CONTENTS
Preface by Marshall SAHLINS
xi
Editor’s introduction by Rupert STASCH
xvii
Acknowledgments
xxxiii
1. Kingship 1
2. The conquerer becomes king: A political analysis
of the Hawaiian legend of ‘Umi
35
3. The transformation of a transformation: A structural
essay on an aspect of Hawaiian history (1809–19)
63
4. Constitutive history: Genealogy and narrrative in
the legitimation of Hawaiian kingship
117
5. Diarchy and history in Hawaii and Tonga 157
6. Death in heaven: Myths and rites of kinship in
Tongan kingship
193
7. Descendants of brother and sister in Oceania:
Notes for a new analytic model
237
8. Cosmogonic myths and order 263
9. Rite 281
10. The power of the gods, the laughter of men: A
theoretical divertissement on a Hawaiian fact
321
11. Ceremonial 347
12. Mourning 363
Appendix I: Belief and worship 377
Appendix II: Feasting and festivity 403
Appendix III: The fetish
417
References 435
Author(s): Valerio Valeri
Series: CLASSICS OF ETHNOGRAPHIC THEORY SERIES
Publisher: HAU Publications
Year: 2014
Language: English
Pages: 513
Tags: RITUALS AND ANNALS BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND HISTORY, Valerio Valeri
He was an original. Not that you could copy Valerio Valeri in any
case; he was not duplicable for sheer erudition, intellectual power, or
analytic finesse. He disliked the word “creativity,” considered it I believe
some sort of American banality—which qualifies me to use it in
reference to some of the astonishing connections he makes in these
pages. As for example, ludic myths concerning Hawaiian gods that
transpose, in a different frame, the structure of the royal sacrificial
rituals that install the god in the temple and the king in the realm. Or
the related exposition of the essential similarity of play, art, and ritual
in their unification of things distinct in ordinary experience and discursive
thought, together with how their similarities differ. Overriding
such distinctions in the received anthropological discourse, much of
Valeri’s work comes as an intellectual shock, as illuminating as it is
iconoclastic.
As for erudition, there is not only Valeri’s global ethnographic
scope and mastery of cultural comparison on the model of the anthropological
greats of old: of whom we’ll probably not see the likes
again, not in our generations. One would have to have the sensibility
of the anthropological project, the knowing of humanity in its cultural
variety, that Valeri testifies to here. True that, except for a revelatory
exploration of Marx’s famous thesis on commodity fetishism, the
studies in Rituals and annals are concerned mainly with religious and
political matters; one will have to go to Valeri’s other writings, especially
his ethnographic accounts of Seram, to discover his infrastructuralism,
so to speak, his cultural analyses of economic relations. True
also, the book has a certain emphasis on Hawaiian kingship—its
forms, myths, rites, and history—but comparison is invited in other
Marshall SAHLINS
xii
chapters with kingships the world around: including Japanese diarchy,
Rwandan hierarchy, the relations of Brāhman and Kṣatriya in India,
and of the celeritas and gravitas kings of ancient Rome, to mention only
some of the more notable polities. Then again, there is a lot more
than kingship in these essays, which study a range of cultural practices
from Ashanti fetishes to Northwest Coast potlatches, Oceanic kinship
relations, Antwerp municipal festivals, and Chinese mortuary rites,
together with many and diverse others, all examined with the same
virtuosity. Erudition: when we were colleagues at the University of
Chicago, I calculated that Valeri had a working knowledge of seventeen
languages.
