Anthropology as Memory

This essay is offered particularly as a contribution to the relationship between theological and literary writings on the Holocaust. Franz Baermann Steiner’s (1909–1952) detailed sociological work – he taught at the Department of Social Anthropology at Oxford and developed a sociology of danger that strongly influenced Mary Douglas, T. W. Adorno, Iris Murdoch, H.G. Adler and Julia Kristeva – contrasts with Canetti’s emphasis on shock. Canetti’s response to the Holocaust constitutes, in Dominick