The Forest of Taboos: Morality, Hunting, and Identity among the Huaulu of the Moluccas

by Valerio Valeri

“ The Forest of Taboos may be considered among the most important books ever written by an anthropologist. Valeri writes superbly, and this book makes a fundamental contribution to one of the most central lines of thought in twentieth-century anthropology. He shows that taboo is finally comprehensible.”—John Stephen Lansing, University of Michigan
 
“ The Forest of Taboos is no conventional ethnography, more an extended meditative essay on its subject, erudite, rich in ideas and data, wide-ranging in its theoretical inspiration, and self-consciously literary in form. It is a fitting memorial to an author whose life was so tragically cut short.”—Roy Ellen, University of Kent at Canterbury

This eloquent and profound book, completed by Valerio Valeri shortly before his death in 1998, contends that the ambivalence felt by all humans about sex, death, and eating other animals can be explained by a set of coordinated principles that are expressed in taboos. In elegant prose, Valeri evokes the world of the Huaulu, forest hunters of Indonesia. The hidden attractions of the animal world, which invades the human world in perilous ways, he shows, also delineate that which the Huaulu regard as most human about themselves.

592 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1999

About the author

Professor in Anthropology and an expert on Hawaii and Indonesia.

Reviews

[Qianye · Rating 4 out of 5]

needs some more editing

[Sam Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's probably unfair of me to only give this three stars. If Valeri had lived long enough to really edit this book instead of just write it, it would almost certainly have got more.

The problem is that the density plus the attention to detail plus the fact that he is making a pluralist, overdetermined argument made this book hard to read. And I had to read it in two weeks, which really meant (given the other things on my plate) a total of like 6 days. So, basically I died.

What he says about taboos forming subjects and differentiating objects is totally rad (but please don't ask me to summarize it), and his argument that this junk has multiple causality both categorically and practically is exciting.

So even though this isn't close to a five star rating, you should totally read this book. Slowly. I probably will in a few years.