Examining the work of Lévi-Strauss, Freud, and Girard, as well as ethnographic and clinical data, Giving Life, Giving Death seeks to explain why our greatest thinkers have consistently marginalized the cultural and biological fact of maternity. In the spirit of Freud's Totem and Taboo, Scubla constructs an anthropology that posits a common source for family and religion. His wide-ranging study explores how rituals unite violence and the sacred and intertwine the giving of death and the giving of life.

Lucien Scubla is a researcher at the Institut Marcel Mauss of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of a study on Claude Lévi-Strauss and wrote the preface for the French translation of Social Origins, a posthumous work by A. M. Hocart.