ABSTRACT
Maurice Bloch is Professor in Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Much of his fieldwork research has been in Madagascar among rice cultivators and shifting agriculturalists. His work blends British and French approaches to anthropology and has been significant in introducing the best of French Marxist theory to Anglophone anthropologists. This chapter deals with such radical rejections, but since these occur in the world of imagination, it leads the argument away from the main concern of the book, which is actual practice and the linked experiences it evokes. The anthropologist with experience of fieldwork will also be well aware that even the most speculative myths are not quite the relaxed, curious speculation which Levi-Strauss seems to suggest. In the past therefore plants, animals and humans were continually interacting in a somewhat promiscuous fashion. However, in the end, plants and animals seem to have failed to observe the fundamental rules of mutual cooperation.
