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The relationship between political and politist anthropology is obvious, as are the nuances of difference between the two. The foregoing article rehearses the formidable legacy of the former, and the uses thereof - sometimes reductionist, sometimes innovative - by the latter. Little versed in the mechanisms of kinship and the analysis of symbolism, political science has chiefly benefited from ethnology in two directions: the search for a political ontology (bringing out the universality of human preoccupations in the domains of coordination, cooperation and the avoidance of violence); and the study of forms of sociability apparently very remote from the authority and power specific to the political sphere but actually closely linked to its functioning (such as cooking, music, celebrations, rituals). Thus, in their recourse to political anthropology, ethnologists and politists cross paths: the former move from the particular to the general and from the private to the public; the latter move in the opposite direction, consolidating more and more from the bottom the fundaments of cultural practices upon which rests, at the summit of society, the analysis of regimes, ideas and political acts.