Content area
Full Text
Valerio Valeri (1944-1998)1
Valerio Valeri died on April 25, 1998, at his home in Santa Monica, the end of a two-year fight with brain cancer. He was a scholar of great international distinction in the ethnology of Polynesia and Indonesia, known for the clarity, rigor, and philosophic-mindedness of his writings on the Huaulu people of the central Moluccas and on the religion and political organization of Hawaii. His monographs Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii (1985a) and The Forest of Taboos: Morality, Hunting, and Identity among the Huaulu of the Moluccas (2000) are among the most important, detailed, and theoretically complex studies of sacrifice and taboo ever written. Besides preparing these long books, Valeri published fifty articles in three languages. He brought to Oceanic and Southeast Asian studies (as to anthropology at large) an astonishing intelligence for comparison, supported by compendious knowledge of European history, world ethnography, and the history and philosophic underpinnings of ethnological inquiry. He will be remembered for his profound influence on numerous graduate students in anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1976 until his death.
Valeri was born at his mother's family home in Somma Lombardo, near Milan, on August 4, 1944, while his father was active in the resistance. The family moved to Libya after the war, where Valerio's father, a philosopher by training, worked as cultural attache to the Italian embassy in Tripoli. When Valerio was ten, they moved to Istanbul. By way of formal education as well as his father's tutelage, Valerio early began to gain the cosmopolitan erudition that would so characterize his mature scholarship; he would come ultimately to speak or write seven languages, and read eight others. During his early years, Valeri was additionally marked by the cultural and social complexities of the foreign landscapes and his family's residence in them, and by his varied readings in literature, history, and travel-notably including the German-language ethnological report of Roder (1948) concerning the central Moluccan island of Seram.
Valeri attended boarding school in Venice, and then in 1964 he entered the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, having been ranked first in nationwide entrance examinations. He studied philosophy, sociology, and the history of science at the Scuola Normale Superiore as...