This book provides a window into a world which has long passed. It's a small window on a very strange world of anthropologists and sociologists in the second half of the 19th and early part of the 20th century but it's fascinating to catch a glimpse of it. The book is part of a Pelican series (an imprint of Penguin) which must have been offered in the 1960's as an anthology style introduction to Anthropology but I found it fascinating given the depth it gets into on a very specific topic (Taboo) and the way in which that topic is so fundamental to so many different advances in thought (psychology, sociology, theology) during a pivotal moment for western thought. Who would have known that the topic of taboo, brilliantly revealed as something we thought came from Polynesian islanders but which Steiner reveals as fundamental to society and the monotheistic religions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taboo_(book)
No comments:
Post a Comment