Böcker av Maurice Godelier

Pourquoi mourir? Comment survivre? De la naissance a la mort, c'est par le corps, c'est dans l'habitacle du corps que l'homme se situe dand l'unvers et fair l'expereince de ses congeneres. A l'occasion des rite de passage notamemnt, c'est par le coprps que la societe revendique l'individu comme sien, at c'est sure son corps qu'elle inscrit cette appartenance. Mais nulle branche de la famille humaine ne s'est jamais resignee aux limites naturelles que le corps assignait aux experiences vecues ou aux transformations subies par sa matiere jusqu'a la mort incluse. Toujours at partout on a imagine une ou plusieurs entites qui asurent la continuite de la personne a travers le temps et en illuminent le traits: ame, ombre, double, esprit, etc. Les noms variet, le metaphores aussi. Comment de telles entites accompagnent le corps, le forifient, s'en detachent ou se dressent contre lui, c'est ce que chaque culture a codifie a sa maniere par des pratiques que nous nommons par exemple- epreuves initiatiques, actes de sorcellerie, possession, ou cannibalisme. Tant at si bien que le corps agresse, possed, supplicie, cannibalise, devient en retour un moyen prvilegie d'analyser les cultures. Aux ethnologues at aux historiens de le mettre en oeuvre et de l'ecouter. Neuf d'entre eux se sont attaches a le faire dans des textes nourris de recherches menees en Asie, en Amerique du Sud, en Afrique at en Oceanie.

Exploring the role of the incest prohibition in human societies

Frontmatter -- AVANT-PROPOS. un domaine contesté : l'anthropologie économique -- PREMIÈRE PARTIE: l'héritage du 19e siècle -- Formes qui précèdent la production capitaliste (1858) -- Le droit archaïque (1861) -- Les effets de l'observation de l'Inde sur la pensée européenne moderne (1875) -- Le développement de l'idée de propriété (1877) -- DEUXIÈME PARTIE : ruptures et controverses -- Un évolutionnisme appauvri: -- Stades de l'évolution économique (1893) -- De l'enquête sur le terrain à la rupture avec l'évolutionnisme -- L'économie primitive des îles Trobriand (1921) -- L'approche formaliste: -- Théories de la maximisation et anthropologie économique -- Théorie économique et anthropologie économique -- L'approche substantiviste: -- L'économie en tant que procès institutionnalisé -- Théorie économique et société primitive -- La controverse entre formalistes et substantivistes en anthropologie économique : réflexions sur ses implications les plus générales -- Néo-évolutionnisme ou marxisme? -- L'économie tribale -- La paysannerie et ses problèmes -- TROISIÈME PARTIE: anthropologie et économie : un bilan critique -- Anthropologie et économie une anthropologie économique est-elle possible? -- Bibliographie -- Table des matières -- Backmatter

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 metamorphosisone that, ironically, is bringing us closer to the ';traditional' societies studied by ethnologists.

Exploring the close relationship between the real, the symbolic and imaginary

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

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 historyin 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 systemsin 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.

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.