Principles of General Sociology: Volume I: Fundamental Social Relations and Forms of Dependency ed.Valérie Lécrivain et Marc Joly, CNRS Éditions, 2021

Bernard Lahire (1)

1 CMW - Centre Max Weber

At the time of his death in 2013, the social anthropologist Alain Testart left behind a magisterial and abundant body of work on primitive communism, the origins of economic inequalities and the state, religion, gift-giving, money, the kinship system among Australian Aboriginal people, the sexual division of labor, initiation rites, slavery, the accompanying dead, and cave painting. His works have become touchstones of the discipline, and have also facilitated dialogue between anthropologists, prehistorians, and archeologists. Far from being a dabbler, his prolixity and the variety of the subjects he explored stemmed from a systematic quest for links between phenomena that had been studied separately by specialized researchers. This search for coherent systems can only be made sense of in the context of Alain Testart's ultimate goal of classifying all societies known to prehistory, ethnology, history, and sociology, in order to comprehend the evolution from one type of society into another. [2][2]Alain Testart, Éléments de classification des sociétés (Paris:… He felt he was emulating what botanists or zoologists had ultimately achieved for the animal and plant kingdoms.

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société

Bernard Lahire. Principles of General Sociology: Volume I: Fundamental Social Relations and Forms of Dependency ed.Valérie Lécrivain et Marc Joly, CNRS Éditions, 2021. La Pensée, 2023, 408 (4), pp.147-151. ⟨10.3917/lp.408.0147⟩. ⟨hal-04194494⟩