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Innovative thinking always operates on the uncertain border between light and darkness. On the side of light, it formulates new, explicit, clearly defined concepts, putting them forward for debate, hoping to convince while taking the risk of being contradicted or even rejected. On the side of darkness, it draws from a reserve of notions which lies within of the realm of the commonly shared views of an epoch or an established discipline and its traditions. Lévi-Strauss's thinking about the concept of symbolism illustrates this in exemplary fashion. This concept derives from a long philosophical and hermeneutic history. At the turn of the twentieth century, the most prominent figures of British religious anthropology - Frazer, Robertson-Smith - and those of the French school of sociology - Durkheim, Mauss - made it one of the major concepts of their theoretical work. From his earliest works, Lévi- Strauss has proposed to use it in a specific way and has elaborated, in this connection, original positions. He writes in 1945: 'No social phenomenon may be explained, and the existence of culture itself is unintelligible, if symbolism is not set up as an a priori requirement of sociological thought' (1945a: 517-18). He also adds: 'Sociology cannot explain the genesis of symbolic thought, but has just to take it for granted in man' (1945a: 518). A few years later in the Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, he specifies: 'Any culture can be considered as a combination of symbolic systems headed by language, the matrimonial rules, the economic relations, art, science and religion' (1950a; 1987a: 16). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was in the fifties that Lévi-Strauss explicitly focused on anthropological knowledge, at a decisive moment indeed. A deep, to many readers troubling, difference opposes The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949a; 1969a) to a series of later, connected books beginning with The Savage Mind (1962b; 1966b). It testified to a completely new approach to ethnographic understanding. Lévi-Strauss himself confirmed the break. In between, ten years had passed, devoted to an epistemological reflection, echoed in homages paid to Mauss, Durkheim and Rousseau. Lévi-Strauss had definitely turned to a question first raised by Mauss, who left it unanswered, standing as a sealed legacy. When Lévi-Strauss came back from New York, he might have decided either to start new fieldwork in the Pacific or to pursue his theoretical research, turning to some non-elementary structures of kinship. These would have supplied a link of sorts to confront contemporary social constructions of family relations in post-war Western societies. Although he never forgot his concern for civil life, he finally chose a third option, precisely to reconsider anthropological knowledge as such. Three enigmas surfaced out of his preceding experiences. One is closely bound to structuralism, another to his Brazilian fieldwork and the third to Mauss's limited success in The Gift. All have to do with the very possibility of anthropology as a science. The uncontested achievement of The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949a; 1969a) had come at an excessively high price. To confirm his argument and give it a decisive perspicuity, Lévi-Strauss resorted to a mathematical representation, a specific application of group theory supplied by the mathematician André Weil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is common knowledge that the contrastive opposition between nature and culture plays a crucial role in the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss: he has used it in such a variety of contexts and for so many purposes, that for many it has come to embody one of the main characteristics of his way of thinking. It is also well known that Lévi-Strauss attributes to Rousseau the merit of having, in practice, founded the field of ethnology by inaugurating, in Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality, a strand of thinking on the possible links between nature and culture (Lévi-Strauss 1978b: 35). In other words, the problem of the tension between these two domains lies not only at the heart of structural anthropology, but is also what defines, according to its founder, the domain to which ethnology is dedicated and thanks to which it can claim a certain autonomy within the human sciences. However, the role attributed to this conceptual pair is not easily circumscribed in Lévi-Strauss's thought: it is at once an analytical tool, the philosophical stage upon which the story of our origins is played out and an antinomy that must be overcome. This conceptual pair is given a plurality of sometimes contradictory meanings, which account for its great productivity and the ensuing difficulties of interpretation. The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the clarification of this question by means of what is at once a critique and a tribute, because progress can only be made on the path one has chosen thanks to the advances made by previous generations and, from this point of view, the twentieth century, in anthropology, will undoubtedly remain the century of Lévi-Strauss, since his thought, even if one rejects it, has stamped its mark on our conception of this science, its aim and its methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between the London book trade and the provinces was for most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conditioned by the power of members of the London Stationers' trade in controlling printing and distribution. The relationship was, however, by no means one-way: London apprentices to the Company were, from the outset, predominantly drawn from outside the capital; bookbinders, booksellers and stationers in several towns and cities were already well established by 1600; and, although early attempts at printing outside London and the two university cities were minimal and exceptional, the end of the seventeenth century saw the beginnings of a provincial trade in printing which was to flourish in the eighteenth. Thus, though the dominance of the London book trade over the whole of England and Wales was formally established by the incorporation of the Stationers' Company in 1557, that dominance was never complete, was continually challenged, and by 1695 was being significantly modified. The main role of the provincial book trade in England and Wales from 1557 to 1695 was the distribution of vernacular books printed and published in London (which had little or no market outside Britain) and the sale of school books in Latin, printed either in London or abroad. Small in scale compared to other trades in provincial towns, the book trade rarely gave rise to its own guild, though York bookbinders and stationers obtained a charter in 1554, and in Chester stationers formed a guild with painters, glaziers and embroiderers as early as 1534. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In publishing, as in Church and State, the 1640s and 1650s witnessed massive changes, and in the first part of this section some of the more striking changes will be considered: in broad terms and then through a specific example – the uses to which the Quakers put print in the early stages of the development of that movement. The speed and extent of those changes do, however, need to be kept in perspective: not all works then produced were radical or subversive – many were conservative or even reactionary. Moreover, there were a number of developments which took several decades rather than a few years to reach a peak in the later Stuart period. In the final part of this section some of the continuities between the edifying and instructive works published in the half century before 1640 and those published in the half century after 1640, and especially after 1660, will be discussed. For in the 1690s as much as the 1650s, works on ‘divinity’ comprised half of the output of English presses. Publishing in the 1630s had been characterized by the production of huge quantities of officially approved publications such as the Authorized Version of the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the version of the metrical Psalms associated with Sternhold and Hopkins, but in the 1640s, owing to jealousies within the print trade and political turbulence, this production was either severely curtailed or brought to an abrupt end. Even the humbler ABC with the catechisme and Primer and catechisme fell under a cloud in the 1650s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

… the traditional beliefs and customs of the medieval and modern peasant are in nine cases out often but the detritus of heathen mythology and heathen worship … village festivals … are but fragments of naive cults addressed by a primitive folk to the beneficent deities of field, wood and river. Les fêtes, les jeux, la danse, la musique, le théâtre, les repas de noces ou de funerailles et surtout l'activité rituelle des groupes de la jeunesse locale et des défunts du village ont pour fonction … de redéfinir fréquemment pour chacun le sens d'appartenance au groupe. In chapter 8 brief mention was made of the games and rituals with which people in a local community enlivened their dull lives and induced a sense, if not of well-being, at least of camaraderie. It is appropriate to examine the assumptions and beliefs, the mentalité of ordinary people, which subsumed these activities, and, in so far as this is possible, to trace their origins as far back as practicable. The world-view of traditional peoples was underpinned by the tacit assumption that there were forces external to mankind which could in some way shape human destiny. Both the regularities of nature, the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, the movements of the planets and the procession of the seasons, no less than its irregularities, like the apparent randomness of weather and the incidence of epidemic disease, called for explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

… The true centre of a people's interest and passion can be judged by the nature of the buildings to which they will devote most labour and most material. With these Iron Age tribesmen it was not ancestral tombs, not temples, to which they showed this passion but military fortifications. Danebury is a hilltop amid the rolling chalk downland of northern Hampshire, and, like many such hills in Wessex, it is crowned by the banks and ditches of a prehistoric settlement. Danebury is no larger, no better preserved than dozens of such hillforts in southern Britain (Fig. 1.1). What makes it different from others is that it has been excavated, thoroughly if not completely, using the most up-to-date archaeological techniques. The result is that we know a very great deal about the people who cut the ditches, built the ramparts, and erected their huts within the security which they offered. We can handle the tools they used; we can walk the fields they cultivated; we can, up to a point, understand how they tilled the land and evaluate their food supply. In short, archaeology reveals much of the material culture of these distant people. But there is much that the excavation of Danebury does not tell us, and there are many subjects that are only faintly illuminated. We know little of the social structure of its inhabitants, and almost nothing of their customs, cults and religious beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It should come as no surprise now that during the nineteenth century the dynamics of kinship in Neckarhausen came to be governed by women. Widows married less frequently and seldom gave up their property until they were old and feeble. In the life of the village, older, propertied, and resident women grew more powerful as they learned to control fundamental resources: land, agricultural equipment, buildings, and credit. They also became important in negotiating marriages and were at the center of an alliance system that stressed mutual reciprocity between lines rather than patriarchal authority – as can be seen in the choice of godparents and in naming practices. With the gender balance of the village tipped radically in favor of women (100 adult women to 85 adult men), and with agriculture demanding more of their labor, they negotiated a central place in the productive structures of the village and in the consumption decisions of their households. If formal offices remained in the hands of men and if the early Verein movement took up most of their energies, women came to find a parallel field for political and social activity in caring for kin, negotiating networks, brokering alliances, and maintaining the viability of agriculture and flax production. Although there is no prima facie reason to expect that women from different classes in the course of the nineteenth century would play similar roles or develop equivalent social and familial functions and strategies, that is in fact what happened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To put flesh on the genealogical bones it is necessary to understand the hierarchies of the group, the organisation of production, modes of agricultural operation, the nature of production, and the organisation of local markets. In the final four chapters, I want to take up the challenge of comparative analysis and offer evidence to show how much the course of history in Neckarhausen followed its own path and how my findings about kinship there open up issues and connections for the course of European history as a whole. The section opens with the discussion in this chapter of the range of bahavior in European rural societies. In Chapter 21, it then moves on to the question of whether the rise of consanguineal marriage in Neckarhausen was part of a more general pattern in Germany and Europe. These two chapters lead inescapably to the question of the relationship between kinship and class (Chapter 22) – which has already been raised here and there in the account of Neckarhausen. Chapter 23 brings the discussion to a close with some observations about the interconnections between kinship and gender in the nineteenth century. In each of the chapters on the family history of Neckarhausen, I have established reciprocal relations between kinship and social forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]