ANTHROP 2R03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Herleshausen, Soot, Epicenter
24 Oct 2014
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Document Summary
Infamous: root is infamy and pertains to having a bad reputation: opprobrium: disapproval. The concept of bad reputations functions according to the same logic everywhere something like a caste system can be found in some form in all societies. We are dealing with a large number of different professions, all of them involving indispensable work to which varying degrees of opprobrium were attached. Implied in their social flexibility and fluidity are various forms of gender inversion. Men and women switch roles as men take care of infants at home, while women work outside as beggars, dancers, musicians and professional prostitutes. Sometimes as pimps and procurers for their wives, these peripatetics indulge in the symbolic reversal of fundamental social categories. As the very embodiment of these inversions, they too mark and fortify cultural boundaries (blok 2001:59): in shakespearian england no women could be actors so men would play female roles.
