1. Home
  2. Issues
2020
No. Nr (13), Oral History - Emotions 2019
No. (12), Public History 2018
No. (11), Cultural History of Knowledge 2017
No. (10), Anthropology – Folklore – History 2016
No. (9), Cultural Heritage 2015
No. (8), Anthropology and History 2014
No. 1 (6), Semiotics of History No. 2 (7), History and Gender 2013
No. 1 (4), On Representation No. 2 (5), Genealogies of Culture 2012
No. 2 (3), Readings of the Past No. 1 (2), Anthropology / history of the Contemporary World 2011
No. 1-2 (1), Preliminaries
ISSN 2084–1418
The paper edition of the Anthropology of History Yearbook is the definitive version

2012, No. 2 (3), Readings of the Past

Zbigniew Libera
The Great Cat Massacre, Symbols and Historical Anthropology

PDF version
Keywords: historical anthropology, symbolism, Robert Darnton and his anthropology

Abstract:
Robert Darnton's book is one of the most faithful applications of the semiotic method to a study of unfamiliar symbolic forms that use Geertz's thick description. In particular, it was Geertz's interpretation of Balinese cockfights that became a model for Darnton's interpretation of the Great Cat Massacre on a certain street in Paris in the 1730s. The criticism leveled at this famous book by J.W. Fernandez (an anthropologist), D. LaCapra (ideas historian) and R. Chartier (historian) is a reprise of the earlier criticism of Geertz by cultural anthropologists. It is also, mainly an “external criticism”, which is to mean it is leveled from the post-structuralist, or even post-humanistic positions. Attempts to correct Darnton by redirecting the focus from the “native's point of view” (of the participants in “the great cat massacre”) to the “cat's point of view” as LaCapra would have wanted (which amounts to freshening the historical anthropology – according to Domańska – by tying it with another “turn” i.e. post-humanism) may lead to (and this is well worth investigating) “the massacre of historical anthropology”.

About Author:
LIBERA ZBIGNIEW - cultural anthropologist, professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

References
Go back