Maurice Bloch

Maurice Bloch is a British anthropologist, born in 1939, known for his long-term fieldwork among Malagasy agriculturalists, particularly the Merina people of Madagascar, as well as research in Japan and elsewhere. He has contributed an influential neo-Marxist strand of anthropological theory addressing power, history, kinship and ritual, examining how ritual practices such as circumcision ceremonies encode and naturalize social hierarchy, as set out in From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar (1986). His earlier book Placing the Dead (1971) examined tombs and kinship organization in Madagascar, and his later work, including How We Think They Think (1998) and Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge (2012), turned toward cognitive anthropology, questioning how far cultural meaning can be explained by cognitive science.