Imagined, the Imaginary and the Symbolic

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.

With his characteristic limpidity of thought and expression, Godelier explores major features of what makes us distinctive social beings: our capacity to imagine and inhabit other worlds beyond and within the ones we are living in. How the symbols we live by render plausible, even compulsory, the absurdities of our collective imagination; how what we imagine becomes imaginary in certain conditions, real in others; how the symbolic which binds collectives together becomes effective through the domination it exerts; how social life stabilizes imagined possibilities through play, art and religion. These basic questions receive here new and illuminating answers, which throw light on the most pressing issues of our time.