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Julian Pitt-Rivers died on August 12, 2001, in Paris, after a long illness. He was a pioneer Europeanist and Mediterraneanist who elegantly married the study of systems of meaning and value with that of their structural frameworks; who brought Mediterranean values and marriage systems squarely into global comparison and into the mainstream of anthropological thought on power, alliance, and sacrifice; who applied historical perspective to the dynamics of class, race, and cultural relations in Spanish America; who demonstrated an exemplary concern both for language as subject and for precision in the language of scholarly analysis; and who provided models for the sensitive study of community, class, ethnic, and national relations at the local level and of symbolic aspects of festivals and such features of popular culture as dress.
Trained largely by Africanists, Pitt-Rivers began early to investigate the distinctions of European social organization: the weakness of kinship ties beyond the household and the structural separateness of households, the ascendancy of the local community and the sense of place, the importance of sacralized ties between households (ritualand pseudo-kinship), patronage institutions, and the nature and role of friendship (1954, 1957, 1958, 1968b, 1973, 1976). Pitt-Rivers's sustained interests in honor and in pseudo-kinship were vehicles for entry into wide and historically deep inquiries into religious and political systems throughout his career. Some of his major essays on these subjects were collected in The Fate of Schechem (1977a). His principal field research was in southern Spain and in Meso- and Andean America, but he also worked in southwestern France (1960), where he had a home. His lived experience of Islam and his interest in biblical texts underlay the inclusive vision of the Mediterranean evident in his scholarship and his editorial activities. He held professorships in three countries-the United States, England, and France.
Julian Alfred Pitt-Rivers was born in London on March 16, 1919. He was educated at Eton College, then in Grenoble and Paris from 1936 to 1939, and at Oxford University beginning in 1940. His Oxford career was interrupted by World War II, during which he served in the Royal Dragoons. After the war he spent two years in Iraq in the royal court at Baghdad as tutor to the young King Faisal II. PittRivers was a great-grandson...