Description
Throughout the world, people believe that much of what they do is accidental, ordinary, and inconsequential, while other acts can bring on divine retribution or earn eternal grace. In Man and the Sacred, Caillois demonstrates how humanity's ambiguous attitude toward the sacred influences behavior and culture.
Drawing on a diverse array of ethnographic contexts, including the sexual rituals of the Ba-Thong of South Africa and evidence drawn from aboriginal Australian, Eskimo, and traditional Chinese social systems, Caillois analyzes the role of the forbidden in the social cohesion of the group. He examines the character of the sacred in the light of specific instances of taboos and transgressions, exploring wide differences in attitudes toward diet and sex and extreme behaviors associated with the sacred, such as rapture and paroxysm. He also discusses the festival--an exuberant explosion following a period of strict repression--and compares its functions with those of modern war.
A classic study of one of the most fundamental aspects of human social and spiritual life, Man and the Sacred--presented here in Meyer Barash's superb English translation--is a companion volume to Caillois's Man, Play and Games.
Still marvelously provocative and entertaining, these plays in Fitzgerald's wonderful English translation are once again made available together in paperback
About the Author
Roger Caillois (1913-78), a French philosopher and writer, was a cofounder of France's pathbreaking College de Sociologie pour l'Etude du Sacre and the founding editor of Diogenes, the journal of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies. His books included works of anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, art, and literary criticism. Meyer Barash, coeditor of Marriage and the Family: A Comparative Analysis of Contemporary Problems, was on the faculty of Hofstra College in New York.
Reviews
"This handsomely produced volume brings together the plays published in FitzGerald's 1853 edition of Six Dramas of Caldern, plus the two works privately printed in 1865, The Mightly Magician and Such Stuff as Dreams are Made Of.Overall FitzGerald's versions are written in good Shakespearean pastiche, and eminently stageable." -- Eamonn Rodgers, Times Literary Supplement
Book Information
ISBN 9780252069031
Author Pedro Calderon Barca
Format Paperback
Page Count 448
Imprint University of Illinois Press
Publisher University of Illinois Press
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 25mm
Drawing on a diverse array of ethnographic contexts, including the sexual rituals of the Ba-Thong of South Africa and evidence drawn from aboriginal Australian, Eskimo, and traditional Chinese social systems, Caillois analyzes the role of the forbidden in the social cohesion of the group. He examines the character of the sacred in the light of specific instances of taboos and transgressions, exploring wide differences in attitudes toward diet and sex and extreme behaviors associated with the sacred, such as rapture and paroxysm. He also discusses the festival--an exuberant explosion following a period of strict repression--and compares its functions with those of modern war.
A classic study of one of the most fundamental aspects of human social and spiritual life, Man and the Sacred--presented here in Meyer Barash's superb English translation--is a companion volume to Caillois's Man, Play and Games.
Still marvelously provocative and entertaining, these plays in Fitzgerald's wonderful English translation are once again made available together in paperback
About the Author
Roger Caillois (1913-78), a French philosopher and writer, was a cofounder of France's pathbreaking College de Sociologie pour l'Etude du Sacre and the founding editor of Diogenes, the journal of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies. His books included works of anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, art, and literary criticism. Meyer Barash, coeditor of Marriage and the Family: A Comparative Analysis of Contemporary Problems, was on the faculty of Hofstra College in New York.
Reviews
"This handsomely produced volume brings together the plays published in FitzGerald's 1853 edition of Six Dramas of Caldern, plus the two works privately printed in 1865, The Mightly Magician and Such Stuff as Dreams are Made Of.Overall FitzGerald's versions are written in good Shakespearean pastiche, and eminently stageable." -- Eamonn Rodgers, Times Literary Supplement
Book Information
ISBN 9780252069031
Author Pedro Calderon Barca
Format Paperback
Page Count 448
Imprint University of Illinois Press
Publisher University of Illinois Press
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 25mm
