The Mental and the Material – Thought Economy and Society

What is the specificity of the human race within nature? How is its history to be explained? What impact do material realities, natural and man-made, have on human beings? What role does thought, in all its dimensions, play in the production of social relations? How are the human sciences to be advanced today?

These are among the crucial questions confronted by Maurice Godelier, the world’s most distinguished Marxist anthropologist, in his key book of contemporary social theory. Its point of departure lies in a fact and a hypothesis. The fact: in order to exist as societies, human beings do not just live in society, they produce society in order to live. The hypothesis: because they have the unique capacity to appropriate and transform nature, humans are able to produce culture and create history. Drawing on his own extensive fieldwork and ranging over the most diverse ethnographic data, Godelier challenges current anthropological approaches attending to the analysis of both social relations of production and the production of social relations. In sustained engagement with currently influential schools of thought, he reassesses original theses on the constitution, reproduction and transformation of societies, resecting the distinction between infrastructure and superstructures, illuminating the relations between economic determination and political/ideological dominance, and clarifying the character of ideology and its central role in the perpetuation of domination and exploitation.

Theoretically ambitious as well as empirically grounded, The Mental and the Material constitutes a major contribution to the mode of production debate and demonstrates the enormous potential of historical materialism.