Claude dit:

May an inconstant disciple dedicate this book which appears in 1958, the year of Émile Durkheim’s centenary, to the memory of the founder of Année Sociologique:  that famed workshop where modern anthropology fashioned part of its tools and which we have abandoned, not so much out of disloyalty as out of the sad conviction that the task would prove too much for us.

Epigraph, Structural Anthropology

Strong is Thomas Strong, lecturer in the department of anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has previously held teaching and/or research posts at the University of Helsinki, the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Wisconsin, and (oddly enough) the American Academy of Ophthalmology. His publications include essays on the symbolism of blood and body in the U.S. and elsewhere, new cross-disciplinary work on kinship, and ideas of culture loss and bodily detumescence amongst the Dano-speakers of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands province. His on-going research in PNG concerns transformations in sociality, gender relations, and personhood following the mid-twentieth-century repudiation of the traditional men's cult in the upper Asaro valley. His other interests include 'brand' as an ethnographic and analytic concept, HIV/AIDS (especially in the U.S. gay male community), and celebrity/fame.