MAURICE GODELIER AND THE STUDY OF ' IDEOLOGY

In recent years we have seen a gradual coming together of two trends in social anthropology which were earlier often thought of as opposite poles, namely the structuralist and the marxist. 1'his development has been most marked within French anthropology. Where Levi-Strauss in 1962 was conte~t to leave to other disciplines the study of inffastructures proper (1966: 131) he now admits a determining role (though not the spie determining role) to the relationship between man and his techno-economic environment (1974). And, where marxist anthropologists never thought of questioning the axiom that it is the economic infrastructure which 'in the last analysis ' determines the form and evolution of social formations, and frustrated the rest of us by always beginning with that 'last analysis ' and never getting around to any of the previous ones, today ideology appe~rs among the most frequent topics for marxist analysis. Among those, explicitly concerned with the combination of structuralist and marxist approaches is. Maurice Godelier.In this paper I wish to take up some points relating to Godelier's work on religion