Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society Hau Books
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
DICTIONARY OF INDO-EUROPEAN CONCEPTS AND SOCIETY HAU BOOKS Executive Editor Giovanni da Col Managing Editor Sean M. Dowdy Editorial Board Anne-Christine Taylor Carlos Fausto Danilyn Rutherford Ilana Gershon Jason Throop Joel Robbins Jonathan Parry Michael Lempert Stephan Palmié www.haubooks.com DICTIONARY OF INDO-EUROPEAN CONCEPTS AND SOCIETY Émile Benveniste Foreword by Giorgio Agamben Translated by Elizabeth Palmer HAU Books Chicago © 2016 HAU Books. Foreword: “The Vocabulary and the Voice” © 2016 HAU Books and Giorgio Agamben. Original French edition, Le vocabulaire des institutions Indo-Europeenes, © 1969 Les Editions de Minuit, Paris. English translation by Elizabeth Palmer (with summaries, table, and original index by Jean Lallot), © 1973 Faber and Faber Ltd., London (also published in 1973 by University of Miami Press). Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore Cover image: “The Tower of Babel,” Hendrick van Cleve III (ca. 1525–1589), ca. Sixteenth Century, Oil, Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands, KM 100.870 Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-0-9861325-9-9 LCCN: 2016955902 HAU Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com HAU Books is marketed and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. Table of Contents FOREWORD “The Vocabulary and the Voice” by Giorgio Agamben ix Preface xxi List of Abbreviations xxvii BOOK I: ECONOMY SECTION I: LIVESTOCK AND WEALTH Chapter One: Male and Sire 5 Chapter Two: A Lexical Opposition in Need of Revision: sūs and porcus 9 Chapter Three: Próbaton and the Homeric Economy 19 Chapter Four: Livestock and Money: pecu and pecunia 27 SECTION II: GIVING AND TAKING Chapter Five: Gift and Exchange 43 Chapter Six: Giving, Taking, and Receiving 55 Chapter Seven: Hospitality 61 Chapter Eight: Personal Loyalty 75 vi DICTIONARY OF INDO-EUROPEAN CONCEPTS AND SOCIETY SECTION III: PURCHASE Chapter Nine: Two Ways of Buying 93 Chapter Ten: Purchase and Redemption 97 Chapter Eleven: An Occupation without a Name: Commerce 105 SECTION IV: ECONOMIC OBLIGATIONS Chapter Twelve: Accountancy and Valuation 115 Chapter Thirteen: Hiring and Leasing 119 Chapter Fourteen: Price and Wages 125 Chapter Fifteen: Credence and Belief 133 Chapter Sixteen: Lending, Borrowing, and Debt 141 Chapter Seventeen: Gratuitousness and Gratefulness 155 BOOK II: THE VOCABULARY OF KINSHIP Introduction 161 Chapter One: The Importance of the Concept of Paternity 165 Chapter Two: Status of the Mother and Matrilineal Descent 171 Chapter Three: The Principle of Exogamy and its Applications 177 Chapter Four: The Indo-European Expression for “Marriage” 191 Chapter Five: Kinship Resulting from Marriage 197 Chapter Six: Formation and Suffixation of the Terms for Kinship 205 Chapter Seven: Words Derived from the Terms for Kinship 215 BOOK III: SOCIAL STATUS Chapter One: Tripartition of Functions 227 Chapter Two: The Four Divisions of Society 239 Chapter Three: The Free Man 261 Chapter Four: Phílos 273 Chapter Five: The Slave and the Stranger 289 Chapter Six: Cities and Communities 295 BOOK IV: ROYALTY AND ITS PRIVILEGES Chapter One: Rex 307 Chapter Two: xšay- and Iranian Kingship 313 TABLE OF CONTENTS vii Chapter Three: Hellenic Kingship 319 Chapter Four: The Authority of the King 329 Chapter Five: Honor and Honors 337 Chapter Six: Magic Power 349 Chapter Seven: Krátos 361 Chapter Eight: Royalty and Nobility 373 Chapter Nine: The King and His People 377 BOOK V: LAW Chapter One: Thémis 385 Chapter Two: Díkē 391 Chapter Three: Ius and the Oath in Rome 395 Chapter Four: *med- and the Concept of Measure 405 Chapter Five: Fas 413 Chapter Six: The Censor and Auctoritas 423 Chapter Seven: The Quaestor and the *Prex 431 Chapter Eight: The Oath in Greece 439 BOOK VI: RELIGION Chapter One: The “Sacred” 453 Chapter Two: The Libation 477 Chapter Three: The Sacrifice 489 Chapter Four: The Vow 497 Chapter Five: Prayer and Supplication 507 Chapter Six: The Latin Vocabulary of Signs and Omens 517 Chapter Seven: Religion and Superstition 525 Table 538 Bibliographical Note 541 Index 543 FOREWORD The Vocabulary and the Voice GIORGIO AGAMBEN Translation by Thomas Zummer Émile Benveniste’s Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes is cer- tainly the culmination of twentieth-century linguistics, in both senses of the term.1 It is here that the nineteenth-century project of comparative grammar had reached its highest point, and, simultaneously, coincided with its end. While there certainly will be further studies that prolong the scientific orientation em- bodied in the prestigious genealogy of Bréal, Saussure, Meillet, and Benveniste, it is also the case that, after the death of Benveniste, linguistics as a whole has taken quite different paths, whereof the school of transformational-generative grammar is such an outstanding example. It is all the more pressing, then, to understand what gives Benveniste’s conception of language such an unusual 1. Works by Benveniste are cited in this foreword with the following abbreviations: Voc. = Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, Minuit, Paris 1969, Vols. 1 and II; Pr. = Problèmes de linguistique générale, Gallimard, vol. I, Paris 1966, vol.II, Paris 1974; L. = Dernières Leçons, Gallimard-Seuil, Paris 2012. Full bibliographical citations of these texts are also included in the references list at the end of the foreword. —Eds. x GIORGIO AGAMBEN character. It is necessary, in other words, to investigate the background, to show what is really diversified, and in this manner, to try to understand upon what seemingly insurmountable obstacle this project has been shipwrecked. The conception that it was possible to trace, through purely linguistic analy- sis, the prehistoric, or at least the most archaic stages of social history, was earlier hinted at by Hermann Usener in his book Götternamen ([1896] 2000). Usener, whose research concerned the names of the Gods, noted that for such an investigation we have no other documents than those that come from an analy- sis of language (ibid.: 5). As early as 1859, the Genevan linguist and patrician Adolphe Pictet, who had a likely influence on the young Saussure, published the two volumes of his masterpiece Les origines indoeuropéennes. As his sub- title, Essai de paléontologie linguistique, suggests, his purpose was to recon- struct “the whole life of a prehistoric people,” the Indo-Europeans (or Aryans as he preferred to call them), entirely through the analysis and comparison of words. Because “words last as long as bones” the linguist, like the paleon- tologist—whose examination of the fossil record “can not only reconstruct the animal, but also instruct us about habits, ways of moving, feeding, etc.”—can replenish, through an examination of common linguistic data, “the state of ma- terial, social and moral welfare of the people who have produced this primitive idiom.” (Pictet 1877: 6). Still, Benveniste was determined to put himself at a distance from such a model. While not specifically naming Pictet in the Preface to the Vocabu- laire—probably one of the last texts he wrote (the Vocabulaire was published four months after the hemiplegia which rendered him aphasic until his death)— Benveniste refers to his predecessors in these terms: Il est apparu très tôt aux spécialistes de l’indo-européen que les concordances entre les vocabulaires des langues anciennes illustraient les principaux aspects, surtout matériels, d’une culture commune; on a ainsi les receueilli preuves de l’héritage lexical dans les termes de parenté, les numéraux, les noms d’animaux, des métaux, d’instruments agricoles, etc. Plusieurs auteurs successifs, du XIXe siècle jusqu’à ces dernières années, se sont des employés à dresser des réper- toires, au demeurant fort utiles, de ces notions communes.2 (Voc., I, pg. 9) 2. “Very early on it occurred to specialists in the Indo-European field that correspondences between the vocabularies of ancient languages illustrate the principal aspects of a common culture, particularly of material culture. Thus FOREWORD xi Although he adds immediately: “Notre entreprise est entièrement différente”3 (ibid.), and the antithesis is dramatically enhanced in the following pages: “Nous ne voyons guère des travaux antérieurs auxquels nous aurions pu con- fronter nos propres raisonnements”4 (ibid., pg. 12). What does this incomparable novelty consist of? Benveniste soon clarifies his purpose. For him, the task is not to make an inventory of the Indo-European institutional realities as they were defined by lexical correspondences between languages, but to investigate the genesis and development of the vocabulary that refers to those realities. L’aspect historique et sociologique de ces procés est laissé à d’autres. Si nous nous occupons du verbe grec hēgéomai et de son dérivé hēgemṓn, c’est pour voir comment s’est constituée une notion qui est celle d l’ ‘Hegemonie,’ mais sans égard au fait que gr. hēgemonía est tout à tour la suprématie d’un individu, ou d’une nation, ou l’équivalent de l’imperium romain, etc., seul nous retient le rapport, difficile à établir, entre un terme d’autorité tel quehēgemṓn et le verbe hegéomai au sens de ‘penser, juger.’ Nous par éclairons par là la signification; d’autres se chargeront de la désignation.5 (ibid., pg. 10) The opposition is reiterated at the end of the Preface of the Vocabulaire: “Il s’agit, par la comparaison et au moyen d’une analyse diachronique, de faire instances of the lexical inheritance were collected from expressions for family relationships, numbers, names of animals, metals, agricultural implements, etc. A series of authors, ranging from nineteenth century until recent times, devoted themselves to the compilation of such lists of common expressions, which are of an evident utility” (this volume, pg. xxii). 3. “Our enterprise is of a wholly different nature.” (this volume, pg. xxiii) 4. “[W]e are not aware of much previous work with which we could have compared our arguments.” (this volume, pg.