Maurice Bloch

Who is Maurice Bloch?

Maurice Bloch is a British anthropologist.

He attended the Lycée Carnot in Paris and the Perse School in Cambridge, moving to Britain at the age of eleven. His move to the UK was because his father had been killed by the Nazis when in the French Army and his mother Claudette Bloch née Raphael, a marine biologist, had remarried the British biologist John S. Kennedy whom she had met at a conference. His mother was a niece of Emile Durkheim and a first cousin of Marcel Mauss. Bloch was an undergraduate at the London School of Economics, attending lectures at the School of Oriental and African Studies, continuing his training in anthropology at Cambridge University where he obtained his doctorate in 1967. His subsequent career has been almost entirely at the London School of Economics where he was appointed a full professor in 1983.

In 2005 he was appointed European Professor at the Collège de France. He was until 2009 visiting Professor at the Free University of Amsterdam. He has taught and has been an occasional visiting professor in most European countries as well as Japan.