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Extra-vagance refers to thought that skirts traditional boundaries. To follow this up, the author broaches subjects as diverse as Balinese ritual, Montaigne, Chaucer, Tarzan and Perry Mason, making leaps among eclectic texts and rituals that do not hold single, fixed meanings, but numerous, changing, and specific ones. The text explores links between ritual and reading, focusing on commentaries about the seclusion of menstruating women in Native American culture, trance dances in Bali, and circumcision in contrasting religions. He considers the ironies of "first-person ethnography" by telling stories from his own fieldwork, reflecting on ethnological museums, and making seriocomic connections between Mark Twain and Marcel Mauss.