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“Oxford has arguably contributed more to our understanding of tribal societies than any other department of anthropology in the world…Through creating a virtual community, by uniting their work and their lives, by their assurance, generations of Oxford scholars have been able to make the leaps which take us into new and previously unsuspected worlds. They had the privileges, the shared zeal and the shock of similarity-with-difference which engenders true creativity and they made good use of it.” · [from the Preface] “[The volume’s] virtues include giving outsiders a sense of Oxford anthropology’s oral tradition.” · JRAI “There is no doubt that Oxford has been a leading player in the discipline of anthropology. It is precisely the fact that this resounding success can be taken for granted that makes possible this deliciously indiscreet retrospective.” · Books & Culture

Victorian Fetishism argues that fetishism was central to the development of cultural theory in the nineteenth century. From 1850 to 1900, when theories of social evolution reached their peak, European intellectuals identified all \"primitive\" cultures with \"Primitive Fetishism,\" a psychological form of self-projection in which people believe everything in the external world—thunderstorms, trees, stones—is alive. Placing themselves at the opposite extreme of cultural evolution, the Victorians defined culture not by describing what culture was but by describing what it was not, and what it was not was fetishism. In analyses of major works by Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Edward B. Tylor, Peter Melville Logan demonstrates the paradoxical role of fetishism in Victorian cultural theory, namely, how Victorian writers projected their own assumptions about fetishism onto the realm of historical fact, thereby \"fetishizing\" fetishism. The book concludes by examining how fetishism became a sexual perversion as well as its place within current cultural theory.