Böcker av Carles Salazar

On the fringe of western Europe, yet fully integrated into the capitalist market, the rural economy of the west of Ireland seems to provide a fascinating object of analysis to the student of European folk cultures. This book concentrates on a particular aspect of that rural economy: the social organization and cultural construction of work in a community of family farms. The concept of work, which is primarily farm work, is taken here as a very elementary set of ideas, images and experiences that enable us to penetrate in the different cultural spheres that intersect life on an Irish family farm. Work, the author concludes, is to this farming community what the Kula ring is to the Trobriand islanders - a kind of Maussian "total social fact" the analysis of which incorporates a comprehensive description of a particular social system.

The history of sexual morality in Ireland has been traditionally associated with repression. In the last two decades, however, repression seems to have given way to its exact opposite. But where did this "e;repression"e; originate? And how can we account for this sudden and sweeping transformation in sexual mores? Based on solid ethnographic and historical analysis of sexual morality in rural Ireland, augmented by comparative data from Papua New Guinea, and being informed by from Freud's emblematic concept of repression, the author draws new conclusions that not only apply to the specific case of his Irish material but shed new light on the specific nature of an anthropological approach to the study of human societies.