Maurice Godelier - Böcker

This work reassesses the significance of gifts in social life by focusing on sacred objects which are never exchanged despite the value they possess. It presents an analysis of the seminal work of Marcel Mauss and Claude Levi-Strauss, and drawing on his own fieldwork in Melanesia, Maurice Godelier argues that traditional theories are flawed because they consider only exchangeable gifts. By explaining gift-giving in terms of sacred objects and the power associated with them, Godelier challenges both recent and traditional theories of gift-giving.

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.

The Baruya are a tribal society in highlands Papua New Guinea, with whom Western contact was first made in 1951. During the last twenty years, Maurice Godelier has spent many long periods of time living among this people, and in this book he presents a detailed account of their lives and their forms of social organization. The focus of the book is on inequality and power in this classless society. Godelier discusses both the power that certain men (the Great men) have over others through their control of war, shamanism, hunting, and rites of initiation, as well as the extraordinary power and domination that men in general exert over women. He explores how this domination is produced and maintained, examining it in particular through a detailed study of male and female initiation. He also analyzes the role that sexuality plays in Baruya thought and theories, showing that in the Baruya view, every aspect of domination - be it (in Western categorization) economic, political, or symbolic - can be explained by sexuality, and the different role of the sexes in human reproduction. A major contribution both to the ethnography of Melanesia and to anthropological theory, the book will interest scholars and students of anthropology, as well as other readers interested in power and inequality, and in the relationships between the sexes.

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? Deriving from the 2002 Page-Barbour Lectures delivered by the French anthropologist Maurice Godelier at the University of Virginia, and supplemented by additional lectures and articles by the author, In and Out of the West addresses a series of fundamental topics and issues in social anthropology--including family, kinship, and the construction of the self. He particularly emphasizes the strategic role of political-religious relations in the construction of societies and social life.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, reflecting his experience as the first head of the science department of the new Quai Branly anthropological museum in Paris, discusses issues surrounding the presentation of nonwestern cultural artifacts to a Western general public.

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.

One of the world's leading anthropologists assesses the work of the founder of structural anthropologyAs 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.

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.

With marriage in decline, divorce on the rise and the demise of the nuclear family, 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 contextualises these developments, surveying the accumulated experience of humanity with regard to such phenomena as the organisation 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.

What is incest? Is it universally prohibited? Does this prohibition concern only "biological" kinships or does it extend to various "social" kinships, such as those that are formed today in so-called blended families but which also exist in many other societies?This prohibition plays a fundamental role in the functioning of the multiple kinship systems studied throughout the world. But where does it come from? Can we think, with Claude Lévi-Strauss, that the prohibition of incest alone marks the passage from nature to culture? And how can we understand, then, the persistent tension between the proclaimed, institutionalized prohibition and the incestuous practice which, everywhere, remains?World-renowned anthropologist Maurice Godelier highlights an essential fact, the spontaneously asocial and undifferentiated character of human sexuality and the need for a social regulation of this spontaneity. It thus brings to light the main teachings of anthropology on the question of incest, a major social fact of burning relevance today.

Does anthropology really add to our understanding of foreign cultures or is it the continuation of colonial domination by other means? Is this academic discipline a mirror-one reflecting the preoccupations of predominantly Western anthropologists-or a window, through which it is possible to observe lives very different to our own? Maurice Godelier places social anthropology in its historical context, with its origins in the West, and more particularly, colonialism. He also argues that it has to some extent transcended its origins, achieving a measure of scientific objectivity and validity that cannot be reduced to the self-interested concerns of imperial ideology. The final chapter discusses the issues surrounding the presentation of non-Western cultural artefacts to a Western general public.

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.