ABSTRACT
Once “native system” is established as anthropology’s point of arrival, Roy Wagner proceeds to the investigation of whether social groups exist in ‘native’ conceptualization despite the anthropologist’s tendency to explain society in terms of groups. Levi-Strauss not only embraces the concept of ‘group’ which Wagner seeks to deconstruct; he also calls the procedure through which Marcel Mauss attempts to ground his theory in Maori conceptualization a “mystifying” one. The displacement of the concept of society by that of culture does not hinder the reinstatement of the totalization that is interrogated as one questions the notion of group through the question of how “natives” conceptualize groups. For Wagner, the way in which ‘the Daribi’ employ names draws boundaries, and thus creates contrasts, that make it possible to elicit “groups as a sort of general context of one’s expression, alluding to them indirectly rather than consciously organizing or participating in them”.
