Finding Melanesia in Ancient Rome: Mauss’ Anthropology of nexum

2020 ◽  
pp. 171-198
Author(s):  
Alain Pottage
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Legal Institution ◽  
Political Strategies ◽  
Roman Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Structural ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
The Gift

Marcel Mauss’ The Gift is an original and unique anthropology of law. Law is the object and medium of the analysis, and the conceptual and political strategies of the text are closely adapted to the symptomatic tensions that Mauss elicits from law. And for Mauss these tensions were concentrated in one particular legal institution – the archaic Roman institution of nexum. As I argue in this chapter, the technicalities of the legal institution of nexum – however they are now recollected – should be seen as largely subordinate to the social-structural and economic forces that shaped ancient Roman society. And this approach might in turn lead to a set of questions that Mauss would have found entirely pertinent, as to what nexum might tell us about the genealogy or deep infrastructure of debt and precarity in contemporary societies.

scholarly journals REPRESENTATION OF THE CONCEPT POPULUS IN THE LATIN LANGUAGE (based on the lexicographic sources)

2019 ◽  
pp. 209-221
Author(s):  
Yulia Pysmenna
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Lexical Representation ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Human Community ◽  
Roman Society ◽  
Latin Language ◽  
The Social ◽  
Specific Part

The article focuses on the study of the lexical representation of the Latin concept POPULUS in lexicographic sources. Based on a comparison of relevant lexicographic articles in the bilingual translation dictionaries as well as observing the synonymous series, the key sememes were highlighted, which shape the determined semantic areas of the concept POPULUS. Semantic area “people as a human community, connected by a common origin” is being interpreted through the notions of ethnicity, nation, nationality; the population of the state or its specific part, region, area; tribe, clan, family, degree of kinship. At the lexical level, this meaning is realized through synonymous series: gens, familia, genus, stirps, prosapia; genus, gens, natio, populus. Semantic area “people as a political community” correlates with the notions of state (Roman state), citizenship, democracy, civil rights; and represented by such words, that reflect the facts of the social and political organization of Ancient Rome, as Senatus populusque Romanus; patricii et plebs. Semantic area “people as a large number of people, crowd”, realized by the lexemes of the synonymous series plebs, vulgus, multitudo, turba, tumultus, demonstrates the opposition of personality and the popular mass and is marked by an expressive axiology. The semantic peculiarities of the lexemes that represent the concept POPULUS in the context of historical and cultural realities of Ancient Roman society are analyzed; their specific features and axiological characteristics are determined.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 263-270
Author(s):  
Carlos Machado
Keyword(s):  
Central Element ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Political Strategies ◽  
Roman Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church

This chapter brings together the different strands that make up the argument of the book. As emperors distanced themselves from the city, reorganizing the administration and the services that regulated life in late antique Rome, Roman aristocrats began to play a growing role in the life of the city, redefining its spaces and institutions. The city became a central element in the social and political strategies of the Roman elite: its spaces and the buildings that gave shape to it, the festivals and ceremonies that animated it, and the hierarchies and instruments of control that defined it were progressively appropriated. These developments took place at a time of dramatic changes in the empire, and late antique Rome was as a result a more provincial and smaller city than in previous centuries. Aristocratic dominance did not prevent the rise of new elements in Roman society, bringing with it the elements that would contribute to the development of a new, Christian Rome, under the leadership of the Church and its bishop.

Micah’s Theory of the Justice of Judgement (Micah 3:1-12)

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Blessing Onoriode Boloje
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Background Structure ◽  
The Social ◽  
Egalitarian Society ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Special Concern

This article is an examination of Micah’s theory of justice within the overall context of his oracles of judgements. While there are competing perspectives in the justice of judgement in the book of Micah, particularly in relation to the extent of judgement, this article concerns itself with the interrelatedness and connection between sin and judgement. The judgements envisioned in Micah’s oracles are provoked by the violations of the traditional moral and social solidarities resulting from the Covenant, which formed the basis of society. As an egalitarian society, the social blueprint of Yahweh’s Torah for Israel advocated special concern for weak and vulnerable individuals as fundamental. The gift of Torah inaugurated Israel as a community meant to personify Yahweh’s justice. However, increasing injustice profoundly jeopardized this witness to God’s healing agenda. For failing to uphold justice the perpetrators are liable and the judgements constitute justice. This justice may not necessarily be corrective in quality but punitive. The article therefore examines briefly the background, structure, and approaches to the book of Micah, analyses a unit of judgement oracle (3:1–12), and concludes by synthesising Micah’s theory of justice within the overall context of his oracles of judgements.

Marcel Mauss and the Turn to the Gift

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Colesworthy
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Market Society ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
New Material ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Leonard Woolf

Chapter 1 takes a cue from recent anthropologists who have stressed the influence of Mauss’s socialism on his sociological work. Returning to Mauss’s The Gift, the chapter argues that what links his essay to the experimental writing of his literary contemporaries is not their shared fascination with the primitive, as other critics have suggested, but rather their shared investment in reimagining social possibilities within market society. Mauss was, as his biographer notes, an “Anglophile.” Shedding light on his admiration of British socialism and especially the work of Beatrice and Sidney Webb—friends of Virginia and Leonard Woolf—as well as competing usages of the language of “gifts” in the social sciences and the arts, the chapter ultimately provides a new material and conceptual framework for understanding the intersection of largely French gift theory and Anglo-American modernist writing.

Receptions of Rome in Debates on Slavery in the U.S.A.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Malamud
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Roman Society ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Black Struggle ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Intense Debate

American abolitionists not only invoked the Roman allusions and comparisons employed by the revolutionary generation’s fight for liberty from the British crown, but also adapted or subverted them in service of the black struggle for freedom. Rather than rejecting Roman society outright because it was a slaveholding society—the primal “Roman error” from their perspective—many abolitionists instead deployed figures and images from Roman antiquity in their own struggles against the despotism of chattel slavery. Supporters of emancipation and black civil rights, this chapter shows, thus engaged in an intense debate over the correct reception of ancient Rome with proslavery Southerners, who argued that slavery in both Rome and America enabled liberty and civilization. Bringing the discussion into the present day, this chapter offers a contemporary example of arguments over the correct reception of ancient Rome in relation to American slavery and the American Civil War.

Coerced Human Mobility and Elite Social Networks in Early Dynastic Iraq and Iran

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-57
Author(s):  
Vitali Bartash
Keyword(s):  
Human Mobility ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Spatial Mobility ◽  
Male Adult ◽  
Early Dynastic ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
The Persian Gulf ◽  
City State ◽  
Social Profiles

AbstractThe article provides a historical analysis of cuneiform records concerning the circulation of unfree humans among the political-cultic elite in southern Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf during the Early Dynastic IIIb period, ca. 2475–2300 BCE. The analysis of the written data from the Adab city-state demonstrates that the royal house used the unfree as gifts to maintain a sociopolitical network on three spatial levels – the internal, local, and (inter)regional. The gift-givers and gift-receivers were mostly male adult members of the local and foreign elite, whereas the dislocated unfree humans were heterogeneous in terms of age, gender, and the ways they lost their freedom. The author relates the social profiles of both groups to the logistics of human traffic to reveal the link between social status and forms and nature of spatial mobility in the politically and socially unstable Early Dynastic Near East.

Les chefs de cabinets ministériels au Québec: la transition du gouvernement libéral au gouvernement péquiste (1976–1977)

1981 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Micheline Plasse
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
The State ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
The Government

This article first presents a brief survey of the role and functions filled by the personal aide (chef de cabinet) of a minister in Quebec. The analysis continues, in a comparative perspective, by tracing a sociological and professional portrait of the Liberal“chefs de cabinet” in April 1976 and their successors in the pequiste government in July 1977.We then test the hypothesis that the cleavage between the government and the dominant economic forces has increased since November 15, 1976 as a result of the ideology articulated by the“chefs de cabinet” regarding the social and economic aims of the state. This hypothesis was confirmed.The hypothesis that the pequiste“chefs de cabinet” exercise a more pronounced influence on the decision-making process is also confirmed. Nevertheless, one cannot argue that the pequiste“chefs de cabinet” usurped the power of the legislators; their influence is more political than technocratic. The growing influence of the pequiste“chefs de cabinet” neverthelsss helps to accentuate the tensions and conflicts between the higher civil service and the ministerial aides.

Material Evidence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen L. Dyson
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Roman Society ◽  
Freed Slaves ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Material Evidence ◽  
Shed Light

Slaves were central to every aspect of Roman society. However¸ they are difficult to identify in the archaeological record. Most were genetically similar to the free population. Unlike slaves in the American ante-bellum South they did not have distinctive residential systems and foodways that can be differentiated archaeologically from those of free persons. Structures related to slavery like market buildings or slave barracks are not easily identified. In contrast, freed slaves, common in ancient Rome are very visible, especially in mortuary monuments. This chapter surveys the extent to which material evidence can shed light on various aspects of the life course of slaves, from enslavement through slave life, to death or manumission.

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