Professor Julian Pitt-Rivers

Julian Alfred Pitt-Rivers, anthropologist: born London 16 March 1919; Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley 1956-57; Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago 1957-69; Professor, London School of Economics 1972-77; married 1946 Pauline Tennant (marriage dissolved 1953), second Margarita Larios (marriage dissolved 1971), third 1971 Françoise Geoffroy; died Paris 12 August 2001.

Julian Pitt-Rivers was the most cosmopolitan British social anthropologist of his generation. He knew France and Spain intimately, was a professor for many years in the United States, and undertook field research in eight Latin American countries. He was one of the first to apply ethnographic methods to a European community. Though he was best known as a Mediterraneanist, his work touched on many other themes and was seen to advantage in some luminous essays.

He was born in London in 1919, the younger son of George Pitt-Rivers, owner-director of the private Pitt Rivers Museum near Blandford in Dorset, and author of a 1927 monograph, The Clash of Cultures and the Contact of Races, based on his fieldwork in New Guinea. George's grandfather was the great archaeologist Augustus Pitt Rivers, who had founded the archaeological museum in Dorset and the more famous Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University, which is mainly ethnographic in content. Julian's mother was an actress.

In his anthropological legacy Julian found as much to react against as to emulate, for his father, whom he hated, became a Mosleyite eugenicist, and was interned by the Home Secretary between 1940 and 1942. Julian Pitt-Rivers was educated at Eton, then in France and at Worcester College, Oxford. He served during the Second World War in the Royal Dragoons, reaching the rank of Captain. Between 1945 and 1947, he was purser to King Faisal II of Iraq, who was later to be murdered.

Pitt-Rivers returned to Oxford and was awarded a Doctorate in Social Anthropology in 1953, based on his fieldwork in Andalusia. His The People of the Sierra (1954) is a classic, blessed with the imprimatur of his famous teacher E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and resembling any study of a "tribal" society, except that its subjects are Spanish villagers. Pitt-Rivers wrote that, though the locals treated him kindly, they assumed him to be a spy. He handled the ethical problem of avoiding indiscretion by the devise of disguising and generalising his descriptions of individuals. Some readers today find the devise frustrating because of the near-absence of verbatim quotations, but the book inspired many other monographs.

Pitt-Rivers was appointed a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956 and moved to the University of Chicago in 1957, where he stayed until 1969. During this period he undertook research on ethnic relations in Latin America: for instance, on the two cultural traditions, Indian and Hispanic, which interact in the Chiapas Highlands of Mexico. He followed those social scientists who tried to show the people of the United States that, if they looked at the variety of ethnic relations elsewhere in their continent, the apparent impasse of racial division in their own country was not inevitable. To British studies of racial relations as well, his analysis of the different senses of the word "race" was to make a significant contribution.

Between 1964 and 1969 Pitt-Rivers divided his time between Chicago and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, where he was invited by Claude Lévi-Strauss, with whom he had a rare mutual understanding. In 1972, he was appointed Professor at the London School of Economics, but in 1977 he settled in France, where he held a number of appointments until retirement. He received official honours in Spain and in Britain he gave the prestigious Marett and Radcliffe-Brown lectures.

Pitt-Rivers was prominent in spirited and sometimes bitter exchanges on the code of honour and shame, which was held by him and some other anthropologists to be central to Mediterranean cultures. In his ambitious collection of essays The Fate of Schechem, or The Politics of Sex (1977) Pitt-Rivers posited a long continuity in the region dating back to Genesis and the Odyssey and based on this code.

On one topic, the Spanish bullfight, Pitt-Rivers yielded to no one as an authority. In some gripping essays he showed that it is a sacrifice, a fertility rite, integral to Spanish popular Catholicism as is the cult of the bull in general. In a more speculative mode, he explored the corrida's sexual metaphors. Something of his personal philosophy comes out in his conclusion (first published in Anthropology Today). Economic homogenisation entails a perceived risk of loss of identity, and the only way to promote Europe's moral unity, he argued, will be to respect the regional right to be different: for instance, the right of the Spanish and the southern French to keep their bullfights.

Pitt-Rivers also revealed his passion for diversity in his respect for an extreme critic of Western imperialism, Robert Jaulin, a French anthropologist and campaigner against ethnocide in the Americas, who argued that it is only through respect for other collectivities, and their right to be as they wish that human beings can realise themselves.

During the early 1970s George Pitt-Rivers's third wife, Stella, began to sell off the contents of the museum in Dorset, to public disquiet. In 1984, what was left passed to the Treasury, and Julian took pleasure in opening a new gallery of the Salisbury Museum designed to house the collection.

Julian Pitt-Rivers was strikingly handsome, and in his manner the epitome of a reticent English gentleman. Otherwise he was unconventional; humorous and teasing, kind and generous to his juniors; and everywhere an odd man out.

His first marriage, in 1946, to Pauline Tennant (now Pauline, Lady Rumbold) was dissolved in 1953. His second wife was Margarita Larios, formerly wife of a Spanish duke. They were divorced in 1971 and in the same year he married Françoise Geoffroy, a French publisher. The marriage was happy and Françoise, who survived him, supported him nobly throughout a form of dementia that began to set in some five years ago when he was still publishing excellent essays, such as one on godparenthood in 1995. He is buried in the Quercy region of France to which he was much attached. There were no children.

Jonathan Benthall