For the Greeks, the sharing of cooked meats was the fundamental communal act, so that to become vegetarian was a way of refusing society. It follows that the roasting or cooking of meat was a political act, as the division of portions asserted a social order. And the only proper manner of preparing meat for consumption, according to the Greeks, was blood sacrifice. The fundamental myth is that of Prometheus, who introduced sacrifice and, in the process, both joined us to and separated us from the gods-and ambiguous relation that recurs in marriage and in the growing of grain. Thus we can...
For the Greeks, the sharing of cooked meats was the fundamental communal act, so that to become vegetarian was a way of refusing society. It follows t...
"Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece" looks at the anthropology of the Greeks and other cultures across space and time, and in the process discovers aspects of the art of comparability. Historians and ethnologists can pool a wealth of knowledge about different cultures across space and time. Their joint task is to analyze human societies and to understand cultural products. Comparative analysis involves working together in an experimental and constructive enterprise. Marcel Detienne, alerted by dissonances, tries to see how cultural systems react not just to a touchstone category, but...
"Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece" looks at the anthropology of the Greeks and other cultures across space and time, and in the process disc...
Rich with implications for the history of sexuality, gender issues, and patterns of Hellenic literary imagining, Marcel Detienne's landmark book recasts long-standing ideas about the fertility myth of Adonis. The author challenges Sir James Frazer's thesis that the vegetation god Adonis-- whose premature death was mourned by women and whose resurrection marked a joyous occasion--represented the annual cycle of growth and decay in agriculture. Using the analytic tools of structuralism, Detienne shows instead that the festivals of Adonis depict a seductive but impotent and fruitless...
Rich with implications for the history of sexuality, gender issues, and patterns of Hellenic literary imagining, Marcel Detienne's landmark book re...
The human race is all too pre-disposed to think in terms of us and them. Europeans have always laid claim to the Ancient Greeks they are our Greeks, our ancestors but their legacy reaches further than we could ever imagine. Their influence stretches from the Japanese to the Cossacks, from Ancient Rome to Indonesia.
In this path-breaking new volume, the great French historian Marcel Detienne focuses on Eurocentric approaches which have trumpeted the Greeks and their democratic practices as our ancestors and the superiority of the Western tradition to which they gave rise. He...
The human race is all too pre-disposed to think in terms of us and them. Europeans have always laid claim to the Ancient Greeks they are our Greeks, o...
The human race is all too pre-disposed to think in terms of us and them. Europeans have always laid claim to the Ancient Greeks they are our Greeks, our ancestors but their legacy reaches further than we could ever imagine. Their influence stretches from the Japanese to the Cossacks, from Ancient Rome to Indonesia.
In this path-breaking new volume, the great French historian Marcel Detienne focuses on Eurocentric approaches which have trumpeted the Greeks and their democratic practices as our ancestors and the superiority of the Western tradition to which they gave rise. He...
The human race is all too pre-disposed to think in terms of us and them. Europeans have always laid claim to the Ancient Greeks they are our Greeks, o...
Son of a mortal king and an immortal Muse, Orpheus possessed a gift for music unmatched among humans; with his lyre he could turn the course of rivers, drown the fatal song of the Sirens, and charm the denizens of the underworld. The allure of his music speaks through the myths and stories of the Greeks and Romans, who tell of his mysterious compositions, with lyrics that only the initiated could understand after undergoing secret rites. Where readers of subsequent centuries have been content to understand these mysteries as the stuff of obfuscation or mere folderol, Marcel Detienne finds...
Son of a mortal king and an immortal Muse, Orpheus possessed a gift for music unmatched among humans; with his lyre he could turn the course of riv...
Despite the rousing stories of male heroism in battles, the Trojan War transcended the activities of its human participants. For Homer, it was the gods who conducted and accounted for what happened. In the first part of this book, the authors find in Homer's Iliad material for exploring the everyday life of the Greek gods: what their bodies were made of and how they were nourished, the organization of their society, and the sort of life they led both in Olympus and in the human world. The gods are divided in their human nature: at once a fantasized model of infinite joys and an...
Despite the rousing stories of male heroism in battles, the Trojan War transcended the activities of its human participants. For Homer, it was the god...
foreword by Pierre Vidal-Naquet The acclaimed French classicist Marcel Detienne's first book traces the odyssey of -truth, - aletheia, from mytho-religious concept to philosophical thought in archaic Greece. Detienne begins by examining how truth in Greek literature first emerges as an enigma. He then looks at the movement from a religious to a secular thinking about truth in the speech of the sophists and orators. His study culminates with an original interpretation of Parmenides' poem on Being.
foreword by Pierre Vidal-Naquet The acclaimed French classicist Marcel Detienne's first book traces the odyssey of -truth, - aletheia, from mytho-r...
In Comparing the Incomparable, Marcel Detienne challenges the cordoning off of disciplines that prevent us from asking trans-cultural questions that would permit one society to shed light on another. Some years ago, he undertook the study of "construction sites" grouped around general questions to be put to historians and ethnologists about their particular areas of expertise. Four of these comparative experiments are presented in the chapters of this book. The first concerns myths and practices related to the founding of cities or sacred spaces from Africa to Japan to Ancient Greece....
In Comparing the Incomparable, Marcel Detienne challenges the cordoning off of disciplines that prevent us from asking trans-cultural questions...
In Comparing the Incomparable, Marcel Detienne challenges the cordoning off of disciplines that prevent us from asking trans-cultural questions that would permit one society to shed light on another. Some years ago, he undertook the study of "construction sites" grouped around general questions to be put to historians and ethnologists about their particular areas of expertise. Four of these comparative experiments are presented in the chapters of this book. The first concerns myths and practices related to the founding of cities or sacred spaces from Africa to Japan to Ancient Greece....
In Comparing the Incomparable, Marcel Detienne challenges the cordoning off of disciplines that prevent us from asking trans-cultural questions...
