The Scope of Anthropology

IT WAS A LITTLE MORE THAN A YEAR AGO, in 1958, tha the College of France decided to create in its midst < chair of social anthropology. This science is too at tentive to those forms of thought which, when w encounter them among ourselves, we call superstition for me not to be allowed to render to superstition ; preliminary homage; is it not the characteristic o myths, which have such an important place in our re search, to evoke a suppressed past and to apply it, lik, a grid, upon the present in the hope of discovering ; sense in which the 2 faces in which man is confrontec with his own reality-the historic and the structuralcoincide? It would seem to me also permissible on thi occasion, on which all the patterns or features o myth are for me reunited, to proceed on their example seeking to discern in past events the meaning and th lesson of the honor which has been done me, to which my dear colleagues, the very date of your deliberatior bears witness: by the strange recurrence of the numbe. 8, already well-known from the arithmetic of Pytha. goras, the periodic table of chemical elements, and th4 law of symmetry of the medusa-jellyfish, the proposa in 1958 to create a chair of social anthropology revive, a tradition which even if I had wished to I would no have been able to escape. Fifty years prior to your initial decision, Sir James George Frazer delivered the inaugural lecture of the 1st chair of social anthropology in the world, at th( University of Liverpool. Fifty years earlier, in 1858 2 men were born-Franz Boas and Emile Durkheimwhom posterity will regard as, if not the founders, al least the chief engineers, 1 in America and the othei in France, of anthropology as we know it today. It is appropriate that these 3 anniversaries, these 3 names, have been evoked here. Those of Frazer anc Boas give me occasion to express my gratitude, if only briefly, for all that social anthropology owes to AngloAmerican thought, and for what I owe it personally, since it was in close conjunction with it that my 1st works were conceived and developed. But it will not surprise you that Durkheim occupies a larger placc in this lecture. He incarnates the essence of France's contribution to social anthropology, even though his centennial, celebrated with enthusiasm in many foreign countries, passed almost unnoticed here and has not yet been marked by any official ceremony.2 How are we to explain this injustice to him, and to ourselves, if not as a minor consequence of that desperate eagerness which drives us to forget our own history, to hold it "in horror," in the words of Charles de Remusat? This sentiment oday opens social anthropology to the possibility of losing Durkheim as it has already lost Gobineau and Demeunier. And yet, my dear colleagues, those among you who share these distant memories will not contradict me if I recall that, around 1935, when our Brazilian friends wanted to explain to us the reasons which led them to choose French missions to organize their 1st universities, they always cited 2 names: 1st, of course, Pasteur, and after that Durkheim. But in reserving these thoughts for Durkheim, I am carrying out another duty. No one would have appreciated more than Marcel Mauss an homage addressed to him at the same time as to the master of whom he was pupil and then successor. From 1931 to 1942, Marcel Mauss held the chair at the College of France consecrated to the study of society, and so brief was the passage in these halls of the unfortunate Maurice Halbwachs that it seems that one can, without being untruthful, consider that in creating a chair of social anthropology, it is Mauss's chair which you wanted to restore. In any case, I owe too much to Mauss's thought not to take pleasure in this notion. To be sure, his chair was called "Sociology," for Mauss, who did so much (together with Paul Rivet) to make ethnology a science in its own right, had not completely succeeded by the 1930's. But to attest to the bond between our fields, it will suffice to recall that in Mauss's field ethnology took an ever growing place; that beginning in 1924, he proclaimed that the "place of sociology" was "in anthropology" (Mauss 1950c: 285); and that, if I am not mistaken Mauss was the 1st (in 1938) to introduce the term "social anthropology" into French terminology (Mauss 1950d:362). He would not disavow the term today.