Books by Maurice Godelier

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

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.