When Women Held the Dragon's Tongue: and Other Essays in Historical Anthropology (Dislocations, 7) - Softcover

Rebel, Hermann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0857458116 ISBN 13: 9780857458117

Publisher: Berghahn Books, 2012

Synopsis

“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.

About this title

About the Author

Hermann Rebel was born in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, and educated at the University of Toronto and at UC Berkeley. He has taught at York University in Toronto, the University of Iowa, and the University of Arizona and has published Peasant Classes (Princeton, 1983) as well as articles on Austrian and German agrarian and cultural history.

Review

“This is a provocative, demanding, and sometimes annoying book that is nevertheless very much worth the effort it takes to read it...Hermann Rebel puts his finger on difficult and unresolved issues in this challenging book.”  ·  JRAI

About this edition

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0857458116
• ISBN 13: 9780857458117
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 330