When Women Held the Dragon's Tongue : : and Other Essays in Historical Anthropology / / Hermann Rebel.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Rebel, Hermann,
• Place / Publishing House: New York; , Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2010]; ©2010
• Year of Publication: 2010
• Language: English
• Series: Dislocations ; 7
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (330 p.)

“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

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Tables -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. What People Without History? A Case for Historical Anthropology as a Narrative-Critical Science -- Part I Myths -- 1. Figurations in Historical Anthropology: Two Kinds of Narrative about the Long-Duration Provenances of the Holocaust -- 2. Culture and Power in Eric Wolf’s Project -- Part II Fairy Tales -- 3. Why Not ‘Old Marie’ . . . or Someone Very Much Like Her? A Reassessment of the Question about the Grimms’ Contributors from a Social-Historical Perspective -- 4. When Women Held the Dragon’s Tongue -- Part III Histories -- 5. Peasants Against the State in the Body of Anna Maria Wagner: An Austrian Infanticide in 1832 -- 6. What Do the Peasants Want Now? Realists and Fundamentalists in Swiss and South German Rural Politics, 1650–1750 -- Part IV Anthropologies -- 7. Reactionary Modernism and the Postmodern Challenge to Narrative Ethics -- Bibliography -- Index