Durham Research Online Deposited in DRO: 29 November 2013 Version of attached le: Published Version Peer-review status of attached le: Peer-reviewed Citation for published item: Mughal, M. A. Z. (2013) 'Bloch, Maurice.', in Theory in social and cultural anthropology : an encyclopedia. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, pp. 77-80. Further information on publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452276311.n27 Publisher's copyright statement: Additional information: Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Durham University Library, Stockton Road, Durham DH1 3LY, United Kingdom Tel : +44 (0)191 334 3042 | Fax : +44 (0)191 334 2971 https://dro.dur.ac.uk Bloch, Maurice 77 important throughout 20th-century anthropology. exchange. He is among the pioneers of the French Examples include Sidney Mintz’s biography of a Marxist tradition in British anthropology. Puerto Rican migrant worker, Oscar Lewis’s life histories of Mexican families, and Ruth Behar’s life Biography and Major Works of a Mexican market woman. Barbara Myerhoff pioneered dialogical life writing, intertwining her Bloch was born in 1939 in Caen, France. He had a telling of the life of a Jewish American immigrant mixed family background as his great-grandfather tailor with reflections about her own relationship was a miller from Lorraine while his grandmoth- to Judaism. To write about the lives of Yukon er’s family were Sephardic Jews, originally from aboriginal women, Julie Cruikshank experimented Portugal, who lived in Bordeaux. His mother’s with writing oral forms of storytelling. Serving as mother was a niece of Émile Durkheim as well as scribes of marginalized lives, Nancy Scheper-Hughes a first cousin of Marcel Mauss. Bloch had a chance has narrated the lives of mothers in a Brazilian shan- to meet Mauss near the end of Mauss’s life. During tytown who delay bonding with newborns, and World War II, Bloch’s father was arrested and killed Philippe Bourgois has recorded the narratives of by the Nazis, and his mother, a marine biologist, crack dealers in Harlem. was held in Auschwitz along with other scientists Finally, the critical reflexivity of postcolonial and forced to do laboratory research for the Nazis. anthropology has renewed interest in biography. To Bloch was protected by one of his father’s friends transcend self/other dichotomies, phenomenologi- during this period. After the war, his mother married cal approaches focus on lived experience, and eth- John S. Kennedy, a British biologist. nography locates once others as subjects—placing Bloch attended Lycée Carnot in Paris but moved anthropologists in relation to, not outside, their to Britain at the age of 11 along with his parents object of study. In the 21st century, as anthropology and joined the Perse School in Cambridge. At the seeks new knowledge through collaboration and Perse, he was inspired by his history teacher John cotheorizing, life writing as reflexive practice is key Tanfield and by Douglas Brown, who taught him to its realization. English literature. He also developed an interest in classical music, with Olivier Messiaen and Benjamin Sally Cole Britten being among his favorites. He entered the See also Autoethnography; Boas, Franz; Bourdieu, Pierre; London School of Economics to study anthropology Firth, Raymond; Mead, Margaret; Mintz, Sidney; as an undergraduate, where he was inclined toward Scheper-Hughes, Nancy; Steward, Julian Maurice Freedman and Burton Benedict, who worked on the cultures of China, and Mauritius and Seychelles, respectively. During this period, he was Further Readings also inspired by Mary Douglas at University College Cole, S. (2003). Ruth Landes: A life in anthropology. London and Adrian Mayer at the School of Oriental Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. and African Studies, where he had gone to study Gordon, R., Lyons, A. P., & Lyons, H. D. (Eds.). (2011). linguistics. In addition to academics, he also acted Fifty key anthropologists. London, UK: Routledge. in plays, usually French, at the university. Bloch was Kerns, V. (2003). Scenes from the high desert: Julian also involved in politics during his time at univer- Steward’s life and theory. Urbana: University of Illinois sity, supporting the anticolonial struggles in Algeria, Press. India, and China. After completing his undergradu- Lutkehaus, N. C. (2008). Margaret Mead: The making of ate studies in 1961, he went to France to oppose the an American icon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Algerian and Vietnam wars. Press. Bloch attended Cambridge University for his PhD, initially working with Meyer Fortes and the French anthropologist Germaine Dieterlen. Bloch BLOCH, MAURICE was interested in working in India due to his ear- lier inspiration from Adrian Mayer’s work, but his Maurice Bloch (1939– ) has worked mainly in funding required that he work in Africa, and he religion, rituals, power, cognition, and economic decided to work in Madagascar. He conducted his 78 Bloch, Maurice field research in Madagascar from 1964 to 1966. Currently, Bloch is emeritus professor at the LSE Initially, Bloch carried out his research under the and an associate member of the Institut Jean Nicod supervision of Audrey Richards, who had experi- of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In addi- ence working with sub-Saharan African communi- tion to the many students he has supervised, his writ- ties. At a later stage, he was supervised by Stanley ings have been translated into at least 12 different Jeyaraja Tambiah, a specialist on Thailand and languages. Sri Lanka. Bloch also had a chance to discuss his work with other pioneering social anthropologists at Critical Contributions to Anthropology Cambridge like Edmund Leach and Raymond Firth. Caroline Humphrey, Marilyn Strathern, Andrew Bloch has published books in both French and Strathern, Adam Kuper, Jim Faris, and Jonathan English and more than 100 articles relating to ritual, Parry were among his fellow PhD students. power, kinship, economics, religion, and money. Bloch completed his PhD in 1967. His doctoral the- French Marxism and Structuralism sis, The Significance of Tombs and Ancestral Villages in British Anthropology for Merina Social Organization, focused on the tombs and kinship organization in Madagascar and was Although Bloch was educated in the British later published by Seminar Press as Placing the Dead: anthropological traditions, he has long been con- Tombs, Ancestral Villages and Kinship Organization nected with French Marxist movements. On the in Madagascar. He was a lecturer at the University one hand, he was interested in the structuralism of Wales, Swansea, in 1967 and 1968, but in 1969, of Claude Lévi-Strauss, while on the other, he was he accepted a lectureship at the London School of influenced by several French Marxist writers with Economics, where his colleagues were Maurice whom he had personal relations, including Maurice Freedman, Lucy Mair, Jean La Fontaine, Ioan Lewis, Godelier and Emmanuel Terray. Bloch organized a and Peter Loizos. Bloch developed friendships with session at the conference of the Association of Social Alfred Gell and Olivia Harris, who were graduate stu- Anthropologists in 1973, in which French Marxists dents at the LSE at that time. In 1970, Bloch moved and British anthropologists discussed various theo- to the University of California at Berkeley, where he retical interests. He tried to use the approaches of became interested in the work of linguists and of phi- Marxist anthropology and Lévi-Strauss’s struc- losophers such as John Searle, leading him to study turalism alongside the then dominant paradigms cognitive sciences. Not comfortable in the United in Britain, like methodological individualism and States because of his Marxist links in France, Bloch structural functionalism. The influence of Lévi- returned to the LSE, where he continued to work on Strauss is particularly strong in Placing the Dead, language and cognition. His article “Symbols, Song, where Bloch interpreted kinship organization as a Dance and Features of Articulation” (1974), on the schema of elementary structures. Anthropologists criticism of semantics, has been widely read. have different responses toward Marxism and Bloch returned to Berkeley in 1974–1975, where Marxist analyses depending on the traditions they he was influenced by cognitive anthropologists were trained in or the communities they have been such as George Lakoff and Paul Kay. He was vis- working with, as Bloch demonstrated in his detailed iting professor at the Johns Hopkins University in description of Marxist analysis, Marxist Analyses Baltimore and the New School for Social Research and Social Anthropology (1975), and in Marxism in New York, but since 1976, his career has been and Anthropology: The History of a Relationship almost entirely at the LSE, where he was promoted (1983). Marxist tradition was declining in France to Reader in 1976. Bloch has also taught and has when Bloch was initially working through a French been an occasional visiting professor at Paris West Marxist approach in British anthropology. However, University Nanterre La Défense, University of Bloch persisted in a Marxist approach in his work Stockholm, and National Ethnology Museum of on the representation of money and economic Japan, among others. He was appointed as full pro- exchange, particularly in his book Money and the fessor at the LSE in 1983 and elected a fellow of the Morality of Exchange, coedited with Jonathan British Academy in 1990. Parry, and the article “Zafimaniry Debt and Credit.” Bloch, Maurice 79 Ritual and Power in Madagascar evolution of religion alongside technological or cul- tural development primarily for social bonding.