After Durkheim: A ``Geometrical'' School of Historical Anthropology

The present paper attempts to bring the school that developed after Jean-Pierre Vernant within the legacy of another, the school of Emile Durkheim. Such a contextualisation revolves around a particular aspect: the interpretation of cosmological ideas on the basis of the social structures of ancient societies. The paper follows the diffusion of such a method within the publications of the sixties by Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Pierre Leveque et Marcel Detienne - all in all what one could call a Paris-Besancon School. Particular attention is given to geometric patterns, used as a scheme providing a common intelligibility to social practices and cosmological ideas. Consequently, we try to assess what such developments owe to Durkheim and Mauss, through the mediation of Louis Gernet, also drawing a comparison with the way British philologists have received the inspiration of the French school of sociology. The proximity with the durkheimian model places historical anthropology of Ancient Greece in a particular place within the contemporary debate in anthropology and in social sciences.