROM HOSPITALITY TO GRACE A JUliaN PITT-RIVERS OMNibUS E dited by Giovanni da Col and Andrew Shryock Hau Books Chicago © 2017 Hau Books Unless otherwise indicated, all rights to Julian Pitt-Rivers’ work are held by Françoise Pitt-Rivers and reproduced here with her permission. Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-0-9861325-2-0 LCCN: 2017945172 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com Hau Books is printed, marketed, and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. Table of Contents acknowledgments xi introduction xiii A perfect host: Julian Pitt-Rivers and the anthropology of grace Andrew Shryock and Giovanni da Col part i: Moral frames: honor, mana, and grace 1 chapter one Honor and social status in Andalusia 3 chapter two Mana 35 chapter three The place of grace in anthropology 69 chapter four The malady of honor 105 vi FROM HOSPITALITY TO GRACE part ii: Uncertain relations: kin/friend, host/guest, male/female, and human/animal 119 chapter five The kith and the kin 121 chapter six Ritual kinship in the Mediterranean: Spain and the Balkans 141 chapter seven The law of hospitality 163 chapter eight Women and sanctuary in the Mediterranean 185 chapter nine The paradox of friendship 199 chapter ten Lending a hand: Neighborly cooperation in southwestern France 211 chapter eleven Spiritual power in Central America: The naguals of Chiapas 227 part iii: Transformative rites: sacrifice, substitution, and the sacred 249 chapter twelve The sacrifice of the bull 251 chapter thirteen The role of pain in rites of passage 267 chapter fourteen From the love of food to the love of God 275 TABLE OF CONTENTS vii chapter fifteen Quand nos aînés n’y seront plus 301 chapter sixteen The fate of Shechem or the politics of sex 323 part iv: Analytics in place: concepts, theory, and method 375 chapter seventeen Contextual analysis and the locus of the model 377 chapter eighteen On the word “caste” 397 chapter nineteen Race in Latin America: The concept of “raza” 421 chapter twenty Reflections on fieldwork in Spain 449 afterword Grace and insight: The legacy of Julian Pitt-Rivers 465 Michael Herzfeld reference list 473 index 493 Julian Pitt-Rivers (1919–2001) A cknowledgments The genealogy of this project is complex, and we could not have completed it without the help of an extensive network of intellectual kith and kin. Giovanni da Col reprinted Julian Pitt-Rivers’ masterpieces on hospitality and grace in the first issues of HAU Journal, and each generated positive response, especially from younger scholars who are less familiar with Pitt-Rivers. Renewed anthro- pological interest in the politics of host and guest, showcased in Candea and da Col’s special issue of JRAI, “The Return to Hospitality” (2012), convinced us that the time was right for serious re-engagement with Pitt-Rivers. In the same year, Stéphane Gros serendipitously discovered, in the library of the Uni- versité Paris Nanterre, a collection of papers entitled “From the Love of Food to the Love of God: Essays in the Anthropology of Ritual and Religion,” which Pitt-Rivers had intended to submit to the University of Chicago Press in 1992. The proposed volume consisted of eight manuscripts, including the eponymous Marett lecture, which appears in this omnibus. The collection was in sketch form, and we were curious to know if Pitt-Rivers ever made additional progress on it. In response to our inquiries at the University of Chicago Press, David Brent and Priya Nelson located a second set of manuscripts that Pitt-Rivers had submitted for preliminary assessment. They kindly agreed to cancel the contract Chicago had made with Pitt-Rivers and gave their support to the publication of this omnibus. Deborah James was no less helpful in pointing us toward Pitt- Rivers’ LSE Inaugural Lecture, “Mana.” Five years (and twenty essays) later, the omnibus is here. The initial stages of production involved careful prep work on several pieces that existed in multiple xii FROM HOSPITALITY TO GRACE versions, were unfinished, came with extensive handwritten marginalia, or were missing dozens of citations. Sean Dowdy helped at first, but Katharine Herman heroically took over in the crucial stages, acquainting herself with its many mov- ing parts and deftly tying together the loose ends. Justin Dyer turned his eagle eye to copyediting; Faun Rice and Jennifer Chisholm did a final round of proof- ing; and Sheehan Moore designed the book cover. A few senior scholars, who knew Pitt-Rivers personally, cheered us on: among them, Michael Gilsenan, Jane Schneider, and Michael Herzfeld (who honors us with his insightful afterword to the volume). Because Pitt-Rivers is nowadays something of an acquired taste among anthropologists, we cannot help imagining pleasant looks on the faces of the colleagues who introduced us to his work. During a graduate seminar in 1986, Paul Dresch sent Shryock on a forced march through The fate of Shechem, a book that was hard for him to fathom at the time but was later indispensable to his work on hospitality in Jordan. For da Col, it was Chris Hann, who amicably suggested that the likeness between da Col’s approach to hospitality and that of Pitt-Rivers was very strong, a high compliment to a young scholar who had not read Pitt-Rivers and would find the effect transformative when he did. To all the discerning souls who pass Pitt-Rivers along in this way, we offer this omnibus as return thanks and a resource for future initiations. Of course, reading Pitt-Rivers in English will not exhaust the insights avail- able in his work. We are grateful to Damien Bright for his translations of four essays that appeared originally in French (Chapter 4, “The malady of honor,” Chapter 12, “The sacrifice of the bull,” Chapter 13, “The role of pain in rites of passage,” and Chapter 15, “Quand nos aînés n’y seront plus”). Likewise, we thank Matthew Carey for his translation of “The paradox of friendship” (Chapter 9). Pitt-Rivers’ style in English is distinctive, and often quite different from his manner in French, so creating a new voice for him in translation was no easy task. Judith Scheele helped us find goodE nglish equivalents for the occasional awk- ward phrase; David Frye and Ruth Behar checked the Spanish; and Françoise Pitt-Rivers, an editor of great gifts, helped us put finishing touches on the essays. At all points along the way, Françoise Pitt-Rivers gave us much-needed sup- port and guidance. In keeping with family tradition, she hosted us graciously in Paris, and she also gave us permission to include in the omnibus several pieces to which she now holds the rights. The project would have foundered without her thoughtful intervention. We owe her special debts, and we hope this volume will affirm our mutual commitment to the appreciation and ongoing use of her late husband’s work. introduction A perfect host Julian Pitt-Rivers and the anthropology of grace Andrew Shryock and Giovanni da Col Mary Douglas begins her appreciation of Julian Pitt-Rivers’ Andalusian eth- nography with a vivid recollection of how he appeared to her when they first met at Oxford, in the late 1940s. He stood out from the other anthropology students in many ways. It was partly because of his striking good looks, partly his elegance, which would have distin- guished him anywhere, and partly because of his princely good manners. Debo- nair—I think everyone who remembers him would agree that debonair was the word. (2004: 43, emphasis added) In a similar vein, Jonathan Benthall describes Pitt-Rivers as “the most cosmo- politan British social anthropologist of his generation,” and “everywhere, the odd man out.”1 Allusions to his patrician habitus are pervasive among colleagues who knew Pitt-Rivers well, and this way of portraying him is never simply 1. The ordsw are from Benthall’s obituary for Pitt-Rivers, which appeared in The Independent, August 24, 2001 (www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor- julian-pitt-rivers-9153369.html). xiv ANDREW ShrYOCK AND GIOVANNI da COL personal. Instead, it would seem to relate directly to his professional life, and it says important things about his approach to social analysis, in which hospitality and grace figure centrally as both objects and methods of study. Julian Pitt-Rivers (1919–2001) was a leading figure in twentieth-century social anthropology, known best for his writings on Mediterranean societies, yet his intellectual profile resists easy characterization. To some, he was a con- servative thinker drawn to village life, communal rituals, and social forms now seen as traditional (the honor complex) or morally retrograde (bullfighting). To others, he was unconventional, an analytical risk-taker who turned the anthro- pological gaze in new and surprising directions, making a more global stance possible for the discipline. His ethnography of a Spanish village, The people of the Sierra (1954), based on fieldwork conducted between 1949 and 1952, was the first study of aE uropean people undertaken by a British social anthropologist. His Oxford advisors, Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans Pritchard among them, thought Andalusia was not a promising object of ethnographic scrutiny; they pushed him toward Africa. Pitt-Rivers ignored their advice. Spain would be the epicenter of his work, though he engaged broadly in social anthropology, Europeanizing it in irreversible ways.