"Ardener is the Czerny of anthropology, concerned with technical training, with how to think productively within the discipline. He should be read above all by postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers, whose formation is not yet 'completed.'...As exercises to form the anthropological mind, these papers are both unique and irreplaceable." * JRAI "The intellectual bequest of a brilliant and compassionate human being." * Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University "His voice is as deeply needed as ever. Ardener anticipated numerous central issues in the social sciences today...This publishing event will achieve something much more significant still: a long-overdue recognition that Ardener not only forged ahead of today's mainstream but bequeathed a legacy of ideas that can regenerate and redirect anthropological thought today. This new edition will allow a new and more receptive audience to come to grips with Ardener's distinctive mode of analysis and understanding, bringing it more clearly into the mainstream of anthropological thought not only as a historical contribution but also, and especially, as a source of new reflections."
(From the Foreword) Edwin Ardener was one of the most important social anthropologists in Britain of his time, working on social, economic, demographic and political problems and particularly influential in his sustained effort to bring together social anthropology and linguistics in a highly original attempt to reconcile scientific and humanistic approaches to the study of society. This volume offers the best of Ardener's papers and forms a theoretically and conceptually coherent body of work by this innovative and profound thinker, which will continue to excite and stimulate new generations of students and researchers as it did in the past.