Maurice Godelier

Is anthropology simply a continuation of colonial domination and cultural imperialism by other means, or has it-since its nineteenth-century rebirth as a purportedly scientific discipline-produced reliable knowledge about the cultures it studies? Is anthropology a mirror-which reflects only the preoccupations of the (Western) anthropologist-or a window, through which it is possible to see, though not with the same eyes as their members, other cultures? Godelier places social anthropology in its historical perspective, with its origins in the West and, more particularly, colonialism, while also arguing that it has to some extent transcended its origins, achieving a measure of scientific objectivity and validity that cannot be reduced to a continuation of the colonial project. A final chapter discusses issues surrounding the presentation of non-western cultural artefacts to a Western general public.

Reconstructing Anthropology

In and Out of the West

What is the specificity of the human race within nature? How is its history to be explained? What impact do material realities, natural and man-made, have on human beings? What role does thought, in all its dimensions, play in the production of social relations? How are the human sciences to be advanced today? These are among the crucial questions confronted by Godelier in this key book of contemporary social theory. Its point of departure lies in a fact and a hypothesis. The fact: in contrast to other social animals, human beings do not just live in society; they produce society in order to live. The hypothesis: because they have the unique capacity to appropriate and transform nature, they produce culture and create history. Drawing on his own extensive fieldwork and ranging over the most diverse ethnographic data, Godelier substantiates his case by attending to the analysis of both social relations of production and the production of social relations. In a sustained challenge to currently dominant schemas, he offers a series of highly original theses on the constitution, reproduction and transformation of societies, recasting the distinction between infrastructure and superstructures, illuminating the relations between economic determination and political/ideological dominance, and clarifying the character of ideology and its central role in the perpetuation of dominance and exploitation.

The Mental and the Material

Marilyn Strathern

The societies of Melanesia have been a constant stimulus to anthropological theory. In this collection of essays, anthropologists who have worked in all parts of the Melanesian region of the Pacific bring their expertise to bear on a single theoretical issue. This is a hypothesis formulated by Maurice Godelier concerning the relationship between power, kinship and wealth. Although tightly focused on Godelier's work, the book opens up a major enquiry into the constitution of society in a part of the world where men of prominence come to personify the nature of power. 'Big men', entrepreneurs of exchanges, and 'great men', who flourish in societies characterised by restricted exchanges and ritual complexity, appear to belong to quite different systems. This book considers how substantial the difference between them really is.

Personifications of Power in Melanesia

Big Men and Great Men

Fredric Jameson

André Gorz

Jean Baudrillard

Theodor W. Adorno

Slavoj Zizek

Max Horkheimer

Alain Badiou

Wilhelm Reich

Simon Critchley

Various

Karl Korsch

Ludwig Feuerbach

Valentin Volosinov

Radical Thinkers

Thomas R. Trautmann

Franklin Edmund Tjon Sie Fat

Exploring a classic topic, this bold new work demonstrates anew the centrality of kinship analysis to the anthropological endeavor. Book jacket.

Transformations of Kinship

When we think of giving gifts, we think of exchanging objects that carry with them economic or symbolic value. But is every valuable thing a potentially exchangeable item, whose value can be transferred? In The Enigma of the Gift, the distinguished French anthropologist Maurice Godelier reassesses the significance of gifts in social life by focusing on sacred objects, which are never exchanged despite the value they possess. Beginning with an analysis of the seminal work of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strass, and drawing on his own fieldwork in Melanesia, Godelier argues that traditional theories are flawed because they consider only exchangeable gifts. By explaining gift-giving in terms of sacred objects and the authoritative conferral of power associated with them, Godelier challenges both recent and traditional theories of gift-giving, provocatively refreshing a traditional debate. Elegantly translated by Nora Scott, The Enigma of the Gift is at once a major theoretical contribution and an essential guide to the history of the theory of the gift.

The Enigma of the Gift

With marriage in decline, divorce on the rise, the demise of the nuclear family, and the increase in marriages and adoptions among same-sex partners, it is clear that the structures of kinship in the modern West are in a state of flux. In The Metamorphoses of Kinship, the world-renowned anthropologist Maurice Godelier contextualizes these developments, surveying the accumulated experience of humanity with regard to such phenomena as the organization of lines of descent, sexuality and sexual prohibitions. In parallel, Godelier studies the evolution of Western conjugal and familial traditions from their roots in the nineteenth century to the present. The conclusion he draws is that it is never the case that a man and a woman are sufficient on their own to raise a child, and nowhere are relations of kinship or the family the keystone of society. Godelier argues that the changes of the last thirty years do not herald the disappearance or death agony of kinship, but rather its remarkable metamorphosis—one that, ironically, is bringing us closer to the “traditional” societies studied by ethnologists.

The Metamorphoses of Kinship

Godelier Maurice

This book presents a detailed account of the lives of the Baruya, a tribal society in highlands of Papua New Guinea and will interest scholars and students of anthropology.

Male Domination and Power Among the New Guinea Baruya

The Making of Great Men

This book is the result of a research project begun by the author in 1958 with the aim of answering two questions: First, what is the rationality of the economic systems that appear and disappear throughout history—in other words, what is their hidden logic and the underlying necessity for them to exist, or to have existed? Second, what are the conditions for a rational understanding of these systems—in other words, for a fully developed comparative economic science? The field of investigation opened up by these two questions is vast, touching on the foundations of social reality and on how to understand them. The author, being a Marxist, sought the answers, as he writes, ‘not in philosophy or by philosophical means, but in and through examining the knowledge accumulated by the sciences.’ The stages of his journey from philosophy to economics and then to anthropology are indicated by the divisions of his book. Godelier rejects, at the outset, any attempt to tackle the question of rationality or irrationality of economic science and of economic realities from the angle of an a priori idea, a speculative definition of what is rational. Such an approach can yield only, he feels, an ideological result. Rather, he treats the appearance and disappearance of social and economic systems in history as being governed by a necessity ‘wholly internal to the concrete structures of social life.

Rationality and Irrationality in Economics

Maurice Godelier, au début de sa carrière, fut maître-assistant de Claude Lévi-Strauss, alors titulaire de la chaire d’anthropologie sociale au Collège de France. C’est sans doute dès cette époque qu’il conçut le projet d’écrire un jour « son » Lévi-Strauss.Le voici, ouvrage puissant fondé sur une relecture ligne à ligne de l’œuvre de son aîné. Et d’abord de son versant théorique : les structures élémentaires de la parenté, les mythes et la pensée mythique et religieuse. L’objet premier de ces parcours au cœur de l’ambition structuraliste ? Mettre en valeur les acquis, souligner les limites et les failles pour poursuivre le travail de connaissance.Une œuvre, donc, qui en révèle une autre, l’une et l’autre dignes de figurer au premier rang des productions de l’intelligence humaine.Anthropologue de renommée internationale, lauréat du prix de l’Académie française et du prix international Alexander von Humboldt en sciences sociales, ancien directeur scientifique du département des sciences de l’homme et de la société du CNRS, dont il est médaillé d’or, Maurice Godelier est l’auteur d’une œuvre considérable, dont L’Idéel et le Matériel (Fayard, 1984), L’Énigme du don (Fayard, 1996), Métamorphoses de la parenté (Fayard, 2004), et Au fondement des sociétés humaines (Albin Michel, 2007).

Lévi-Strauss

"Exploring the close relationship between the real, the symbolic and imaginary Lévi-Strauss held that 'the real, the symbolic and the imaginary' are three separate orders. Maurice Godelier demonstrates the contrary: the real is not separate from the symbolic and the imaginary. Godelier's book goes to the strategic heart of the social sciences, for to examine the nature and role of the imaginary and the symbolic is also to attempt to account for the basic components of all societies and ultimately of human existence. And these aspects in turn shape our social and personal identity"--

The Imagined, the Imaginary and the Symbolic

Peggy Reeves Sanday

A new approach to understanding the phenomenon of ritual cannibalism through a detailed examination of selected tribal societies demonstrates that the practice is closely linked to people's orientation to the world, and helps distinguish "cultural self."

Cannibalism as a Cultural System

Divine Hunger

Antropología y economía

One of the world’s leading anthropologists assesses the work of the founder of structural anthropology As a young man, Maurice Godelier was Claude Lévi-Strauss’s assistant. Since then, Godelier has drawn on this experience to develop a profound and intimate grasp on the writings of his former teacher, one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Meticulously researched, Lévi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought will prove indispensable to students of Lévi-Strauss and to structural anthropologists more generally. It is a compelling and comprehensive study destined to become the definitive work on the evolution of Lévi-Strauss’s ideas, at the heart of which lies his analysis of kinship and myth.

A Critical Study of His Thought

Claude Lévi-Strauss

A declining marriage rate, rising divorce rate, families breaking up and reforming, homosexual marriage and adoption. Where are the transformations in the family today taking us? In order to understand what is happening and what awaits us, the world-renowned anthropologist Maurice Godelier has decided to open up the whole question of kinship, surveying the accumulated experiences of humanity as regards marriages and unions, the organization of lines of descent, sexuality and sexual prohibitions. In parallel, Godelier studies the history of the study of kinship, from the nineteenth century to the present, in order to develop his own hypotheses. He concludes that it is nowhere the case that a man and a woman are sufficient on their own to bring a child into existence, and nowhere are relations of kinship or the family the foundation stone of a society. Godelier argues that the changes of the last thirty years do not herald disappearance or death agony of kinship but rather its remarkable metamorphosis - one that, ironically, has brought us closer to the "traditional" societies studied by ethnologists.

Maurice Godelier

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