Marcel Mauss: The Man Is the Message

Table of contents and chapter summaries, September 2024

A book of 80,000 words for students, some specialist academic colleagues, and the public in Polity Press’s Key contemporary thinkers series. A full draft to be submitted in 2025 for publication in 2026.

The elements so mixed in him that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, “there was a man” (Shakespeare).

Table of contents

Preface

Chronology

Introduction

Part One: Academic writings, work and public engagement

Chapter 1. Durkheim’s school of French sociology and after

Chapter 2. Religion, ritual and classification

Chapter 3. Political economy: money, the social market, a movement from below

Chapter 4. The essay on the gift

Chapter 5. Interdisciplinary humanism: sociology, psychology, biology, technology

Chapter 6. Anthropology as a descriptive science of total human beings

Part Two: Analysis, commentaries and Mauss’s legacy

Chapter 7. The sacred and symbolism

Chapter 8. Human understanding: magic, religion, philosophy and science (number)

Chapter 9. Building a human economy in a world crisis

Chapter 10. The critique of modern bureaucracy and social science, then and now

References

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The book has two parts. Part One discusses Mauss’s important writings, work and public engagement—a different selection from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (2013 [1950]) edited collection in French, but with considerable overlap. Part Two asks why Mauss’s place in the history of social thought should be reconsidered along with its relevance today and in future. My approach to Mauss’s work and life is substantially based on texts not available in English translation, although a good start has already been made there.[1] A summary of each chapter follows. I recommend that you read the book in your own order, letting your attention linger where it will.

Part One: Academic writings, work, and public engagement

Chapter 1. Durkheim’s school of French sociology and after

“Durkheim was full of far-reaching ideas. But what drew us together around him was knowing that here was a real scholar, that his methods were totally sound, and that his range of knowledge was vast and scrupulously verified” (Mauss 1998 [1930]: 30).

Mauss believed that science was always a collective effort, even if this was less visible for social science than the natural scientists’ laboratories. He was twice a team-player, first as his uncle’s subordinate from childhood and after the war he led the short revival of L’Année sociologique and founded French anthropology. This chapter starts with a more detailed biography before examining the Année sociologique team’s work and principles. An account follows of Mauss’s deep friendship with Henri Hubert, a relationship that has some affinity with a psychological novel. Finally, I sketch the history of France and the world in Mauss’s lifetime.

Chapter 2. Religion, ritual and classification

Mauss wrote two early essays on religion with Henri Hubert. The second, “A general theory of magic” (1902), is discussed in Chapter 8. Their first attempt, “Sacrifice: its nature and function” (1898), was written in dialogue with British anthropologists—Robertson-Smith, Tylor and Frazer. It draws on Mauss’s knowledge of Indian Vedic ritual and is a faithful reflection of the school they were setting up with Durkheim then. Mauss struggled to write his doctoral thesis on prayer. It remained unfinished, but he did publish two long sections: on definition, theory and method; and on oral ritual among Aboriginal Australians. Hubert and Mauss’s 1909 book, Mélange d’histoires des religions (Miscellaneous Histories of Religions) has a strong analytical preface discussed here.

Chapter 3. Political economy: money, the social market, a movement from below

Mauss was a cooperative socialist; his party was the ‘French section of the Workers International’. He opposed Marxists and anarchists on the left, adhering to ‘social market’ principles that fuelled Germany’s postwar rise. He was friends with Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose advocacy of a consumer cooperative democracy he shared. He anticipated an anti-capitalist revolution supported by an ‘economic movement from below’ based on coops, workers’ associations, and mutual insurance. After the war, he was a prolific financial journalist for left wing organs, specializing in the exchange rate crisis of 1922-24. He started a book on socialism and the nation, a combination soon undermined by fascists. He saw money as a driving force extending society to more inclusive levels; and he wrote about finance in professional style on themes similar to those of Karl Polanyi and Maynard Keynes. Mauss once wrote that “The great economic revolutions are monetary in nature”, since they push society into unknown regions that require new money forms.

Chapter 4. The essay on the gift

Mauss’ Essay on the gift is often misunderstood by English-speakers who cling to the Victorian contrast between individual contracts and social gifts; this contrast is still often taken to be synonymous with the West vs. the Rest. Rather than survey this literature along with abundant French and multinational writing on the essay, I offer here my own take on it. Mauss upheld Durkheim’s concept of the “non-contractual element in the contract” and renewed it as the contradictory glue between the individual and social sides of human nature. Drawing on others’ ethnographic discoveries of heroic gift-exchange in The Gift, he argued that the ‘potlatch’, like markets and money, extended local societies to develop mutual obligation with foreigners whom they needed to supply essentials that they lacked. The Mouvement anti-utilitaire en sciences sociales—MAUSS, the Anti-utilitarian Movement in Social Science led by Alain Caillé—echoing Anthony Giddens (2013) and very many others,[2] holds that the gift is a third way between market and state.

Chapter 5. Interdisciplinary humanism: sociology, psychology, biology, technology

Mauss extended the range of his interdisciplinary publications in 1926-40 until forced retirement and illness diminished him. Essays discussed here often started out as addresses to prestigious academic associations or he developed them from lectures. The most famous are “Sociology and psychology” (Mauss 1979 [1926]), “The category of the person, the self” (Carrithers, Collins and Lukes 1985 [1938]) and “Techniques of the body”, part of Mauss’s interest in skills and technology (Schlanger 1998, 2008, 2023 [1935]). He also wrote “Physical aspects of death” (Mauss 1979 [1940]).

Chapter 6. Anthropology as a descriptive science of the total human being

France’s first generations of ethnographers were happy to acknowledge Mauss as the founder of national ethnology (socio-cultural anthropology). I discuss his approach to teaching, and summarise the careers of three notable women students. Germaine Tillion[3] studied peasants in northeastern Algeria and is almost unknown in the English-speaking world. She is one of only a few women in the Pantheon for participating in the French resistance—she published an ethnography of a women’s concentration camp—and for her activism in the Algerian war. She was a pioneer of reflexive anthropology; her life and work inform my speculative reconstruction of Mauss as an auto-ethnographer.

He did no “fieldwork” as such, but he was no armchair anthropologist. Apart from political activism and journalism, his four years in the First World War’s trenches as a translator for British and Australian troops were transformative, just as her war experience later informed her public interventions on anthropology, feminism, war, and social services, and her passion for understanding, truth, and justice.

Germaine Dieterlen and Denise Paulme studied the celebrated Dogon of Mali. The first, with Marcel Griaule and Jean Rouch, was a founder of French anthropology in West Africa (Hart 1985). She wrote on myth, ritual, and descriptive ethnography. Paulme also studied social organization, African women, Berber literature and sculpture; she compiled Mauss’ Manual of Ethnography from his lecture notes. As Africanists, they each offer me one link to their teacher.

Part Two: Analysis, commentaries and Mauss’ legacy

Chapter 7. The sacred and symbolism

Roy (‘Skip’) Rappaport based his great book, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999), on the belief that language and religion emerged together in human evolution. The symbolic plasticity of words made possible The Lie, and this undermined the sacred constant that is belonging to each other in society or human communities. People need something to believe in and ritual renews it regularly. That is why, as Durkheim and Mauss knew, the sacred and society are synonymous. But each of them made great strides towards understanding and harnessing the symbolic power of meaning afforded by language within the framework of religion’s power to symbolize human belonging through ritual. Lévi-Strauss sought to discredit them both.

Chapter 8. Human understanding: magic, religion, philosophy and science (number)

Mauss approaches human understanding through magic, religion, philosophy and science (number). Against the British anthropologists’ evolutionism, he shows with Hubert in their essay on magic (1902) that they overlap significantly. His essay with Durkheim on “Primitive classification” (1903) addresses the categories of understanding in comparative perspective. I use their framework to examine how a recent shift in statistical paradigms reflects national capitalism’s revival of the Old Regime; and conclude with Kant’s debt to Spinoza and Hume in his dialectical synthesis of rationalism and empiricism.

Chapter 9. Building a human economy in a world crisis

Since 2000, I have developed with others the idea of a “human economy” (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010). I now consider Mauss to be our main precursor. This has two referents: that the economy is realised by active human beings, and economic analysis should address their practical concerns. It should also address global humanity. I develop earlier themes of economy and religion by linking them to the world crises of his and our times. His international cooperative socialism opposed Marxism and resort to violence, but not money and the markets its makes. His hopes that postwar developments based on the nation and socialism could lead to a greater integration of world society were dashed. We can learn from his responses then when confronting today’s world crisis.

Chapter 10. The critique of modern bureaucracy and social science, then and now

This chapter considers the relevance of the book to contemporary reflections on world crisis. It links Mauss’s critique of the last intellectual revolution and its offspring, modern bureaucracy to his growing interdisciplinary and eclectic approach to writing from the 1920s. If humanity repeats the failure of the last century’s model of impersonal society in this one, there will not be a twenty-second. Avoiding this disaster will require both a world and another intellectual revolution for which Marcel Mauss could be one inspiring example.

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[1] Thanks mainly to the efforts of Oxford University’s Durkheim Institute with Berghahn Books.

[2] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way.

[3] See https://johnkeithhart.substack.com/p/germaine-tillion-the-facts-of-her