Élémentaire, complexe: de certaines formes d'explication en anthropologie

Abstract

The notion ‘elementary’ was used from different perspectives as a modality of anthropological explanation by two authors: Durkheim in relation to religion, and Lévi-Strauss in relation to kinship. They developed a methodology for studying the most simple, the most essential, and the most general properties of social phenomena within a regional context. In this context, the movement towards the ‘complex’ is used only to analyse the additions, the evolutions, or the combinations of pure forms or structures. The less systematic approach taken by Mauss in his article on the gift highlights the complexity of the entire social fact.