Representations

Representations - Jerry A. Fodor

Throughout human history societies and cultures have utilized representation, in the forms of images and words, as an essential means of expression and communication. This book is an investigation of the ways in which such representations relate to religion, ideology and culture, ranging across eastern, western and African cultures, and over the last two millennia. Representations are basic to human communication and expression. They occupy a central terrain in social, political and cultural consciousness and identity – mimetic, symbolic, and fictive. Jack Goody seeks to understand their meanings, and to show what they reveal about the societies in which they manifest themselves. The author explores the uneven distribution of representations in human societies and at different times within the same society. He shows how prone representations are to change during and after revolutions, and explains what lies behind their absence or suppression: the widespread scarcity, for examples, of figurative representation, and the decline of secular literature, between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, and the suppression of theatre during the Reformation. Jack Goody’s accessible approach to his subject will ensure that his book appeals equally to anthropologists and historians, and to all students of culture, art history and literature.