When we think of giving gifts, we think of exchanging objects that carry with them economic or symbolic value. But is every valuable thing a potentially exchangeable item, whose value can be transferred? In The Enigma of the Gift, the distinguished French anthropologist Maurice Godelier reassesses the significance of gifts in social life by focusing on sacred objects, which are never exchanged despite the value they possess. Beginning with an analysis of the seminal work of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strass, and drawing on his own fieldwork in Melanesia, Godelier argues that traditional theories are flawed because they consider only exchangeable gifts. By explaining gift-giving in terms of sacred objects and the authoritative conferral of power associated with them, Godelier challenges both recent and traditional theories of gift-giving, provocatively refreshing a traditional debate. Elegantly translated by Nora Scott, The Enigma of the Gift is at once a major theoretical contribution and an essential guide to the history of the theory of the gift.

The Enigma of the Gift

Politics & Social Sciences

Godelier, Maurice

Social Sciences

University of Chicago Press

When we think of giving gifts, we think of exchanging objects that carry with them economic or symbolic value. But is every valuable thing a potentially exchangeable item, whose value can be transferred? In The Enigma of the Gift, the distinguished French anthropologist Maurice Godelier reassesses the significance of gifts in social life by focusing on sacred objects, which are never exchanged despite the value they possess. Beginning with an analysis of the seminal work of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strass, and drawing on his own fieldwork in Melanesia, Godelier argues that traditional theories are flawed because they consider only exchangeable gifts. By explaining gift-giving in terms of sacred objects and the authoritative conferral of power associated with them, Godelier challenges both recent and traditional theories of gift-giving, provocatively refreshing a traditional debate. Elegantly translated by Nora Scott, The Enigma of the Gift is at once a major theoretical contribution and an essential guide to the history of the theory of the gift.

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.

The Making of Great Men: Male Domination and Power among the New Guinea Baruya (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Series Number 56)

Anthropology

Cambridge University Press

When we think of giving gifts, we think of exchanging objects that carry with them economic or symbolic value. But is every valuable thing a potentially exchangeable item, whose value can be transferred? In The Enigma of the Gift, the distinguished French anthropologist Maurice Godelier reassesses the significance of gifts in social life by focusing on sacred objects, which are never exchanged despite the value they possess.Beginning with an analysis of the seminal work of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strass, and drawing on his own fieldwork in Melanesia, Godelier argues that traditional theories are flawed because they consider only exchangeable gifts. By explaining gift-giving in terms of sacred objects and the authoritative conferral of power associated with them, Godelier challenges both recent and traditional theories of gift-giving, provocatively refreshing a traditional debate.Elegantly translated by Nora Scott, The Enigma of the Gift is at once a major theoretical contribution and an essential guide to the history of the theory of the gift.

Philosophy

Polity Press

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.

In and Out of the West: Reconstructing Anthropology (Page-Barbour Lectures)

University of Virginia Press

Employs Marxist concepts to study production, distribution, and consumption systems, focusing on the social factors that transform economic processes. Bibliogs

Rationality and Irrationality in Economics

Business & Money

Economics

Monthly Review+press

Verso-Mental & Matrl

Verso Books

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.

Rationality and irrationality in economics;

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Books by Godelier, Maurice

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The Enigma of the Gift

The Enigma of the Gift

The Making of Great Men: Male Domination and Power among the New Guinea Baruya (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Series Number 56)

The Making of Great Men: Male Domination and Power among the New Guinea Baruya (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Series Number 56)

The Enigma of the Gift

In and Out of the West: Reconstructing Anthropology (Page-Barbour Lectures)

Rationality and Irrationality in Economics

Rationality and Irrationality in Economics

Verso-Mental & Matrl

Rationality and irrationality in economics;