Honor and Grace in Anthropology
Honor and Grace in Anthropology
Julian Pitt-Rivers
£42.99
GBPLittle has been written about honour in the social sciences and almost nothing about grace. Yet honour has caused more deaths than the plague and grace is what we all yearn for, whether in the form of favor, luck, pardon, gratuity, or salvation. This collection of essays develops a line of thought in anthropology which was opened in the 1960s by the editors (and some of the same contributors) in Honor and Shame: The Values of a Mediterranean Society. The essays, half of them historical and half contemporary, deal with different aspects of honor and grace, and the strategies and transactions by which they can be obtained. They range from the French royal rituals of the Middle Ages to the murderous feuds and peace-making rites of the Rif; they show how different peoples and periods have faced the problems of power, legitimacy, purity, divinity, and personal destiny. The concluding chapter suggests that anthropology, which ignored honor until a quarter of a century ago, should no longer ignore grace, whose varied connotations provide the basis of religious doctrines as well as the common coinage of the exchange of favors and thanks.
Product details
February 2005Paperback
9780521619325
276 pages
229 × 152 × 16 mm
0.41kg
9 b/w illus. 1 table
Available
Table of Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- 1. Introduction J. G. Peristiany and Julian Pitt-Rivers
- 2. Royalty and ritual in the Middle Ages: coronation and funerary rites in France Catherine Lafages
- 3. The court surrounds the King: Louis XIV, the Palatine Princess, and Saint-Simon Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie
- 4. Rites as acts of institution Pierre Bourdieu
- 5. Religion, world views, social classes, and honor during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spain Julio Caro Baroja
- 6. The Sophron - a secular saint? Wisdom and the wise in a Cypriot community J. G. Peristiany
- 7. The Greek hero J. K. Campbell
- 8. Name, blood, and miracles: the claims to renown in traditional Sicily Maria Pia Di Bella
- 9. From the death of men to the peace of God: violence and peace-making in the Rif Raymond Jamous
- 10. Indarra: some reflections on a Basque concept Sandra Ott
- 11. Postscript: the place of grace in anthropology Julian Pitt-Rivers
- Index.
