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"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.
"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.
List of Tables
Preface
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. What People without History? A Case for Historical Anthropology as a Narrative-Critical Science
PART I: MYTHS
Chapter 2. Figurations in Historical Anthropology: Two
Kinds of Narrative about the Long Duration Provenances of the
Holocaust
Chapter 3. Culture and Power in Eric Wolf’s Project
PART II: FAIRY TALES
Chapter 4. Why Not “Old Marie” . . . or Someone Very Much
Like Her? A Reassessment of the Question about the Grimms’
Contributors
Chapter 5. When Women Held the Dragon’s Tongue
PART III: HISTORIES
Chapter 6. Peasants Against the State in the Body of Anna
Maria Wagner: An Austrian Infanticide in 1832
Chapter 7. What do the Peasants Want Now? Realists and
Fundamentalists in Swiss and South German Rural Politics,
1650-1750
PART IV: ANTHROPOLOGIES
Chapter 8. Reactionary Modernism and the Postmodern Challenge to Narrative Ethics
Bibliography
Index
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.
“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
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