This talk discusses Julian Pitt-Rivers’ ethnography People of the Sierra as a groundbreaking ethnographic study, which stimulated the study of small-scale communities throughout Western Europe. The photographs in the volume as well as the introductory remarks by E.E. Evans-Pritchard promoted the acceptance of westerners, who speak familiar Indo-European languages, as legitimate objects of anthropological inquiry.

Stanley Brandes holds a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, where he is currently Professor Emeritus of Anthropology. For more than half a century he has been conducting fieldwork in the Iberian Peninsula, Mexico, and the United States.  Brandes has lectured widely around the world, and taught courses on diverse anthropological topics in Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Peru, and China, among other locales. Presently, his principal areas of investigation include visual anthropology, popular ritual and religion, animal-human relations, and the cultural dimensions of food and drink.