Mauss, Marcel 1872-1950

Quotes
“There are no uncivilized peoples, there are only peoples with different civilizations (In his inaugural lecture at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, 1901)" “The most important of these spiritual mechanisms is clearly the one which obliges us to make a return gift for a gift received (The Gift, p.5)” “It is not always the phenomena closest in time that are the profound causes of the phenomena we are familiar with. (On Prayer, p.366)”

Biography and History
Marcel Mauss was born into a French Jewish family in 1872. He started out as a philosopher, studying this field at the University of Bordeaux. His understanding of philosophy was greatly influenced by his uncle, Émile Durkheim. Mauss later decided to devote himself to research, he studied the history of religion at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1925 he established the Institut d’Éthnologie de l’Université de Paris with Lucien Levy-Bruhl, where he would teach ethnography until 1939. Along with generally being considered the founding father of contemporary French social anthropology, he is also deemed the most influential social scientist of the French school. He would later become an active participant in The Sociological Year, a biannual journal of French Sociology founded by Durkheim in 1898.

His academic career complemented the rise of the first generation of well-known French-Jewish anthropological literates – amongst these were Henri Bergson, Émile Durkheim and Lucien Levy-Bruhl.

Work
Mauss’ early works were a collaborative effort with Henri Hubert, an ancient historian and archeologist of the sociological school. These early studies concentrated on religion and analyzed the social functions of sacrifice (Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions, 1899) as well as focused upon magic as a social phenomenon (A General Theory of Magic, 1902). He would later explore the subject of magic in further detail in regards to Aboriginal Australian societies. He would also go on to analyze the act of praying, but would never finish his doctoral thesis On Prayer (1909). His 20th century analysis of cultures attempted to display the universality of the concept “mana.” Mauss did so, by relating the Polynesian understanding of mana to concepts found in other indigenous cultures, such as the Iroquois and the Ojibway.

Mauss’ work focused upon, comparative religion, social cohesion, the function of cultural facts, the social origin of mental categories (Durkheim’s influence can be recognized in relation to this subject), and the impact of social determinism on individual behavior. His later and most famous book, The Gift (1925) analyzes the nature of gift economies in different cultures. It discusses the social theories of reciprocity and gift exchange. This work focuses upon the way in which gift exchange builds relationships between individuals, with emphasis on the potlatch in the Pacific Northwest, the Maori concept of the hau in Polynesia, and the kula exchange in Papua New Guinea. Mauss argues that these societies have a common practice that concentrates upon this concept of reciprocal exchange. He contrasts this notion of gift economy, to that of the wests’ beliefs about the history and nature of exchange.

Influences
Mauss’ theoretical contributions derive mainly from Durkheim’s doctrine, which emphasizes the quality of documentation over the number of societies compared -“The essential thing is to unite not many facts, but facts at once typical and well-studied (Émile Durkheim, Critical Assessments, p.62)”. In addition to collaborating together on De Quelques Formes Primitives de Classification (1903), and writing reviews, he also assisted Durkheim with his work on suicide, compiling statistical tables. Mauss' and Durkheim's collaboration eventually led to Mauss' notion of 'total social fact'.

World War I negatively impacted The Sociological Year group, and after the early death of his uncle, Mauss took leadership of the group. Along with reviving the journal twice (in the 1920s and 1930s), he dedicated much of his time to editing the published works of Durkheim, R. Hertz, Hubert and others. He was also a socialist, and the qualities of his socialism can be seen within the conclusion of The Gift (1925), where he stresses the decline in quality of human relationships when the exchanges between them becomes purely economical.

The Gift was a central influence to Levi-Strauss’ theory of structuralism, in which he relates this idea of exchange to kinship systems, language and economics. Moreover, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown brought aspects of Maussian and Durkheimian French sociology to his theory of functionalism, which in turn appropriately coined the term ‘structural functionalism’. Later, the book reached neo-Marxian and poststructuralist territory and was heavily debated by authors in this field. Mauss' focus on the nature of reciprocity as it relates to exchange, has also greatly influenced the field of economic anthropology. Along with this, his writings have also inspired many discussions on a wide range of subjects in anthropology such as the methodological individualist theory as well as feminist and gender studies. In addition, the anthropolical sub-discipline of exchange theory is based heavily on the work of Mauss.

Analysis
Mauss was a structural  anthropologist who believed that social relationships are based on exchange. He took Durkheim’s notion of ‘solidarity’ and applied it to structures of reciprocity and related it to mediums of exchange. He argued that solidarity is achieved through the social bonds that gift exchange creates. Mauss’ interest was related to gift economies and the meaning behind the gifts found in traditional societies versus those in the contemporary world. The question that drove his research was: "What power resides in the object given, that causes its recipient to pay it back (The Gift, 1925)?" His engrossment with this subject guided him towards less modern societies in which gifts held a certain power in regards to the people apart of the given community. He was also concerned with the virtuous and the moral bond that was created between the people exchanging gifts.

Mauss understood the gift to be more than a commodity; it is a “total prestation” saturated in “spiritual mechanisms” that reveals the essence of the society that it is apart of. Ultimately, the gift, according to Mauss, holds economical, political, legal, mythological, religious, magical, personal, social and kinship-oriented properties. As a structuralist he was interested in the connection between the elements of gift giving and systems of exchange and thus relates the gift to the fabric of social life and fundamentally sets the foundation for a theoretical apprehension of social relations.

Critique
Mauss’ assertion of mana as a universal concept was heavily criticized for its generalization of different cultures; the same criticisms were made in relation to his book, The Gift (1925). Mauss implies that there are no such things as free gifts, to which French anthropologist Alain Testart responds, that this is not true and that there are features of reciprocity in which obligation is not a factor. He uses the example of passers-by giving beggars money as well as donors and receivers who do not know each other to illustrate his point. With these examples he is demonstrating the lack of obligation that Mauss emphasizes within his study. In regards to Mauss’ description of the potlatch, Testart argues that he embellishes the significance of obligation that is produced by social pressures. British anthropologist James Laidlaw elaborated upon this idea of free gifts as he argues that Mauss’ emphasis on the importance of reciprocation takes away from the symbolic essence of the donation. Furthermore, his broad application of the term ‘potlatch’ was criticized for the fact that it did not consider the social context in which various forms of gift-exchange occur. Also, there are still traces of evolutionary thinking in Mauss’ work as he categorized the Australians he studied as being apart of the Upper Paleolithic period. Moreover, the concept of reciprocity was a key debate between Mauss and Bronislaw Malinowski, in which they deliberated the meaning of ‘’Kula exchange’ during the First World War. Where Mauss emphasized the way in which gifts were exchanged between representatives of larger collectives, Malinowski  understood the opposite and accentuated that the exchange was done between individuals. Another criticism about Mauss was that despite his interests in ethnology, he never engaged in fieldwork of any kind. This, people argue, is the reason for him overlooking the degree of individual variation in different societies as well as his tendency to over embellish cultural similarities. Most of Mauss’ critiques revolve around the abstract trait of his theories and his attempt to associate these theories to cultures that are not necessarily related to each other in any way except for in regard to these arbitrary notions that he believed to be universal. This criticism of arbitrariness is often an issue in structuralism.