The Forest of Taboos: Morality, Hunting, and Identity among the Huaulu of the Moluccas - Softcover

Valeri, Valerio

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299162141 ISBN 13: 9780299162146

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000

Synopsis

“The Forest of Taboos may be considered among the most important books ever written by an anthropologist. Valeri writes superbly, and this book makes a fundamental contribution to one of the most central lines of thought in twentieth-century anthropology. He shows that taboo is finally comprehensible.”—John Stephen Lansing, University of Michigan

“The Forest of Taboos is no conventional ethnography, more an extended meditative essay on its subject, erudite, rich in ideas and data, wide-ranging in its theoretical inspiration, and self-consciously literary in form. It is a fitting memorial to an author whose life was so tragically cut short.”—Roy Ellen, University of Kent at Canterbury

This eloquent and profound book, completed by Valerio Valeri shortly before his death in 1998, contends that the ambivalence felt by all humans about sex, death, and eating other animals can be explained by a set of coordinated principles that are expressed in taboos. In elegant prose, Valeri evokes the world of the Huaulu, forest hunters of Indonesia. The hidden attractions of the animal world, which invades the human world in perilous ways, he shows, also delineate that which the Huaulu regard as most human about themselves.

About this title

About the Author

Valerio Valeri (1944–1998) was professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and the author of Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"Without this immense forest in which they wander, I never would have understood the inhabitants of its sparse clearings, of villages situated in limited spaces but within labyrinthine universes. Sometimes, their tales brought back my own, as on the upper ranges of the slope that descends to Manusela. We slid in the twilight with quiet steps among immense trees covered with yellow moss and thickened by silence-a forest of gnomes, of trolls in which the memories of my childhood blended with Heine's verses-the warmth of stunned winters, of Christmases that have grown unknown to the senses. In the forest I thought I came face to face with time itself."

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299162141
• ISBN 13: 9780299162146
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 592