Daniel de Coppet – författare

Understanding Rituals explores how ritual can be understood within the framework of contemporary social anthropology, and shows that ritual is now one of the most fertile fields of anthropological research. The contributors demonstrate how rituals create and maintain - or transform - a society's cultural identity and social relations. By examining specific rituals from various theoretical viewpoints, they reveal the ultimate and contradictory values to which each society as a whole is attached.

Exchanges are fundamental to human societies. The authors show that the study of exchanges not only serves as a key to understanding particular societies as totalities but also helps to frame a comparative mode of analysis expressed in terms of a hierarchy of values. Starting with a comparative analysis of the different vocabularies used when dealing with exchange, the authors go on to provide a detailed account of how each society's exchanges form a genuine value-oriented system. Their conclusions shed light on important issues in anthropology such as the difference between subject and object; the construction of the person in the matrix of social relations; and the contrast between 'socio-cosmic' systems and other societies which recognize a universal term of reference beyond their community.

Current anthropology uses expressions such as 'society as a whole', 'socio-cosmic relations', 'spatiotemporal extension', 'global ideology', and 'cosmomorphy' to establish that the clear-cut Western dichotomy between society and cosmos is not always to be found in the communities it studies. In fact, many elements that the West would at first undoubtedly classify as belonging either to the cosmos or to the society appear very often in Melanesia as belonging to neither one of these domains, but to a realm which combines the attributes of both. Focusing on different examples drawn from diverse Melanesian societies, this thought-provoking volume by eminent specialists re-examines the relationship between society and cosmos and, in the process, opens new directions for research.