The Imagined the Imaginary

by Maurice Godelier

ISBN: 9781786637703

Published: 2020-01-28

Exploring the close relationship between the real and the symbolic and imaginary What you imagined is not always imaginary, but everything that is imaginary is imagined. It is by imagining that people make the impossible become possible. In mythology or religion, however, those things that are imagined are never experienced as being imaginary by believers. The realm of the imagined is even more real than the real; it is super-real, surreal. Lévi-Strauss held that "the real, the symbolic and the imaginary" are three separate orders. Maurice Godelier demonstrates the contrary: that the real is not separate from the symbolic and the imaginary. For instance, for a portion of humanity, rituals and sacred objects and places attest to the reality and therefore the truth that God, gods or spirits exist. The symbolic enables people to signify what they think and do, encompassing thought, spilling over into the whole body, but also pervading temples, palaces, tools, foods, mountains, the...