L’anthropologie face à l’encastrement. Le cas de la réception de Karl Polanyi chez Maurice Godelier

Abstract

Maurice Godelier’s interpretation of Karl Polanyi’s work allows us to approach the confrontation between the Marxist tradition and the substantivist school on the field study of anthropology. It highlights a certain number of structural problems for the anthropological analysis of economic phenomena. Thus, the criticism of the substantivist approach, qualified as “critical empiricism”, leads to the question of the relationship between empiricism and theory since the object studied—the economy—is characterized above all by the variability of its forms and functions across time and space. In particular, the attention paid to the difference between the autonomization of economic life in a market regime and its integration with religious, family or political institutions in non-capitalist societies threatens to obscure the relative constancy of forms of domination or oppression. Beyond such a critique, however, the research of the French anthropologist leads him to integrate the Polanyian opposition between embeddedness and disembeddedness into the conceptual framework of anthropological analysis. In the case of Maurice Godelier, this forces a redefinition of a certain number of notions that shape the discipline. More precisely, it involves not only the confrontation with the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss but also and above all the reworking of the key notions of the Marxist tradition, in particular in the form that it takes, in the 1960s, in the works of Althusser and his disciples.

Keywords

• marxism
• Polanyi (Karl)
• Godelier (Maurice)
• economic anthropology
• substantivism
• embeddedness