Victor REBRIK, IHAC

The book is confined to the study of the “popular morality” of the Athenians of the second half of the fifth century BCE and the whole extent of the fourth. The author moves outward from the central phenomenon of Athenian life, the oikos, comprising the family and extended family (Chapter 1), with a more sideways to take in threats or alternatives to the family, in the shape of courtesans and other ladies of irregular status (Chapter 2), returning then (Chapter 3) to the oikos with a chapter on problems of inheritance. After this he passes (Chapter 4) to the topic of friends and enemies, as essential feature of the Greekpolis.     

Crisis and communitas: Victor Turner and social process

Victor Turner anticipated many of the new directions that distinguish contemporary sociocultural anthropology. In The Ritual Process, Turner set out the significant parameters of his approach in which ethnography plays a central role. He advocated an anthropology that is open, non-dualist, and that is concerned with the human condition in the diversity of its practices. In his introductory guest editorial to part two of the special issue on Ritual process, Bruce Kapferer focuses in particular on the structure/anti-structure dynamic in Turner’s approach to ritual process.     

In Search of Happiness: Victor Jacquemont's Travel in America

This article examines Victor Jacquemont's reflections on American democracy and society occasioned by his travel in the United States in 1827. A close friend of Stendhal, Jacquemont (1801–32) was one of the most prominent representatives of the new French generation that came of age around 1820. After a presentation of Jacquemont's political and intellectual background, the essay examines his remarks on slavery and the future of the red race, the different forms of religion, domestic manners, associational life, and newspapers in America. Because Jacquemont grasped the impact of equality on individual lives and mores in America, he might be regarded as a forerunner of Tocqueville.     

Victor Turner and The ritual process

Victor Turner’s The ritual process is discussed as articulating a general sociological theory, a practice theory, concerning the dynamics of continuity and change methodologically grounded in the analysis of rites that address moments of sociocultural and personal existential crisis. The significance of Turner’s development from the work of Arnold van Gennep (rather than Durkheim) is considered in relation to the ongoing contemporary importance of Turner’s intervention across disciplines and in relation to the existential crises that humanity faces.