Marcel Mauss

Works

• 1925The Gift

  From the potlatch to the Maori hau: gifts bind people through the obligations to give, to receive and to reciprocate.

Position

Mauss wrote mainly essays, but several of them became founding texts. With Hubert he analysed sacrifice (1899) and magic (1902–03), with Durkheim the social origins of systems of classification (1903). The Gift (1925) compares the potlatch of the north-west coast of America, the kula ring of the Trobriand Islands described by Malinowski, Maori ideas of the hau, the spirit of the gift, and early Roman, Germanic and Hindu law. Everywhere he found three obligations: to give, to receive and to give back. Gifts that seem voluntary are in fact binding; they create alliances, rank and rivalry, and they mix persons and things. Such exchanges are “total social facts”, in which economic, legal, religious, moral and aesthetic aspects cannot be separated. Mauss drew a political lesson against both pure market society and Bolshevism and argued for social insurance and mutual aid as modern forms of the gift. In “Techniques of the Body” (1934) he showed that walking, swimming or sleeping are learned differently in each society, and used the term habitus for such acquired bodily dispositions. Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his introduction to Mauss’s collected essays (1950), read The Gift as a forerunner of structuralism; Pierre Bourdieu took up habitus and the gift as an exchange whose economic character must be misrecognised; Jacques Derrida, in Given Time (1991), objected that a gift that returns as exchange is no longer a gift.

Life & context

Marcel Mauss was born in 1872 in Épinal in the Vosges into a Jewish family; his mother was the sister of Émile Durkheim. He studied philosophy at Bordeaux under his uncle and passed the agrégation in 1895, then studied Sanskrit and the history of religions in Paris. He did no fieldwork himself, but read nearly everything ethnographers wrote. From 1898 he was one of the main contributors to Durkheim’s journal L’Année sociologique, often together with his friend Henri Hubert, and in 1901 he took the chair for the history of religions of “non-civilised peoples” at the École pratique des hautes études. A socialist close to Jean Jaurès, he helped found the newspaper L’Humanité in 1904 and was active in the cooperative movement. The First World War, in which he served as an interpreter, killed many of Durkheim’s students and Durkheim’s son; after Durkheim’s death in 1917 Mauss edited his uncle’s papers and kept the school together. In 1925 he co-founded the Institut d’ethnologie in Paris, and in 1931 he was elected to a chair of sociology at the Collège de France. The anti-Jewish laws of the Vichy regime forced him out in 1940. He died in Paris in 1950.

Further main works

• Essay on the Nature and Function of Sacrifice (with Henri Hubert, 1899)
• A General Theory of Magic (with Henri Hubert, 1902–03)
• Primitive Classification (with Émile Durkheim, 1903)
• Techniques of the Body (Les techniques du corps, 1934)
• A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person (1938)