One of the world’s leading anthropologists assesses the work of the founder of structural anthropology
Maurice Godelier is Professor of Anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. One of the world’s most influential anthropologists, Godelier has written numerous works including Rationality and Irrationality in Economics, The Mental and the Material, The Making of Great Men and The Metamorphoses of Kinship.
Praise for The Metamorphoses of Kinship
This is a blockbuster of a book. Nothing like it has been written
since Lévi-Strauss's Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949)
or Meyer Fortes's Kinship and the Social Order (1969). Yet in the
sweep of its evidence and argument, Godelier's summa is more
ambitious and far-reaching than either of these. It is at once a
major intervention in the discipline of anthropology, and a work of
the widest human interest. Kinship has the reputation of being the
most technical department of anthropology, the least accessible to
a general public. But while Métamorphoses synthesizes a huge range
of complex materials, it is written in an unfailingly lucid style
that makes no assumptions of professional familiarity with terms
and debates about kinship, but always takes care to explain them in
language anyone can understand. The book is both a monument of
scholarship and agripping set of reflections on universal
experience. It is certain to be read and discussed for years to
come.
*New Left Review*
Praise for The Metamorphoses of Kinship
Godelier has reasserted the value of our rich tradition of
discussions of kinship matters. He has also shown how the category
has metamorphosed as it has drawn in new issues of pressing current
importance in modern life and made his case that, far from being
genuinely in decline, the study of kinship is central to our
understanding of what it means to be human.
*Comparative Studies in Society and History*
Praise for The Metamorphoses of Kinship
It is this constellation of world views and ways of being that we
meet in Maurice Godelier's powerful and often provocative new book,
The Metamorphoses of Kinship. In this timely and challenging study,
Godelier heralds the revival of kinship studies within the
discipline of anthropology. In striking and elucidating prose,
Godelier writes both for the trained anthropologist and for the
general public. This is a book that aims to introduce the merits of
anthropology to a broader readership.
With singular conviction and remarkable depth, Godelier traces
anthropology's long courtship with kinship studies.a hopeful and
compelling read.
*Irish Times*
Praise for The Metamorphoses of Kinship
A truly monumental work
*Times Higher Education Supplement*
Praise forThe Mental and the Material
Engaging and intriguing - Anthropology, it would seem, may yet
return from the graveyard of structuralism to stir up some debate
in the social sciences.
*New Statesman*
Praise for The Enigma of the Gift
This book restores one's faith in the anthropological project and
will, I hope, mark the beginning of a new era of anthropological
argumentation. one marvels at the clarity of Godelier's thought. He
does not mask his central propositions in obscurantist post-modern
prose. His use of abstruse concepts such as the 'real', the
'imaginary', and the 'symbolic' is not obtuse. He knows what he
wants to say and his persuasive rhetoric is captivating... his use
of the criticalmethod sets new standards for scholarly disputation.
Godelier does not dismiss. He carefully criticises, modifies and
transcends. The argument is forceful but always intellectually
generous. But what really sets him apart is that the 'native point
of view' is just as much the raw material for critique as is the
point of view of fellow academics. As such, there is enough in this
book to upset just about everybody.
This provocative book is of interest not only to anthropologists
and Pacific specialists, but also to historians, political
scientists, religious studies specialists. Indeed, it should be
read and debated by all scholars concerned with developing a
critical stance on the human condition.
*Journal of Pacific History*
Today, in his authoritative and unrivalled study, Maurice Godelier
returns to Lévi-Strauss, the theoretician. Laying out his
production in chronological order and examining it, Lévi-Strauss'
former assistant at the Collège de France, and acclaimed
anthropologist in his own right, Maurice Godelier has less
appreciation for his style than his contemporaries: "The formulas
are superb, but they are literally meaningless." At least the
reader is forewarned. We are not here to chat. The book is divided
in two parts: "Kinship" and "The myths". It is the first time the
entire corpus of Lévi-Strauss' work has been presented in
chronological order, by topic, and compared with recent research.
Step by step, Godelier retraces sixty years of scholarship: we
watch his thinking emerge and change, a laborer not content with a
disorderly series of phenomena but who seeks the underlying rule,
anonymous and silent - the rule of exchange, of marriage, of mind
processes. In passing, Godelier clarifies the famous but
misunderstood universality of the incest taboo and gives us access
to little-known studies such as those concerning the notion of
"house". But more than producing an inventory, Godelier takes
stock. Against a background of unfailing admiration, Godelier
points out Lévi-Strauss' deliberate omissions, his denial of the
role of descent in the analysis of kinship systems, the absence of
the political and religious domains in his understanding of the
myths. But instead of eroding the monument, the criticism picks out
its bone structure, reveals its formidable coherence and provides a
better understanding of its singularity, of what makes this body of
work seem such a stubborn undertaking, sometimes so sure of itself:
the desire to make anthropology into a hard science that carries
its reasoning through to its logical conclusions.
*L’Express*
One would dream of seeing a study devoted to Godelier's production
the likes of the one he himself has just published on Lévi-Strauss,
whose assistant he was at the Collège de France after having first
worked under Fernand Braudel. Godelier's Lévi-Strauss is like a
Bourdieu that might have been written by Michel Foucault, a
Jankelevitch by Emmanuel Lévinas or a Dumézil by Jean-Pierre
Vernant: two minds viewing each other in a "mirror", the one
illuminating the other. Godelier devotes himself to the most
modest, attentive and insightful of critical readings (and clearly
the best equipped from a scholarly standpoint). He runs
Lévi-Strauss work through a veritable IRM, terming it "immense,
multiple, uncommonly creative",a work that has "fecundated" the
entire field of the human and social sciences. He shows its unity,
its delicate architecture, the possible rebounds and developments -
and also the dead-ends, the "omissions" and sometimes the errors.
Maurice Godelier's book is not a homage to Lévi-Strauss; it is a
homage to the scholarship, to the knowledge for which Lévi-Strauss
laid the cornerstone.
*Libération*
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