Reviews for Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France

The average rating for Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-02-08 00:00:00 Prakash Sharma This book was remarkable for a few reasons. First, I admire the political conviction of its authors. It's so rare to see academic books espouse a clear point of view (in this case: materialism is bad). I guess academics were able to do as much in the 1970s. Maybe someday we'll be back there. Second, the book does a remarkable job looking at an understudied subject and treating it fully (312 in-depth interviews!) and with the care and concern it deserves. It doesn't strive toward broad generalizations, but attempts to draw conclusions based on a huge amount of data in a way that both seems fair to the research subjects and not overambitious in terms of its actual results. And it does this while also clearly showing how the data is distributed, coded, and aggregated. I joked with Jason a bit that perhaps the reason this book isn't cited more often is due to the craziness of the first author's last name, but then I looked him up and found out he's remained famous and well-regarded (he's the "flow" guy). So, perhaps the real reason this book is so little cited is because people recognize the need to update the scholarship (to contemporary times) and can't bear the thought of embarking on such a study. It wouldn't be easy, but I imagine the results could be incredibly fruitful. In the meantime, I'll probably be able to use some of the actual data they cite regarding the importance of books as well as some of their more theoretical offerings regarding the motivations for assigning meaning to objects, particularly those in the home (the latter includes discussions of cultivation and symbolic worth).

Review # 2 was written on 2016-04-08 00:00:00 Ramiro Perez Del Castillo 3.75