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L'Occident, miroir brisé. Une évaluation partielle de l'anthropologie sociale assortie de quelques perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

Maurice Godelier
Maurice Godelier*
Affiliation:
EHESS, Paris
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Extract

C'est, bien entendu, une tâche impossible que de dresser en quelques pages un bilan de l'anthropologie sociale. C'est plutôt un prétexte pour poser quelques questions sur la pratique et le statut théorique des sciences sociales. Personne ne niera que les sciences sociales sous leur forme actuelle sont nées en Occident à une époque récente et portent nécessairement les marques de cette origine. Mais, nées en Occident, elles ne sont devenues des disciplines à caractère scientifique que lorsqu'elles réussissaient, même partiellement, à décentrer leurs analyses par rapport aux vues de l'Occident qui les avait fait naître. C'est ce caractère contradictoire du développement des sciences sociales que nous tenterons de décrire à travers l'exemple de l'anthropologie.

Summary

Summary

The author questions the theoretical status of social sciences through a partial assessment ofone ofthem, social anthropology. Discipline linked to the colonial expansion of european societies and to their domination over the rest of the world, but associated also with the need ofthe Nation-State of Europe to deal with peasant and ethnical local customs resisting to économie and political transformations, social anthropology is deeply rooted into the history and domination of Europe. However, the discipline achieved its first scientific results only when it could construct its concepts and analysis beyond and against the social représentations and concepts dominating European culture. This contradiction was présent since the beginning as illustrated by the work of Lewis H. Morgan, its founder, who opened the vast field of research on kinship, domain par excellence of the ethnologists. Morgan discovered that ail the kinship Systems known in his time, included the European ones, were variants of seven basic types never identified before him. But soon he used his remarquable discoveries in order to build up an outline of the évolution of mankind in which thèse forms of kinship succeeded each other in an order moving from primitive savagery to Anglo-Saxon modem civilization. The West was again the mirror and the measure of the development of mankind. Anthropology after Morgan was obligea to break with this evolutionism. So, where are we after one century of researches on kinship? Is kinship based mainly on principles of descent, as stated by Meyer Fortes, or on principles of alliance and marriage, as argue Lévi-Strauss and Dumont? Does alliance imply necessarily exchange of women between men and universal maie domination? Are classificatory kinship Systems mère extensions of intrafamily relationships? Has the concept of consanguinity still a universal value? What are the relationships between kinship Systems and économie or political Systems? At the end of this critical assessment it seems clear that anthropology, far from being a discipline in deep crisis and close to disappear, is well alive and still for a long time indispensable.

Type
Histoire et Sciences Sociales
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales , Volume 48 , Issue 5 , October 1993 , pp. 1183 - 1207
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 1993

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