The Imagined, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Maurice Godelier
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The Imagined, the Imaginary and the Symbolic
The Imagined, the Imaginary
and the Symbolic
Maurice Godelier
Translated by Nora Scott
This work was published with the help of the French
Ministry of Culture – Centre national du livre
Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français
chargé de la Culture–Centre national du livre
This English-language edition published by Verso 2020
Originally published in French as L’Imaginé, l’imaginaire & le symbolique
© CNRS Editions 2015
Translation © Nora Scott 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-770-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-768-0 (LIBRARY)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-772-7 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-771-0 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Minion Pro by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
For Lina and Zacharias,
And in memory of the immense scholar,
and my good friend, Jack Goody.
Contents
PART I: FROM THE REAL TO THE UNREAL
1. Concerning a Few Invariants
6. What Is Play?
7. Art, or From the Imagined Imaginary to the Materialised Imaginary
PART II: FROM THE UNREAL TO THE SURREAL
8. Concerning the Religious Imaginary
The imaginary, the symbolic and the real in myth and ritual
Communicating with spirits and gods
9. The Imaginary of Political-Religious Systems
The conditions in which the first forms of state appeared
Conclusion: And so – What Is the Real?
Notes
Bibliography
Indexes
Terms and Concepts
Authors
Names
Societies and Places
Why this book, and why this title? In the first place, because not everything that is imagined is imaginary. And since everything that is imagined is done so by the mind, we must analyse how and why, in certain domains, the mind produces imagined content that is imaginary and, in other domains, imagined content that is not. In his two books The Imagination and The Imaginary, Jean-Paul Sartre did not make this distinction, yet it is a strategic one.1
We all know, from daily experience, that we can be at the same time present in the moment by our consciousness but absent by our mind, even though consciousness is also mind. And we also know that when our mind projects itself beyond the present, it is not the same thing to represent to ourselves facts that no longer exist but did exist at one time, such as scenes from our childhood, as it is facts that do not yet exist but will exist in the future, such as a planned vacation to Istanbul; or facts that can never exist but which we can imagine, such as the invasion of the earth by giant spiders from a planet billions of light years away.
There are several kinds of imaginaries, and our relations with each of them, therefore, cannot be the same. To obtain a clearer picture, let us make a very short – all too short – inventory; as we will see, the distinctions between these imaginaries always seem to emerge from the singular relationship each entertains with the ‘real’. Which raises the inevitable question: What is the real?
Take play, keeping in mind that all children the world over have played, and that once they are adults many continue to play in other forms. The child playing cowboys and brandishing noisy revolvers that cannot kill knows that he (is and) is not a ‘real’ cowboy. And, when he was younger and scolded his teddy bear for having wet on the carpet, he already knew that Teddy was not a ‘real’ bear and had not ‘really’ wet on the carpet.
Or take the arts, and the example of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which since antiquity have been attributed to the great poet Homer. Perhaps Homer was not the only author of these masterworks, but neither was he Achilles or Ulysses, whose feats he sang. And perhaps neither Ulysses nor Achilles ever ‘really’ existed, either, but we thrill to the tale of the many dangers Ulysses faced, threatened with the deadly grip of the Cyclops or the loving embrace of Circe as, after the fall of Troy, he sailed towards Ithaca where his faithful wife, Penelope, had been waiting for years.
We do not expect poets or their work to depict historical events as they happened. Furthermore, are not historical events perhaps also a mixture of the real and the imaginary? When inscriptions or monuments dating back several thousands of years tell us that the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II (605–552 BCE), after conquering