Maurice Bloch

Maurice Bloch, 1982

Maurice Bloch (born in 1939 in Caen, Calvados, France) is a British anthropologist.

He attended the Lycée Carnot in Paris and the Perse School in Cambridge, moving to Britain at the age of eleven. His move to the UK was because his father had been killed by the Nazis when in the French Army and his mother, a marine biologist, had remarried the British biologist John S. Kennedy whom she had met at a conference. His mother was a niece of Emile Durkheim and a first cousin of Marcel Mauss.^[1] Bloch was an undergraduate at the London School of Economics, attending lectures at the School of Oriental and African Studies, continuing his training in anthropology at Cambridge University where he obtained his doctorate in 1967. His subsequent career has been almost entirely at the London School of Economics where he was appointed a full professor in 1983.

In 2005 he was appointed European Professor at the Collège de France.^[2] He was until 2009 visiting Professor at the Free University of Amsterdam. He has taught and has been an occasional visiting professor in most European countries as well as Japan. In the US, he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and at the New School for Social Research in New York. At present, he is Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics and an associate member of the Institut Jean Nicod of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

He has supervised many younger anthropologists, several of whom hold prestigious posts in the UK, US, Australia, Japan, France, Canada, the Netherlands, China, Argentina, Madagascar and Malaysia. His writings have been translated in at least twelve languages.

In 1990, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.^[3]

Research

Bloch's field research has been mainly carried out in two different areas of Madagascar. One field site has been among the peasants of central Imerina; and the other in a remote forest inhabited by a group of people called Zafimaniry. His writing deals with religion, kinship, economics, politics and language. His research has been much influenced by French Marxist ideas.

He has been an innovator in always relating social anthropology to linguistics and cognitive psychology.^[4] Much of his theoretical work since the 1970s has concerned the interface between cognition and social and cultural life. What he has written on this subject faces two ways: on the one hand, he criticises anthropologists for exaggerating the particularity of specific cultures; on the other hand, he criticises cognitive scientists for underestimating it.

He has published more than a hundred articles and many books,^[5] half of which concern Madagascar in some way.

Publications

Among the books he has published are:

• 1971 Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages, and Kinship Organization in Madagascar, London: Seminar Press (Extracts translated into Malagasy).

• 1975 Political Language, Oratory and Traditional Society, (ed.) London: Academic Press.

• 1975 Marxist Analyses and Social Anthropology (ed.), A.S.A. Studies. London: Malaby Press.

• 1982 Death and the Regeneration of Life (ed. with J. Parry), Cambridge: CUP.

• 1983 Marxism and Anthropology: The History of a Relationship, Oxford: Clarendon.

• 1986 From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar, Cambridge: CUP.

• 1989 Money and the Morality of Exchange (ed. with J. Parry) Cambridge: CUP.

• 1992 Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience, Cambridge: CUP

• 1998 How We Think They Think: Anthropological Studies in Cognition, Memory and Literacy. Boulder: Westview Press.

• 2005 Essays in the Transmission of Culture. Berg: London.

Interviews

• "Interview of Maurice Bloch": Maurice Bloch interviewed by Alan Macfarlane on 29 May 2008
• "The Reluctant Anthropologist": Eurozine interview of Maurice Bloch by Maarja Kaaristo on 29 July 2007
• "Maurice Bloch" La Huit interview of Maurice Bloch

References

External links

• Maurice Bloch’s webpage at the LSE

• Some of Maurice Bloch’s publications are available via LSE Research Online:

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/