Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being (Women & Culture) - Tapa blanda

The myths of Centaurs and Amazons are particularly illuminating; here we see a conceptual parallelism of beast and woman that have to be defeated to ensure the survival of Hellenism itself. . . . The picture that emerges from Professor duBois's investigations of the archaic and classical periods is not a very pretty one to contemplate, but the lessons are there to be learned." -Gregory Nagy, Harvard University "Its great virtue lies in its bringing together of material in various fields-literature, philosophy, art, history-in order to characterize basic ways of thinking in a culture." -Bryn Mawr Classical Review

In Centaurs and Amazons, Page duBois offers a prehistory of hierarchy. Using structural anthropology, symbolic analysis, and recent literary theory, she demonstrates a shift in Greek thought from the fifth to the fourth century B.C. that had a profound influence upon subsequent Western culture and politics. Through an analysis of mythology, drama, sculpture, architecture, and Greek vase painting, duBois documents the transition from a system of thought that organized the experience of difference in terms of polarity and analogy to one based upon a relatively rigid hierarchical scheme. This was the beginning of "the great chain of being," the philosophical construct that all life was organized in minute gradations of superiority and inferiority. This scheme, in various guises, has continued to influence philosophical and political thought. The author's intelligent and discriminating use of scholarship from various fields makes Centaurs and Amazons an impressive interdisciplinary study of interest to classicists, feminist scholars, historians, art historians, anthropologists, and political scientists.