Interchapter Query - 7. Social Division Into Calendrical Tribes and Ranks

Copy UUID Return to the Host Page See All Queries See General Queries

Interchapter Query

Quoted text:

But Benveniste (1973: pp. 249–253) pointed out that the most archaic ideas of “oikos” (like the Latin “domus”) referred not to the individual household but to a larger social grouping. It meant the “house” in an extended sense to a single family, a broader related grouping rather than just a collection of houses. The nominal stem for “oikos,” “weik” or “weiko,” denoted a group formed from several families. Benveniste wrote: “[Greek] (w)oîkos occupies an intermediate position: first ‘(large) house,’ in which all the descendants of the head of the family lived, then a word substituted for dómos… and finally ‘house, building’ in oiko-dómos ‘builder, architect’ with its numerous derivatives and compounds. Thus the word for a social unit has been transferred to the material sphere which delimits that unit.”

The pattern of evolution seems to reflect “the break-up of the ‘Grossfamilie’ into separate families.”

By Aristotle’s time the oikos (Roman domus) had become “the smallest division and the first form of society which existed, and he defines it as a community of husband and wife, of master and slaves: this is a notion like in Roman familia.”

Benveniste concluded (p. 253) that “Today we see things differently; such a reconstruction, which starts from a social cell and proceeds by successive accretions, is false. What existed from the start was the society as a whole and not the family, then the clan, then the city. Society from its origin was divided into units which it comprised. The families are necessarily grouped within a unit, and so on. But Aristotle [Politics] makes into a universal phenomenon and a philosophic necessity what was represented in his own society: he makes an absolute of a particular social state of affairs.”

Benveniste added that in Greek prehistory “the ‘house’ was not a building,” but a “social grouping.”

In dividing any society, there are two basic decisions to be made: citizens and their families, versus outsiders. There are many individuals who do not fit into the citizenry and its subgroupings. These include on the one hand outright foreigners or resident aliens such as the Athenian metics, and on the other hand public workers (the Greek demiourgoi, servants of the demos). It was typical for archaic society to establish a kind of parallel body or set of bodies, to set certain functions apart from the individual clans to serve the “higher” communal purpose. Typically this was done through the temples or related sanctified groupings.

Latin “civitas,” meaning “the whole body of citizens,” seems to have derived from the old Indo-European word for “citadel.”

Likewise the Greek “polis” stemmed from the fortified Athenian “acropolis” (high city) behind the walls from a high defensive position. Benveniste (1973: pp. 295ff.) pointed out that Thucydides (II.15) stated explicitly that “the akrópolis (citadel) is still today called pólis by the Athenians.”

Note that the author had a note that this might be a good transition between Chapter 7 and Chapter 8, but since both chapters are stubs, we’re not sure if some or all belongs in which chapter. Let us know what you think. See also the General Queries page for Chapter 8 (particularly this query) and the General Queries page for Chapter 7, specifically the query about the stub section on Etymology (depending on which you came from; the quoted text is nearly identical except for a mention of Chapter 8 in the former).

Suggest an edit or addition for this query. Join the research!

Reply