Tabou et transgressions: Actes du colloque organise par le College de France, Paris, les 11-12 avril 2012 [Hardcover]

This colloquium brought together biblical scholars, Assyriologists and scholars of Antiquity to discuss the question of taboo and its transgressions, from the perspective of their disciplines and through their particular corpus of texts: Bible, literary or archaeological evidences from Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the Mamelouk period... On the one side, the contributions highlight the absence of a term that would be the equivalent of the word taboo , originally borrowed from the Polynesian languages by last century's anthropologists. It appears however that several characteristics connected to this concept are recurring in the societies under scrutiny. Thus, several contributions indicated the importance of food prohibitions as identity markers. These table manners , such as the blood interdiction in ancient Israel, allow a group to establish its own boundaries from the inside, and to define its modes of belonging and recognition. It also happens that specific diets are used to describe a group from the outside. It can prove unjustified and caricatural, as is the case for the pork-less diet attributed to the Egyptians by Herodotus, or, on the contrary, reflect a socio-historic reality, like in the case of the Amorites, a nomadic tribe which ate desert truffles and raw meat. The identity function of diets is also highlighted in interethnic meetings, when minority groups, like the Jews in the Hellenistic periods, were forced to adapt their practice to avoid being excluded from the city's circles of influence. Sexual intercourse is a domain where laws hold little sway and where taboos help to define limits. Thus, prostitution in Ancient Israel was discussed as well as the metaphorical use of prostitution in prophetic discourse. Other contributions also analyzed the problem of interethnic marriages that blur the boundaries of the community, and the possibility, in extreme situations, to defy fundamental prohibitions such as incest in order to prese