Anthropology, Ethnology All books
Françoise Héritier
The Salt of Life
In this wonderful little book that literally sparkles with wisdom, Françoise Héritier incites us to play a game with our own memories
Françoise Héritier
Two Sisters and Their Mother The Anthropology of Incest
The author explores the taboo regarding the incest of the second type which concerns blood relations of a same sex who share the same sexual partner. She makes us understand that the categories which we use to determine what is incestuous and what is not are founded on representations of the identical and the different, which are themselves derived from the difference in the sexes.
Françoise Héritier, Margarita Xanthakou
Body and Affects
The articles gathered here, written by eminent French anthropologists, present a novel angle on the way societies function. The writers argue that because societies are not abstract intellectual constructions, they cannot be dissociated from the physical individuals that constitute them, or from the affects (feelings and emotions) expressed by them. Included here are studies of Western and non-Western societies on such subjects as skin colour, religious rituals involving animals, witchcraft and flying sorcerers, passion in traditional North African cultures, and breast-feeding (both induced lactation to breastfeed infant girls and spontaneous lactation to breastfeed infant boys) in parts of Italy. Françoise Héritier is an anthropologist and teaches at the Collège de France. She is the author of Les Deux Soeurs et leur mère and Masculin/Féminin I and II, published by Editions Odile Jacob. Margarita Xanthakou, an anthropologist, is a research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).