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N.J. (‘Nick’) Allen had an extensive academic career, which for the most part was spent in Oxford. He passed away in 2020. This edited volume brings together a selection of his anthropological papers. They cover two major fields and a supplementary one: Indo-European mythical comparison and his own notion of tetradic kinship, supplemented by a long-term interest in the work of Marcel Mauss and his uncle Émile Durkheim.It follows key areas of his research in which his contributions were novel, innovative, stimulating and plausible.
Robert Parkin taught anthropology at Oxford from 2002 to 2017, when he retired. He previously taught at the University of Kent and the Free University of Berlin. His main research interests are the tribal populations of India, kinship, the history of French anthropology, and politics and identity along the German-Polish border.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Part I: Structuralism
Chapter 1. On the Notion of Structure
Chapter 2. Hierarchical Opposition and Some Other Types of Relation
Part II: Georges Dumézil and Indo-European Comparativism
Chapter 3. Debating Dumézil
Chapter 4. Quadripartion of Society in Early Tibetan Sources
Chapter 5. The Ideology of the Indo-Europeans: Dumézil’s Theory and the Idea of a Fourth Function
Chapter 6. The Category of Substance: A Maussian Theme Revisited
Chapter 7. Why did Odysseus Become a Horse?
Part III: The Tetradic Theory of Kinship
Chapter 8. A Dance of Relatives
Chapter 9. Tetradic Theory: An Approach to Kinship
Chapter 10. Assimilation of Alternate Generations
Chapter 11. Tetradic Theory and Omaha Systems
Chapter 12. The Division of Labour and the Notion of Primitive Society: A Maussian Perspective
Conclusion
Index