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When Women Held the Dragon's Tongue

When Women Held the Dragon's Tongue

Hermann Rebel

(2010)

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Abstract

“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.


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


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.


Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
When Women Held the Dragon's Tongue i
Table of Contents vii
List of Tables ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Figurations in Historical Anthropology 77
Chapter 2: Culture and Power in Eric Wolf's Project 93
Chapter 3: Why Not 'Old Marie'... or Someone Very Much Like Her? 101
Chapter 4: When Women Held the Dragon's Tongue 131
Chapter 5: Peasants Against the State in the Body of Anna Maria Wagner 183
Chapter 6: What Do the Peasants Want Now? 196
Chapter 7: Reactionary Modernism and the Postmodern Challenge to Narrative Ethics 247
Bibliography 281
Index 295