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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.
“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
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