Françoise Héritier

Françoise Héritier (15 November 1933 – 15 November 2017) was a French anthropologist, ethnologist, and feminist. She was the successor to Claude Lévi-Strauss to hold the chair of anthropology at the Collège de France, and held the inaugural chair of Comparative Study of African Societies from 1983. Her work dealt mainly with the theory of alliances and on the prohibition of incest, both theories based on the notion of exchange of women. In addition to Lévi-Strauss, she was also influenced by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown.

Early life and education

Françoise Héritier was born on 15 November 1933 at Veauche, a commune in the Loire department in central France. She grew up in a social background that she described as a "small and reasonable bourgeoisie that came out of the peasantry". She studied in Paris at the Lycée Racine, and later in the hypokhâgne at the Lycée Fénelon, Paris.

She studied history, geography, and then ethnology at the Sorbonne University and at the Musée de l'Homme. She said that, a seminar given by Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Sorbonne University, in which he talked about the "joking relationship in Fiji", sparked her decision to study ethnology.

Career

In 1957, Héritier went on a mission in French Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) with the anthropologist Michel Izard, whom she would later marry, with the Samo people. She became a specialist in African ethnology, and joined the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 1967.

Like Claude Lévi-Strauss and his successor Philippe Descola, Françoise Héritier was first a study director at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) from 1980. Her field of social research focused in particular on male dominance, kinship systems, and the incest taboo.