Maurice Godelier

Maurice Godelier is a French anthropologist, born in Cambrai in 1934, known as one of the earliest advocates of incorporating Marxist theory into anthropology. He founded a program in economic anthropology in France in 1963 and conducted extensive fieldwork among the Baruya people of Papua New Guinea from the 1960s through the 1980s, examining gender inequality and systems of power in his influential book The Making of Great Men (1982) and later exploring gift-economy theory in The Enigma of the Gift (1996). He has served as director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, founded and directed its Center for Research and Documentation on Oceania from 1995 to 1999, and served as president of the Societe des oceanistes from 2013 to 2015.