Description
Berghahn Books When Women Held the Dragons Tongue and Other Essays in Historical Anthropology 2010 Edition by Hermann Rebel
"Peasants tell tales," one prominent cultural historian tells us (Robert Darnton). Scholars must then determine and analyze what it is they are saying and whether or not to incorporate such tellings into their histories and ethnographies. Challenging the dominant culturalist approach associated with Clifford Geertz and Marshall Sahlins among others, this book presents a critical rethinking of the philosophical anthropologies found in specific histories and ethnographies and thereby bridges the current gap between approaches to studies of peasant society and popular culture. In challenging the methodology and theoretical frameworks currently used by social scientists interested in aspects of popular culture, the author suggests a common discursive ground can be found in an historical anthropology that recognizes how myths, fairytales and histories speak to a universal need for imagining oneself in different timescapes and for linking one's local world with a "known" larger world. Table of contents :- List of TablesPrefaceAcknowledgementsChapter 1. What People without History? A Case for Historical Anthropology as a Narrative-Critical SciencePART I: MYTHSChapter 2. Figurations in Historical Anthropology: Two Kinds of Narrative about the Long Duration Provenances of the HolocaustChapter 3. Culture and Power in Eric Wolf's ProjectPART II: FAIRY TALESChapter 4. Why Not "Old Marie" . . . or Someone Very Much Like Her? A Reassessment of the Question about the Grimms' ContributorsChapter 5. When Women Held the Dragon's TonguePART III: HISTORIESChapter 6. Peasants Against the State in the Body of Anna Maria Wagner: An Austrian Infanticide in 1832Chapter 7. What do the Peasants Want Now? Realists and Fundamentalists in Swiss and South German Rural Politics, 1650-1750PART IV: ANTHROPOLOGIESChapter 8. Reactionary Modernism and the Postmodern Challenge to Narrative EthicsBibliographyIndex