Françoise Héritier


Françoise Héritier was a French anthropologist, ethnologist, and feminist. She was the successor of Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France. Her work dealt mainly with the theory of alliances and on the prohibition of incest. In addition to Lévi-Strauss, she was also influenced by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. She was replaced by Philippe Descola, who is the current holder of the chair of anthropology at the Collège.

Biography

Françoise Héritier comes from Loire, in a social background that she describes as a “small and reasonable bourgeoisie that came out of the peasantry”. She studies in Paris, in the Lycée Racine, and later in hypokhâgne in the lycée Fénelon. During a seminar given by Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Sorbonne University, where he talks about the “joking relationship in Fiji”, she has a “revelation” and decides to study ethnology. In 1957, she goes on a mission in French Upper Volta with the anthropologue Michel Izard, who she will marry later.
Françoise Héritier was part of the structuralism movement. She is well known for her works in the theory of alliances and the prohibition of incest based on the notion of the circulation of women in the society. She brings the concepts of the “identical” and its “repulsive frustration”, in the continuity of the approaches of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. In her conception of the societies, she especially focuses on the concepts of “nature” and “environment”.
Like Claude Lévi-Strauss and his successor Philippe Descola, Françoise Héritier was first a study director at the EHESS, and was in 1982 elected at the Collège de France at the Chair of Anthropology. From 1998 to 2001, she was a member of the CNRS ethics committee.
In her book Masculin/Féminin, she noted that the distinction between the feminine and the masculine is universal and that exists everywhere; and that the male is always considered superior to the women. However, she showed in her book, Masculin/Féminin I et II, De la Violence, through numerous examples, the hierarchical thinking regarding men and women is a cultural construct -- and therefore to be revisited. She called this concept "the differential valence of the sexes" that she preferred to the concept of the masculine domination used by Pierre Bourdieu or Maurice Godelier.
She died the day of her birthday, November 5th 2017 in the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. She was 84 years old.

Works