Anthropology and sociology: From Mauss to Lévi‐Strauss

Abstract

Lévi‐Strauss’ ambitious postwar reconstruction of ethnology as a social and structural anthropology not only transformed the internal configuration of the discipline, but also affected its traditionally close relationship with sociology since the pioneering work of the Durkheimian school. These tensions are visible in the Introduction à l'œuvre de Marcel Mauss, which is less an introduction to the work of the celebrated ‘father’ of French ethnology than a pretext for Lévi‐Strauss to lay the theoretical groundwork for his second area of specialisation, the anthropology of religions. The structuralist programme which emerges represents a powerful, if not entirely faithful appropriation of Mauss, and places ethnology firmly at the centre of the sciences humaines, thereby reversing its traditional position of subordination to sociology. Ultimately, in fact, Lévi‐Strauss’ ambivalent mediation of Mauss seems to relegate him, along with Durkheim, to the prehistory of the line of socio‐anthropological thought culminating in structural anthropology.