Jean Burrell

Economic Habitus and Management of Needs: The Example of the Gypsies

corresponding adjective? Does ’economics’ refer to a specific relationship between ends and means, as some think, or is it defined, more prosaically, as the satisfaction of material needs? Is it a category of specific facts or a praxeology of goal-oriented action? Some interesting debates on the matter, which have brought formalist, substantivist, and Marxist writers into conflict, have revealed marked ideological distortions, some reductionism, and finally epistemological positions that were difficult to reconcile. In the following pages I shall summarize these debates in order to introduce a new

Borrowings go Round and Round. Transcending Borders and Religious Flexibility

’Siberian hunters have never been able to get used to our insistence on pressing our God on everyone else, nor to our way of abasing ourselves before him when they see us as masters of all conquering the bear and the elk with our rifles, using our knowledge and power to conquer the indigenous people, who have always been determined to hang on to what little they have. How crazy the shaman would be to put his penny in the collec-

The Yezidis, People of the Spoken Word in the midst of People of the Book

eous dogmas have been piled one upon another, creating one of the most astonishing syncretisms known to humanity. But in order to penetrate the mysteries of the centuriesold cross-breeding that brought about this situation, we need to try to define what Yezidism is. For we must remember that this is a religion whose mysterious origin and process of development have not yet been traced. Its first appearances on the stage of history are still shrouded in utter darkness.

The Criticism and Transmission of Texts in Classical India

Did the traditional Indian world know the concept of critical edition? The question seems naive, but modern scholars are not unanimous in the answer they give to it. There are three possible positions. The first, which is inclined to say no, holds that amendments made to texts in the transmission process are a priori contrary to the ideals of modern philology. We simply need to apply the methods currently in use for western literature. According to the second, which is not so sceptical, some Indian classical methods do mirror those of the western-style critical edition then considered as an honouring and flattering credential. The third view, which is more pragmatic, maintains that, if there was indeed a traditional Indian textual criticism, its basic aim was not to

Adaptive Strategies and Indigenous Resistance to Protestantism in Ecuador

During the last ten years I have been working on the process of conversion to Protestantism of the indigenous people in Chimborazo province, Ecuador. Protestant evangelization in Ecuador started in the early twentieth century, but it is only in the last thirty years that the process of conversion of the indigenous people has become a large-scale one. During the first sixty years of evangelical activity North American missionaries from the Evangelical Missionary Union baptized only four natives in Chimborazo province. This period was marked by strenuous resistance and rejection of the new religion. Accounts given by missionaries of the period describe the disasters and difficulties that the first evangelizing mission suffered. It was only the conviction that lost souls had to be saved that helped them overcome adversities and later achieve amazing results. Among the entry strategies most frequently employed were building free schools and hospitals, translating the Bible into dialects of Quechua and setting up a radio transmitter. Around the mid 1960s a real evangelical flowering took place: in 1970 there were 7,000 baptisms recorded, with a 100 per cent average annual growth over 1969 and 1970. At present 28,553 people have been baptized in a community numbering 100,000, believers which represents 27 per cent of the province’s population. Various factors may explain the rapid rise in the number of conversions; however, I will restrict myself to examining some of the indigenous people’s adaptive strategies when confronted with Protestantism

Time, Understanding, and Will

So let us leave the Platonists to wander off down a blind alley Poor simpletons, they think they will find the secret of discourse about time in the link with eternity. Whereas I, who am powerless in the face of eternity, would prefer to ask: what link can be retained, in discourse about time, between past, present, and future? If there is some link, can the three kinds of time break free of their mutual bonds? Can predicting the future, a time that will be but has never existed before, be disconnected from what determines the future as a product of what already exists and what has already existed? Can the past be what it once was or will it always be what each age decides it should have been? Put this way, these questions lead to never-ending discussions in which each argument seems to retain its validity. So may I take the liberty of imposing some limits on the questions based on a dual distinction: the difference between a theoretical question and

Reviews : Louis-Vincent Thomas, Les Chairs de la mort, Collection 'Les empêcheurs de penser en rond', Paris: Institut d'Édition Sanofi-Synthélabo, 2000

’The dead have never left us ...’ This idea from the Senegalese novelist Birago Diop, which is quoted at the beginning of this work, is the guiding light for Louis-Vincent Thomas, who taught for many years at the University of Dakar. He is responsible, amongst other writing on African cultures, for substantial studies of Diola society, which extends from Senegal through Guinea, Mali and Burkina Faso to the Ivory Coast. In this posthumous publication the prolific anthropological work of Thomas reaches a kind of the-

Civilizations as 'Aesthetic Absolute'. A Morphological Approach to Mittel-Europa

This project unites in the twentieth-century the authors, ideas and theoretical models discussed here. They form the strand of thought labelled ’historical morphology’ (or ’cultural morphology’), one of the aspects of religious ethnology, and the history of religions that is particularly the concern of the Germanic states (Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Baltic countries). Owing to its integrative character, this strand extends into various fields such as the history of ideas, art history and literary history. Marked by a strong reaction against scientism and positivism, cultural morphology offers, as an alternative to these traditions, a ’morphological’ or ’physiognomical’ approach to civilizations. The mode of apprehension it advocates is opposed to the cognitive methods of modern science on three fundamental points: a) it claims to be an art rather than a method; b) its knowledge is based on the perceptible intuition the object of study awakens in the mind of the researcher, an intuition that by its very nature is related to aesthetics; c) it makes use of analogy as a method of validating its discoveries, postulating an isomor-

Reviews : Images of the Sky (A Chronicle)

Does living on Earth not also for human beings mean being open to the sky?’ Watching day alternate with night, relying on the seasonal cycle, finding their way according to the position of the stars, humans have always been aware of their dependence on the sky and tried to understand the origin of life in relation to it. And it is up to the sky again that their imagination and thoughts fly whenever they feel cramped in their earthly habitat. Following the axis of their own vertical position, the earth that is the floor for humans is