Honneur, foi et croyance. Approche linguistique anthropologique des valeurs morales et religieuses

Albert Doja
2011 Anthropos: Internationale Zeitschrift für Völker- und Sprachenkunde  
The aim of this article is to explore the ethnographic-linguistic nexus used to express institutions and concepts of honour, belief, and trust, which can prove to be crucial for understanding social values of morals and religion. To designate notions of religion and belief Albanians use terms which draw their origin in the same Indo-European common stock shared with equivalent Latin and Ancient Greek terms and which indicate the moral values of honour such as oath and given word as well as the
more » ... trategies of matrimonial alliance. This is to say that terms of this lexical field indicate concepts that appear crucial for understanding the functioning of the family, kinship system, social group, and society as a whole. They demonstrate that social organisation is based not only on a complex of honour and shame at the level of ethic and moral values, but also on lineage structures strongly pregnant with symbolic and actual significance, on the primacy of descent and blood affiliation, and on implementing collective responsibility through complex mechanisms of alliance and feud systems. Alternatively, to better understand not only the expression of moral values but also the nature of religion, one should not start from the subjectivity of a belief or the objectivity of a knowledge, but from the relation that social practices and discourses establish between people. Faith and religion are the virtue of honour, the weight of belief and confidence in the given word. [Albania, ethno-linguistics, honour, belief, trust, religion]
doi:10.5771/0257-9774-2011-1-161 fatcat:sxljhkzybjaa3ohlm6ne4zfy7m