 | Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition Subjects: Narration (Rhetoric); Homer Iliad; Bible. O.T. Numbers -- Criticism interpretation etc; Sterne Laurence 1713–1768. Life and opinions of Tristram Shandy gentleman; Exploring beyond the usual boundaries of social anthropology, a leader in the field shows why our readings of ancient literary texts may be off the mark Found in the Bible and in writings from as far afield as Egypt, China, Indonesia, Greece, and Russia, ring composition is too widespread to have come from a single source. Does it perhaps derive from the way the brain works? What is its function in social contexts? The author examines ring composition, its principles and functions, in a cross-cultural way. She focuses on ring composition in Homer's Iliad , the Bible's book of Numbers , and, for a challenging modern example, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy , developing a persuasive argument for reconstruing famous books and rereading neglected ones. Born in Italy, Mary Douglas was educated at Oxford University and began her career as a civil servant in 1943. Her first field research was carried out in what was then the Belgian Congo and she taught at Oxford and the University of London before moving to the United States in 1977. Purity and Danger (1966) is an essay about the logic of pollution beliefs, suggesting that ideas about dirt and disorder outline and reinforce particular social orders. Her other essays exploring the implicit meanings of cultural symbols follow a similar Durkheimian format. Her recent interests have turned to analysis of risk behavior and cross-cultural attitudes about food and alcohol. (Bowker Author Biography) |
