Abstract
Anthropologists have traditionally pursued two endeavors that don't seem to have much in common.
On the one hand, they meticulously study small groups of individuals, often quite isolated from the major centers of globalization, and endeavor to interpret their worldview or social organization.
On the other hand, they construct general theories about the behavior and ways of thinking of humanity as a whole. How can these two types of activity be linked, and to what end?
It seems that the majority of contemporary anthropologists consider the kind of approach that brings these two practices together to be of little interest, since they indulge entirely and exclusively in one or the other. As a result, university anthropology departments around the world are increasingly dominated by an ethnography that has abandoned any general theoretical ambition. As a result, theorists find themselves more at home outside mainstream anthropology departments. The problem is particularly acute for cognitive anthropology, which borrows many of its ideas from cognitive science disciplines that do not hesitate to generalize to the species level. On the other hand, they are only anecdotally interested in particular cases situated in time and space.
In this opening lecture, Maurice Bloch proposes that, like anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Françoise Héritier, we keep one foot in each of these two endeavors. Only in this way, he believes, can anthropology make an original and enriching contribution to the other disciplines of the human sciences.
