The University of Wisconsin Press

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Anthropology / Asian & Pacific Studies

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The Forest of Taboos Morality, Hunting, and Identity among the Huaulu of the Moluccas Valerio Valeri "A magisterial work, brilliant, profound, moving."—Sebastian de Grazia, author of Machiavelli in Hell and A Country With No Name "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. 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.   Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)

July 1999 LC: 98-048152 DS 18 b/w photos 534 pp.     6 x 9 Paper $29.95 s ISBN 978-0-299-16214-6 Cloth OUT OF PRINT ISBN 978-0-299-16210-8 ADD TO CART

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