Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Epidemic, ideas and classical Athenian society
- 3 Disease, dragons and saints: the management of epidemics in the Dark Ages
- 4 Epidemic disease in formal and popular thought in early Islamic Society
- 5 Plague and perceptions of the poor in early modern Italy
- 6 Dearth, dirt and fever epidemics: rewriting the history of British ‘public health’, 1780–1850
- 7 Epidemics and revolutions: cholera in nineteenth-century Europe
- 8 Hawaiian depopulation as a model for the Amerindian experience
- 9 Plague panic and epidemic politics in India, 1896–1914
- 10 Plagues of beasts and men; prophetic responses to epidemic in eastern and southern Africa
- 11 Syphilis in colonial East and Central Africa: the social construction of an epidemic
- 12 The early years of AIDS in the United Kingdom 1981–6: historical perspectives
- Index
- Past and Present Publications
3 - Disease, dragons and saints: the management of epidemics in the Dark Ages
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Epidemic, ideas and classical Athenian society
- 3 Disease, dragons and saints: the management of epidemics in the Dark Ages
- 4 Epidemic disease in formal and popular thought in early Islamic Society
- 5 Plague and perceptions of the poor in early modern Italy
- 6 Dearth, dirt and fever epidemics: rewriting the history of British ‘public health’, 1780–1850
- 7 Epidemics and revolutions: cholera in nineteenth-century Europe
- 8 Hawaiian depopulation as a model for the Amerindian experience
- 9 Plague panic and epidemic politics in India, 1896–1914
- 10 Plagues of beasts and men; prophetic responses to epidemic in eastern and southern Africa
- 11 Syphilis in colonial East and Central Africa: the social construction of an epidemic
- 12 The early years of AIDS in the United Kingdom 1981–6: historical perspectives
- Index
- Past and Present Publications
Summary
Dragons exist. Let us begin with the effort of imagination necessary to make that assertion plausible. Let us entertain the idea that never having seen a dragon may reflect only narrowness of experience. Others have, if not encountered the beast, at least come close to doing so. Here is the opening of a paper by the anthropologist Dan Sperber, appropriately entitled ‘Apparently Irrational Beliefs’. It takes the form of a quotation from his field diary:
[Dorze, Southern Ethiopia]
Sunday 24 viii 69
Saturday morning old Filate came to see me in a state of great excitement: ‘Three times I came to see you, and you weren't there!…Do you want to do something?…If you do it, God will be pleased, the Government will be pleased. So?’
‘Well, if it is a good thing and I can do it, I shall do it.’
‘I have talked to no one about it: will you kill it?’
‘Kill? Kill what?’
‘Its heart is made of gold, it has one horn on the nape of its neck.
It is golden all over. It does not live far, two days' walk at most. If you kill it, you will become a great man!’
And so on…It turns out Filate wants me to kill a dragon. He is to come back this afternoon with someone who has seen it, and they will tell me more…
Filate did not return – to the anthropologist's embarrassed relief.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Epidemics and IdeasEssays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, pp. 45 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992
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