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.
The difficulties represented by diff's of usage in such designations as 'mestizo,' 'ladino,' 'mulato,' & 'lobo' or ' ap rdo' are explored. It is explained that capitalizing the vocabulary of ethnic status is to be avoided, at least in the case of Latin America. The words 'mestizo' & 'ladino' are generally accepted today as equivalent in denoting non-Indian status & distinguished only by the custom of the region which chooses to employ one or the other of these terms. The 2 words have not always been synonymous & are not so in the other contexts where they are used. In essence mestizo refers to mixed descent, while ladino refers to intellectual & moral qualities. A ladino was originally an Indian who was fluent in Spanish, ie, his membership of hispanic society was attributed, not to descent, but to culture. New Spain jettisoned the word ladino as an ethnic category. Guatemala did not. The reasons for this are discussed. It is found that the 2-term distinction of the pop of Mexico & Guatemala into hispanic (mestizo or ladino) & Indian is the historical product of the 3-term system of white, intermediary & Indian. In Yucatan this 3-term system has been reduced to 2 terms by the elimination of the term indio, thereby leaving the indigenous Maya under the rubric of mestizos. The opposite of the mestizo is expressed by 'gente decente' (respectable people) or 'catrines' (those who wear city clothes), terms that are also used in Mexico but as synonyms of mestizo. The distinction between Indian & ladino in Chiapas or Guatemala does not correspond to that between mestizo & gente decente in Yucatan. It is concluded that the development of the diff terms a society has for denoting the races & classes is related to the history of the society. M. Maxfield.
