Abstract

The objective of this dissertation is to analyze how theoretical frameworks, taken as cultural and socio-historical products, are configured, consumed, reproduced and exchanged under particular social, economic and political conditions that determine to an important extent the object and boundary-building process of a discipline or a field of knowledge such as anthropology. ;This dissertation analyzes the work of Cornelius Castoriadis as a product of the French intellectual, political and socio-economic conditions during the 1960s and 1970s. It addresses the influence exercised by this body of theory in the configuration and delimitation of the anthropological field, comparing it to the influence of two other dominant and contemporaneous theoretical trends---Structuralism and post-Structuralism---in France and the U.S. ;The analysis focuses on three problems: the notion of the subject; the production of cultural meaning and representation; and cultural change. Based on these issues, this dissertation discusses the different conceptions of anthropological theory and the epistemological assumptions exposed by Castoriadis' framework, Levi-Straussian Structuralism and Foucauldian post-Structuralism. ;As an illustration of the post-Structuralist influence in the U.S., the anthropology of science developed by Paul Rabinow is compared to anthropological developments that follow Castoridian foundations. This brings to light unexplored applications of Castoridian work to the anthropological practice. The problems selected as anthropological objects, methodological and epistemological assumptions when doing ethnography, conceptual tools and the political and social role of anthropology, are problems affected when incorporating the Castoridian perspective. ;Throughout the dissertation, an alternative perspective is shown as emerging from Castoriadis' elaborations: a new ontology where total determinism and functionality are completely swept away, and the subject is theorized as a creative entity with cultural productions and imaginary representations. This new ontology makes it explicit that the process of configuration of the anthropological field can establish intimate relationships with philosophy and psychoanalysis, in forms of analysis unprecedented in anthropology. ;The fieldwork for this dissertation was done in Cornelius Castoriadis' official archival in Paris. Interviews with close collaborators of the author were carried out in Paris, Barcelona and New York. Furthermore, an interview was done with Paul Rabinow at the University of California, Berkeley.