Du sacrifice au potlatch D’Alfred Métraux à Claude Lévi-Strauss

“From sacrifice to potlatch” retraces the genesis of the “ethnographic moment” of Bataille’s thought. By rereading the testimonial of his friend Alfred Métraux, we suggest that he was not only a mediator that would introduce Georges Bataille to Marcel Mauss writings and the theory of gift, but that his research on the sacrifices and the cannibalism of the Tupinamba would have a deep influence on the ideas that Batailles developed in The Accursed Share in 1949.