Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss (born May 10, 1872, Épinal, Fr.—died Feb. 10, 1950, Paris) was a French sociologist and anthropologist whose contributions include a highly original comparative study of the relation between forms of exchange and social structure. His views on the theory and method of ethnology are thought to have influenced many eminent social scientists, including Claude Lévi-Strauss, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and Melville J. Herskovits.

Mauss was the nephew of sociologist Émile Durkheim, who contributed much to his intellectual formation and whom he assisted in the preparation of a number of works, notably Le Suicide. Mauss also assisted, and eventually succeeded, Durkheim as editor of the journal L’Année Sociologique (“The Sociological Year”). In 1902 he began his career as professor of primitive religion at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (“Practical School of Higher Studies”), Paris. He was a founder of the Ethnology Institute of the University of Paris (1925) and also taught at the Collège de France (1931–39). He possessed an encyclopaedic mind familiar with an exceptional breadth of ethnographic and linguistic knowledge. His lectures were described as abounding in new and productive ideas that inspired books and theses. A political activist for many years, he supported Alfred Dreyfus in his famed court battle, aligned himself with the socialist leader Jean Jaurès, and assisted in founding the socialist daily L’Humanité (1904).

Although he never did fieldwork, Mauss turned the attention of French sociologists, philosophers, and psychologists toward ethnology. He took pains to distinguish points of view in nonliterate societies, thus preserving their freshness and specificity and, at the same time, strengthening the link between psychology and anthropology. Among his earliest works is “Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice” (1899; Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function). His most influential work is thought to be Essai sur le don (1925; The Gift); concentrating on the forms of exchange and contract in Melanesia, Polynesia, and northwestern North America, the work explores the religious, legal, economic, mythological, and other aspects of giving, receiving, and repaying. This study provides an excellent example of Mauss’s approach to method in its concern with a limited segment of social phenomena viewed in its systematic entirety. Mauss also wrote on magic, the concept of self, mourning rites, and other topics. Sociologie et anthropologie (1950) is a collection of essays he published between 1904 and 1938.

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