Totem and Taboo

This chapter surveys the linguistic landscape of taboo avoidance and its role in word loss and meaning change. Freud invoked Carl Abel’s “universal phenomenon” of Gegensinn in supp...

The wholly updated Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud is grounded in James Strachey’s canonical translation while annotating and clarifyi...

From ancient times to the present, taboos have affected our societies, as demonstrated in this encyclopedia full of unusual information from around the world. The topic of tab...

Angels present an opportunity to explore the theme of male flight, in that all angels were originally male, and sometimes said to be androgynous, which is much the same thing. Once...

From the earliest periods of history human beings have used mind-altering substances. In addition, in almost all religions we find techniques for meditation which may induce states...

The first decades of the twentieth century saw a flurry of dance ‘crazes’, from the tango and the Charleston to the jitterbug, increasingly mapped onto the language of blackness. J...

The first conclusion chapter draws out the implications of Chapter 7 more fully, putting them in comparative perspective with the lessons drawn from the West African cases. In part...

Climate Engineering: A Normative Perspective takes as its subject a prospective policy response to the urgent problem of climate change, one previously considered taboo. Climate en...