· 2016· Review
Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society
- 152citations
- 2016year
Short summary
Émile Benveniste's "Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society" (1969) is a foundational reference for understanding the historical roots of key sociocultural concepts like gifts, contracts, and kinship across Indo-European languages.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- The book traces the genealogy of concepts such as gifts, contracts, sacrifice, hospitality, authority, freedom, ancient economy, and kinship.
- It provides a comparative linguistic history analyzing word structures and significations across multiple Indo-European language families.
- Published in 1969, it has inspired numerous prominent thinkers across various disciplines.
- The work highlights the deep historical interconnections between European, Middle Eastern, and South Asian societies.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Since its publication in 1969, emile Benveniste's Vocabulaire here in a new translation as the Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society has been the classic reference for tracing the institutional and conceptual genealogy of the sociocultural worlds of gifts, contracts, sacrifice, hospitality, authority, freedom, ancient economy, and kinship. A comprehensive and comparative history of words with analyses of their underlying neglected genealogies and structures of signification and this via a masterful journey through Germanic, Romance, Indo-Iranian, Latin, and Greek languages Benveniste's dictionary is a must-read for anthropologists, linguists, literary theorists, classicists, and philosophers alike. This book has famously inspired a wealth of thinkers, including Roland Barthes, Claude Levi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Giorgio Agamben, Fran ois Jullien, and many others. In this new volume, Benveniste's masterpiece on the study of language and society finds new life for a new generation of scholars. As political fictions continue to separate and reify differences between European, Middle Eastern, and South Asian societies, Benveniste reminds us just how historically deep their interconnections are and that understanding the way our institutions are evoked through the words that describe them is more necessary than ever.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source., 2016 · DOI ↗
Continue with a free account
Ask the paper: 3 free questions a day about this paper; save it, get its citation, new summaries every day for your field. Takeaways are Premium.
Continue free on the webSign in with Google or Apple; no card needed. You come back to this paper.
On your phone:
Field: Classics
ClassicsArts and Humanities