Description: Examining the work of Lévi-Strauss, Freud, and Girard, as well as ethnographic and clinical data, Giving Life, Giving Death seeks to explain why our greatest thinkers have consistently marginalized the cultural and biological fact of maternity. In the spirit of Freud's Totem and Taboo, Scubla constructs an anthropology that posits a common source for family and religion. His wide-ranging study explores how rituals unite violence and the sacred and intertwine the giving of death and the giving of life.
Brief description:
Lucien Scubla is a researcher at the Institut Marcel Mauss of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of a study on Claude Lévi-Strauss and wrote the preface for the French translation of Social Origins, a posthumous work by A. M. Hocart.
Review Quotes: "Giving Life, Giving Death delivers a challenge to both psychoanalysts and anthropologists. It makes something that neither group has wanted to see look like an obvious fact, namely that the desire and organization of human societies do not revolve around penisneid, the Oedipus complex (classically interpreted), or alliance, but instead around masculine envy of women's power to give birth and relations of filiation as much as or more than alliance. Giving Life, Giving Death marks a turning point in the field."
--Alain Caillé, professor of sociology, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense