From Triads to Pentads

N.J. (‘Nick’) Allen had an extensive academic career, which for the most part was spent in Oxford. He passed away in 2020. This edited volume brings together a selection of his anthropological papers. They cover two major fields and a supplementary one: Indo-European mythical comparison and his own notion of tetradic kinship, supplemented by a long-term interest in the work of Marcel Mauss and his uncle Émile Durkheim.It follows key areas of his research in which his contributions were novel, innovative, stimulating and plausible.

Robert Parkin taught anthropology at Oxford from 2002 to 2017, when he retired. He previously taught at the University of Kent and the Free University of Berlin. His main research interests are the tribal populations of India, kinship, the history of French anthropology, and politics and identity along the German-Polish border.