Claude Lévi-Strauss

Maurice Godelier is a world-renowned anthropologist. Among the many honours he has received are the CNRS Gold Medal and the Alexander von Humbolt prize. His major works include The Making of Great Men, Metamorphoses of Kinship, The Enigma of the Gift, In and Out of the West, and more recently Lévi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought.

Praise for The Metamorphoses of KinshipThis is a blockbuster of a book. Nothing like it has been written since Lévi-Strauss's Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949) or Meyer Fortes's Kinship and the Social Order (1969). Yet in the sweep of its evidence and argument, Godelier's summa is more ambitious and far-reaching than either of these. It is at once a major intervention in the discipline of anthropology, and a work of the widest human interest. Kinship has the reputation of being the most technical department of anthropology, the least accessible to a general public. But while Métamorphoses synthesizes a huge range of complex materials, it is written in an unfailingly lucid style that makes no assumptions of professional familiarity with terms and debates about kinship, but always takes care to explain them in language anyone can understand. The book is both a monument of scholarship and agripping set of reflections on universal experience. It is certain to be read and discussed for years to come.