Ideology in social science;: Readings in critical social theory

Politics & Social Sciences

David Goddard

Maurice Godelier

E.J. HOBSBAWM

Tom Nairn

Ralph Miliband

Lucio Colletti

NORMAN GERAS

C.B. MacPherson

Edward Nell

Sociology

Pantheon Books

Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology (Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology)

Social Sciences

Cambridge University Press

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 Maurice Godelier, the world’s most distinguished Marxist anthropologist, 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. Theoretically ambitious and empirically rigorous, The Mental and the Material constitutes a great advance in the mode of production debate and demonstrates the enormous explanatory potential of historical materialism.

The Mental and the Material

Anthropology

Verso

Rationality And Irrationality In Economics

Verso Books

In and Out of the West: Reconstructing Anthropology

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

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Horizon, trajets marxistes en anthropologie (Petite collection Maspero) (French Edition)

Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

F. Maspero

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Books by Maurice Godelier