Civilizing Processes—Myth or Reality? A Comment on Duerr's Critique of Elias

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Volumn 39, Issue 4, 1997, Pages 729-733

  Mennell, Stephen ^a   Goudsblom, Johan ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN   (Ireland)

^b UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85013577580     PISSN: 00104175     EISSN: 14752999     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417500020879     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford, Blackwell, 1994).
2. This passage, which we translated is quoted from Duerr, vol. 1:227–8.
3. Attributed to Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings (London 1975), 10, 12.
4. Attributed to E. Vetromile, The Abnakis and their History (New York, 1866), 89ff.
5. Attributed to Ward Goodenough, “Personal Names and Modes of Address in Two Oceanic Societies”, in M. E. Spiro, ed. Context and Meaning in Cultural Anthropology (New York, 1965).
6. Attributions are given to A. Strathern, “Why is Shame on the Skin?” Ethnology, New York, (1975), and to G. F. Vicedom and H. Tischner, Die Mbowamb, vol. 1 (Hamburg, 1948).
7. Edmund Leach, Rethinking Anthropology (London, Athlone Press, 1961).
8. Duerr, vol. 3:26.
9. Duerr, vol. 3:27.
10. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 481.
11. Duerr, vol. 3:28.
12. Our allusion here is to Elias. The Civilizing Process, 460–5. “Diminishing Contrasts. Increasing Varieties.”
13. Norbert Elias, Time: An Essay (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992)
14. The Symbol Theory (London, Sage, 1991).
15. E. Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge. Mass., Harvard University Press, 1995).
16. Elçin Kürsat-Ahlers. Zur frühen Staatenbildung von Steppenvölkern: Über die Sozio- und Psychogenese der eurusischen Nomadenreiche am Beispiel der Hsiung-Nu and Göktürken mit einem Exkurs über die Skythen (Berlin, Dunker and Humblot. 1994).
17. Wim Rasing, “Too Many People”: Order and Nonconformity in Iglulingmiut Social Process (Nijmegen, Catholic University of Nijmegen, 1994).
18. Elias, The Germans: Studies of Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford, Polity Press, 1995).
19. Elias himself defined the task of the sociologist as to be “a destroyer of myths” (What is Sociology? [New York, Columbia University Press, 1978]). Although he took great pains to distance himself from nineteenth-century models of social evolution and progress, Duerr is not the first critic to level at Elias the charge of following such outdated models.