Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T07:41:01.898Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Manners, Deference, and Private Property in Early Modern Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2012

David Graeber
David Graeber
Affiliation:
New York University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This essay is an attempt to map out the rudiments of a theory of manners and formal deference and to demonstrate how such a theory can be usefully applied to certain long-standing problems in the historical sociology of Europe. It is also meant to demonstrate the continuing relevance of comparative ethnography for social theory—something which has been somewhat cast into doubt in recent years.

The historical problems I have in mind is how Max Weber's famous observations (1930) about how the rise of Puritanism was related to the emergence of a commercial economy in early modern Europe can be related to processes that other scholars have noted during that same general period, the rise of “puritanism” in its more colloquial sense, even in areas totally unaffected by Calvinist theology. I am thinking particularly here of the work of Norbert Elias and Peter Burke.

Type
Shaping the Social Being
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , October 1997 , pp. 694 - 728
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Aries, Philippe. 1962. Centuries of Childhood. New York: Vintage Press.Google Scholar
Aylmer, G. E. 1980. “The Meaning of Property in Seventeenth-Century England.” Past and Present, 86:87–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and his World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Beidelman, Thomas. 1966. “Utani: Kaguru Notions of Sexuality, Death and Affinity.” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology. 20:4, 354–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berce, Yves-Marie. 1976. Fete et Revolte. Paris: Hachette.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brigden, Susan. 1982. “Youth and the English Reformation.” Past and Present, 95:37–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burke, Peter. 1978. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Capp, Bernard. 1977. “Communications: English Youth Groups and the Pinder of Wakefield.” Past and Present, 76:111–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chagnon, Napoleon. 1968. Yanomamö, the Fierce People. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
Cohn, Norman. 1970. The Pursuit of the Millenium. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Corlette, Ewan. 1935. “Notes on the Natives of the New Hebrides.” Oceania, 5:4, 474–487.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Csordas, Thomas. 1994. “Introduction: The Body as Representation and Being-in-the-World,” in Csordas, T., ed., Embodiment and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Darnton, Robert. 1984. The Great Cat Massacre. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Davis, Natalie Zemon. 1975. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dumont, Louis. 1970. Homo Hierarchicus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dumont, Louis. 1971. From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dumont, Louis. 1986. Essays on Individualism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Eggan, Fred. 1937. “The Cheyenne and Arapaho Kinship System,” in The Social Anthropology of North American Tribes, Eggan, F., ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Elias, Norbert. 1978. The History of Manners. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Feher, Michel. 1989. “Introduction,” Fragments of the History of the Human Body, Part I. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Firth, Raymond. 1959. Economics of the New Zealand Maori. Wellington, New Zealand: Owen Press.Google Scholar
Firth, Raymond. 1965. Primitive Polynesian Economy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Flandrin, Jean-Louis. 1979. Families in Former Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1982. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1985. “Erotics”. October, 33:3–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Game, Ann. 1991. Undoing the Social: Towards a Deconstructive Sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1956. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.Google Scholar
Graeber, David. 1996. “Beads and Money: Notes toward a Theory of Wealth and Power.” American Ethnologist, 23:1 (February).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gurevich, A. J. 1985. Categories of Medieval Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Hajnal, J. 1965. “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” in Population in History, Glass, D. V. and Eversley, D. E. C., eds. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Herlihy, David. 1985. Medieval Households. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hill, Christopher. 1964. Society and Puritanism in England. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Hill, Christopher. 1972. The World Turned Upside Down. New York: Penguin Press.Google Scholar
Hill, Christopher. 1975. Change and Continuity in 17th Century England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas. 1968. Leviathan. Hammondsworth: Penguin Press.Google Scholar
Hunt, William. 1983. The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution to an English County. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hutton, Ronald. 1994. The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroeber, Alfred. 1925. Handbook of the Indians of California. Washington D.C.: Bureau of American Ethnology, 78.Google Scholar
Kroeber, Alfred. 1928. “The Law of the Yurok Indians.” Proceedings of the 22nd International Congress of Americanists, 511–6.Google Scholar
Kussmaul, Ann. 1981. Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laslett, Peter. 1964. “Market Society and Political Theory.” Historical Journal, 7:1, 151–4.Google Scholar
Laslett, Peter. 1965. The World We Have Lost. New York: Scribner.Google Scholar
Laslett, Peter. 1972. “Characteristics of the Western Family Considered over Time,” in Household and Family in Past Time, Laslett, P. and Wall, R., eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laslett, Peter. 1977. Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laslett, Peter. 1983. “Family and Household as Work Group and Kin Group,” in Family Forms in Historic Europe, Wall, R., ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Leach, Edmund. 1954. Political Systems of Highland Burma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Leach, Edmund. 1964. “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse,” in New Directions in the Study of Language, Lennenberg, E., ed. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
LeGoff, Jacques. 1978. Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. Totemism. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lovejoy, Arthur. 1936. The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
MacAllister, J. Gilbert. 1937. “Kiowa-Apache Social Organization,” in The Social Anthropology of North American Tribes, Eggan, F., ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
MacFarlane, Alan. 1970. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacFarlane, Alan. 1978. The Origins of English Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
MacPherson, C. B. 1962. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
MacPherson, C. B. 1973. “Servants and Labourers in Seventeenth-Century England,” in C. B.|MacPherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval, 203–23. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mauss, Marcel. 1954. The Gift. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Mauss, Marcel. 1968. “A Category of the Human Spirit.” Psychoanalytic Review, 55:457–81.Google Scholar
Mead, Margaret. 1930. Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education. New York: Morrow and Co.Google Scholar
Mead, Margaret. 1934. Kinship Organization in the Admiralty Islands. New York: American Museum of Natural History.Google Scholar
Mead, Margaret. 1937. “The Manus of the Admiralty Islands,” in Cooperation and Competition among Primitive Peoples. New York: MacGraw Hill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, Edmund Sears. 1944. The Puritan Family. Boston: Trustees of the Public Library.Google Scholar
Nicholls, Jonathan. 1985. The Matter of Courtesy. Woodbridge: Brewer Press.Google Scholar
Sahlins, Marshall. 1972. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sahlins, Marshall. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Stone, Laurence. 1965. The Crisis of the Aristocracy: 1558–1641. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stone, Laurence. 1968. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.Google Scholar
Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Scribner Press.Google Scholar
Thomas, Keith. 1976. “Age and Authority in Early Modern England.” Proceedings of the British Academy, 62:1–46.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. 1966. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. 1967. “Time, Labor and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present, 38:56–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, E. P. 1976. “The Grid of Inheritance,” in Family and Inheritance, Goody, J., Thirsk, J., and Thompson, E. P., eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, Laura. 1940. The Southern Lau, Fiji. Bernice Bishop Museum Bulletin, no. 162.Google Scholar
Thrupp, Sylvia. 1977. Society and History: Essays. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Turner, Bryan. 1984. The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory. New York: Routledge Press.Google Scholar
Turner, Terence. 1994. “Bodies and Anti-Bodies; Flesh and Fetish in Contemporary Social Theory,” in Csordas, T., ed., Embodiment and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Turner, Terence. 1995. “Social Body and Embodied Subject: The Production of Bodies, Actors and Society among the Kayapo.” Cultural Anthropology, 10:2, 143–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process—Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Wagner, Roy. 1967. The Curse of Souw. Chicago: University of Press.Google Scholar
Wall, Richard. 1983. Family Forms in Historic Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weber, Max. 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Unwin Press.Google Scholar
Wright, A. R., and T. E.|Lones. 1938. British Calendar Customs. Glaisher, London.Google Scholar
Wrightson, Keith, and David, Levine. 1979. Poverty and Piety in an English Village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar