Caroline Humphrey

Quotes From

The Archetypal Actions of Ritual (1994)

• Ritualization, by presenting action to experience as already-constituted and hence apprehensible elements, allows a wide variety of actual conduct to be counted unambiguously as successful performance, and this is independent of the attribution of particular propositional meanings to the acts.#Quoted in Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, Michael Puett, & Bennett Simon, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (2008)

“Barter and Economic Disintegration” (1985)

• Barter in the present world is, in the vast majority of cases, a post-monetary phenomenon (i.e. it coexists with money), and that it characterises economies which are, or have become, de-coupled from monetary markets.#
• Delayed barter could only exist generally in face-to-face communities in which every exchange partner has knowledge about others such that he can trust payment to be made for items given. #