Pierre Pestieau

Bequests and inheritance: empirical issues and France-U.S. comparison

Inheritance has long been a favoured research topic in the social sciences. Marxists viewed it as a privileged channel of class reproduction from one generation to the next. In anthropological studies of traditional or primitive societies, it plays a major role in revealing the structure of kinship relations and in the exchange of words, women and goods. Psychosociologists consider it first of all as a moment of crisis, but also one of truth, when hidden family links and relations to siblings, lineage and marriage are suddenly brought to light; moreover, they insist upon the double dimension, ‘symbolic’ (or sentimental) and economic, of inherited goods, and upon their process of ‘appropriation’ — how the heir must ‘identify’ himself with these family goods and then decide what to do with them (either keep them, or sell them, or whatever).