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- Title
PROTEST AND PROFANATION: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Traditions, Part II.
- Authors
Scott, James C.
- Abstract
In this analysis of little traditions and popular religion in Europe and Southeast Asia, the author's point has been to demonstrate that, among the peasantry in most complex agrarian societies one can find a pattern of profanations symbolic reversals of the existing social order. Much as the official religious doctrine is selected, reworked, and profaned in little tradition cults, so is the existing political order symbolically negated in popular millennial traditions. For the most part, as the author has stressed, these symbolic reversals are an undertone a counterpoint, to dominant religious and political ideas. When outside forces or natural disasters appear to overwhelm the peasantry and play havoc with the normal categories of experience, however, this alternative World may chart a new course of action and open up new possibilities. This alternative symbolic world is constructed, one must not forget, largely in reaction to what might be described as the historic process of modernization-the creation of a bureaucratic state.
- Subjects
EUROPE; SOUTHEAST Asia; RELIGIONS; PEASANT uprisings; REVOLUTIONS &; socialism; AGRICULTURE &; politics
- Publication
Theory & Society, 1977, Vol 4, Issue 2, p211
- ISSN
0304-2421
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/BF00156453