Michael Wintroub takes as the focus of his research what Mauss has called “total social phenomena”—that is, phenomena in which religious, scientific, legal, moral, aesthetic and economic institutions find simultaneous expression. He is concerned with the mediations and connections between these various dimensions of human activity and how they develop over time and over space. His sources are rituals, ceremonies, festivities, and technical practices; words, poems, pictures, rhetorical rules and classificatory schemes; ships, sailors, poets, courts and kings; coins, artefacts,...
