Aristotle Among the Basques: The 'Cheese Analogy' of Conception

Ott, Sandra

doi:10.2307/2802155

Cited by 15 publications

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“…11 Very similar oppositions have been described by Ott (1979) in her article on a French Basque mountain community, in which she deals with the analogy between the skill of making cheese and that of causing or preventing pregnancies. 12 Cf.…”

Section: Earlier Versions Of This Article Were Presented At the Confementioning

confidence: 70%

Rams and Billy-Goats: A Key to the Mediterranean Code of Honour

Blok¹

1981

Man

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Man.Although anthropologists have dealt at length with the theme of honour and shame in the Mediterranean, the code of honour as such still awaits further unravelling. By combining structural with historical analysis, this article tries to demonstrate that the meaning of the horn-symbol as a disgraceful attribute of the deceived husband or cornute provides a key to an originally pastoral code of honour predicated upon virility and strength.My wish has always been to take seriously Durkheim's idea that the properties of classification systems derive from and are indeed properties of the social systems in which they are used (Douglas I975: 296).The problem as to why deceived husbands in European societies have been referred to, derisively, as cornutes, men who wear horns, has never been solved (cf. Brand I877; De Jorio I832; Elworthy I895; Cocchiara I932; Onians I95i). A recent study of gestures in western and southern Europe and the Mediterranean rehearses no fewer than fourteen different 'theories' on the symbolism of horns and the vertical horn-sign (Morris et al. I979). Although the authors have reasonable doubts about most of these explanations, they still believe that 'one day, some new evidence will come to light that will favour one above the rest' (1979: I2I). As will be shown, however, the problem has less to do with a scarcity of ethnographic data than with the mistake of separating a code from its context.Oddly enough, anthropologists writing on honour and shame in Mediterranean societies have fared no better than earlier folklorists and modern students of semiotics. Ignoring that 'the elements of symbolism are not things in themselves but "relations" organized in pairs and sets' (Leach I973: 48-9), their emphasis has been on horns as such, on horns as a phallic symbol, and on horns as attributes of the Devil (e.g. Pitt-Rivers I96I: i i6; I965: 46; Campbell I964: I52). This leaves the question regarding the implicit meaning of the cornute completely open.In the Mediterranean code of honour we are not concerned with horns as such, but with the horns of a specific animal, namely the billy-goat-a fact Man (N.S.) i6, 427-40

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Section: Earlier Versions Of This Article Were Presented At the Confementioning

confidence: 70%

Rams and Billy-Goats: A Key to the Mediterranean Code of Honour

Blok¹

1981

Man

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“…Chez les habitants du village basque de Saint-Engrâce, étudié par l'ethnologue britannique Sandra Ott (1979), la fabrication du fromage et la gestation d'un enfant sont homologues. À Saint-Engrâce, les hommes fabriquent deux fromages de brebis différents : le fromage « de maison » et le fromage « de montagne ».…”

Section: Symbolisme Et Métaphoreunclassified

“…Un exemple fixera les idées. À la fin du XIIIe et au début du XIVe siècle, on trouvait chez les vachers de l'Ariège et les habitants du village occitan de Montaillou des croyances fort semblables à celles étudiées par l'ethnographe Sandra Ott dans le village basque contemporain de Saint-Engrâce (Ott, 1979) : la présure y était en effet considérée comme « l'équivalent de ce qui fait cailler le lait des vaches [78] ou la semence de l'homme, et qui donc fabrique, selon les cas, le fromage ou le foetus » (LeRoy Ladurie, 1982 : 248). Or il existait à Montaillou une « herbe » qui, dans la magie amoureuse, avait une fonction contraceptive, et qui, utilisée par un berger malicieux contre l'un de ses confrères, empêchait l'action solidificatrice de la présure sur le lait : cette herbe était une anti-présure, elle inhibait l'action de la pré-sure comme celle du sperme (LeRoy Ladurie, 1982 : 247-249).…”

Section: Symbolisme Et Métaphoreunclassified

Symbolisme et analogie

Racine¹

2012

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“…Distillation appeared in Fougerolles at the end of the eighteenth century among farmers, before being gradually industrialized. But Ott, S. (1979) gives a very good example of this, in relation to a Basque shepherds' community (of Sainte Engrâce in France) where conception is compared with cheesemaking, referring once again in a very close way to the ancient explanations of Aristotle. By no means, therefore, could the contemporary elements of the body-still analogy be explained by the simple persistence of local knowledge of the ancient doctrine.…”

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confidence: 99%

Stills, spirits and bodies: a story of distillation

Voisenat¹

1995

French Cultural Studies

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Ever since spirits were discovered, around the twelfth century AD, men have assigned to them exceptional powers. Two main characteristics of alcohol have exerted a particular fascination: first, in spite of looking like water when it comes from the still, alcohol burns; second, it does not decay, and indeed it prevents bodies immersed in it from themselves going rotten.' These two characteristics were supposed to be linked to the process of production of alcohol, based on distillation, that means a separation, by the action of fire, of the different parts of a body, the most subtle being conserved, while the most terrestrial are rejected.But there were very different interpretations of the way these two characteristics were thought to act upon the body: until the sixteenth or even the seventeenth century, alcohol was thought to preserve life, but it was also soon to be considered as responsible for human spontaneous combustion,' and during the nineteenth century came to be thought of as the main agent of corporal and social disintegration.Nowadays, the negative aspects of alcohol are well known. However, the idea that it prolongs life, gives strength and cures indispositions linked with coldness or digestion is still widespread. The endurance of such ideas is what I have tried to investigate by means of a two-pronged study: first in Address for correspondence: Claudie Voisenat, Charg6e de mission, Mission du Patrimoine ethnologique, Minist6re de la Culture et de la Francophonie, 65, rue de Richelieu, Paris, France. 1 'Elle contregarde les chairs cuites ou crues de toute pourriture, si on les arrose ou trempe dans cette eau ... Son odeur fait mourir les serpents et chasse le venin' (Liébaut, 1579). These two characteristics were so important in the definition of spirits that Dujardin (1900) differentiates between the invention of the distillation of wine and the invention of alcohol. For him, even if the distillation of wine had been practised for a long time, we can only speak of the discovery of spirits when the special properties of this substance had been recognized. 2 In the middle of the nineteenth century, human spontaneous combustion, thought to strike mainly women, was considered as the extreme point of alcoholic addiction. Cf. Guionnet (1989) and Voisenat (1992).

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Aristotle Among the Basques: The 'Cheese Analogy' of Conception

Cited by 15 publications

References 2 publications

Rams and Billy-Goats: A Key to the Mediterranean Code of Honour

Rams and Billy-Goats: A Key to the Mediterranean Code of Honour

Symbolisme et analogie

Stills, spirits and bodies: a story of distillation

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