Table of contents
Introduction: aims, his life and times, book outline
1. Religion and society: Mauss in transition between Durkheim and Rappaport
2. In search of human understanding: magic, religion, and science
3. The religious life: ritual practice, prayer and myth
4. Moral economy and politics
5. The essay on the gift
6. Inter-disciplinary concrete humanism: psychology, physiology and technology
7. Founder of French ethnology: reader, teacher, a student, auto-ethnography
8. An early dissenter from modern positivist social science
9. Conclusion: building a human economy together
Chapter 1. Rousseau knew that the Old Regime was already collapsing of its own accord. The problem was its most likely successor, the English bourgeoisie. Durkheim and Mauss from the 1890s opposed insistence on society’s role in shaping human experience to the British Empire’s global dominance supported by unequal *industrialization, control of international finance and trade, and market fundamentalist ideology—the most complete before its American successor after 1945. This meant focusing on the social glue sustaining individual contracts and replacing theories of unilinear human evolution from primitive to modern with a comparative science of existing social forms, sociology. The key for both uncle and nephew was religion’s role, as both ritual and belief, in making society and human understanding of it possible.
When I moved from classics to anthropology, I was soon enthralled by Durkheim’s message, but found it hard then to grasp Mauss’ and Marx’s modification of it. I next undertook an intellectual journey of several decades through Weber, Hegel, Kant and Rousseau to Locke. Halfway through I gained a view of Mauss and Marx as joined at the hip in my version of anthropology.
Durkheim used the one example of Australian totemism for a general theory of “natural religion” in society, based on a contrast between official church religion and everyday life as the sacred/profane pair. He delegated to Mauss the comparative study of religion and keeping up with contemporary ethnography, complementing his wide knowledge of ancient languages, world religion, and European history. Mauss brought to this task a conviction that thought, words and actions were unified in human sociality and communication. His first colloraboration with Henri Hubert was a study of sacrifice, followed by one on magic where they disagreed. In the next decade they expanded their empirical knowledge and produced a compilation of histories of religion that Durkheim categorically rejected.
The main biographer of Durkheim and Mauss says that no-one knows how The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) was actually written—by them both in some proportion or an informal team of their L’Annee sociologique school. But Durkheim’s singular voice is prominent there and the basic argument is an update of his original views on the sociology of religion. In the mid-1990s, my friend, Roy (‘Skip’) Rappaport told me that he was dying of cancer; in the next year I helped him finish what became Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999) and edited it for publication after his death. See Appendix 1, the book’s Foreword, with my strong claim that the two books belong together as the principal sorces for an anthropology of religion. Mauss’s development before and after Durkheim’s death is the bridge between them.
Chapter 2: Mauss was the specialist on comparative religion in Durkheim’s team. His early collaborative essays on sacrifice and magic held broadly to the party line. But in time he abandoned Durkheim’s positivist sociology and the role of official religion for an interdisciplinary approach extending sociology towards anthropology, history and politics. He held a chair in the History of the Religions of Non-Civilized Peoples, considering them to be different, not “primitive”. His work with Henri Hubert on this theme culminated in A Mixture of Histories of Religions (1909). Mauss rejected the idea of an evolution of human thought from magic, through religion, to science. The methods and assumptions of all three overlapped as ideal types. His essay on “primitive classification”, written with Durkheim (1903), derived the categories of understanding—and the idea of the sacred itself—from individual and collective human experience in society and nature.
Chapter 3: Mauss’ unfinished doctoral thesis was on prayer which he considered to be at once the most simple and complex aspect of “religious life”. He devoted systematic research to the study of myth, ritual practice and religious sentiments. The term occurs frequently in his writing and figures prominently in the title of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), usually attributed to Durkheim as author. What matters, regardless of authorship, is that this is the book of the founders of modern sociology that still has most to offer us. A case can be made for this update of Durkheim’s thought in the 1890s as a fully neo-Kantian work, combining ritual as the asic social act stabilizing everyday life for subjective individuals. As such, it anticipates Mauss’s own interdisciplinary interests after the war in sociology, anthropology, psychology, history and other human sciences.
Chapter 4: Mauss was a cooperative socialist; his party was the ‘French section of the Workers International’; he worked with its joint leader, Jean Jaurès, and co-edited L’Humanité. He opposed Marxism and anarchism strongly, adhering to ‘social market’ principles. His close English friends were Sidney and Beatrice Webb—core members of the Fabian Society center-left think tank—whose advocacy of a consumer democracy he shared. He started a book on socialism and the nation after the war, but later abandoned it. He worked for an anti-capitalist revolution supported by an ‘economic movement from below’, based on cooperatives, work associations, and mutual insurance. He was a prolific financial journalist for leftwing organs, specializing in the exchange-rate crisis of 1922-24. A coalition socialist government failed in the mid-1920s; Populaire his party’s newspaper folded; and the coop movement foundered.
Chapter 5: This is an extended analysis of and commentary on Mauss’ most famous essay. This is mostly misunderstood in the English-speaking world, where the Victorian contrast between individual contracts and social gifts still rules, often taken to be synonymous with the West vs the Rest. 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 components of human nature, typified by a family of economic relations including gift-exchange, markets and monetary transactions.
Drawing on ethnographic discoveries in Australia, Melanesia and America’s northwest coast, he held that heroic gift-exchange—like money in many different forms and the markets they sustain—extended local societies to develop mutual obligations with foreigners for trade in essentials that they lacked. Despite this, he is often identified with the binary contrast of English political economy between selfish contracts and altrusitic gift-giving that he—and Durkheim before him—sought to refute. French commentary is much better informed and nuanced; the MAUSS group led by Alain Caillé, echoing Anthony Giddens, holds that the gift is a third way between the Cold War pair of free markets and state socialism.
Chapter 6: Mauss was Durkheim’s successor as the leader of French sociology and anthropology; he always emphasized society’s influence on human behavior. But he was a “concrete dialectician” with an interdisciplinary approach that included psychology, physiology, and technology. His encyclopedic explorations of ancient languages, European history, comparative religion, contemporary social thought, and the ethnographic record%, plus active participation in politics, war, and open-minded social interaction, were antithetical to the bureaucratic compartments of modern education, research, and writing. In the interwar period, he produced a few remarkable texts expressing a mature and highly original methodological vision—on sociology and psychology, the category of the person or self and techniques of the body.
Chapter 7: At first, Mauss read the ethnography of his day voraciously; it was a major part of his work with Henri Hubert on comparative religion. His essay with Beuchat (1905) on seaonal variations among the Eskimo (Inuit) was a precocious investigation of the relationship between environment and society, one that also undermines radical opposition of distinctive types of political society. Seasonal modes of production and consumption vary between individualism in the winter when food sources are scarce and collectivism in the summer when they are plentiful.
From the mid-1920s, Mauss became the main teacher of France’s first ethnographers. I consider his teaching style and public performances, both featuring orality; Mauss held that “speech is the unity of thought and action”. A student, Denise Paulme published his Manual of Ethnography from notes. Of his many distinguished students, I single out Germaine Tillion (1907-2008), an ethnographer of Algerian peasants, activist in two wars, and later a public intellectual who was admitted to the Pantheon. She was a pioneer of reflexive anthropology; her life and work have informed my speculative reconstruction of Mauss as an auto-ethnographer. He did no “fieldwork” as such, but he was not an armchair anthropologist. Apart from political activism and journalism, his four years in WW1’s trenches as a translator for English troops were transformative, just as her war experience fed Tillion’s anthropology, feminism and passion for understanding, truth, and justice.
Chapter 8: Marcel Mauss was an early opponent of positivist compartmentalization in the social sciences, along with Weber, Simmel, Veblen, Bakhtin, Cassirer, Keynes, and Polanyi, for example. To these I would add the revolutionaries—Lenin, Gandhi, Du Bois, and my Caribbean mentor, C.L.R. James. The social disaster resulting from this impersonal experiment in political economy, education and expertise has long been obvious. Mauss’ example should contribute to the new intellectual synthesis that this century urgently needs. He already anticipated and influenced the new French social thinkers of the 1960s and 70s. But he is often %%%%%%%%regarded as a junior follower of Durkheim who left a spotty record of publication and founded French anthropology. His editor, Claude Lévi-Strauss began this process of marginalization and Anglophone ignorance of his writings beyond The Gift perpetuates it. Mauss’ dialectical humanism, intellectual curiosity, methodological innovation, and public engagement speak directly to our times of world crisis.
Chapter 9. Conclusion: building a human economy together
Marcel Mauss believed that society was set on an inexorable path to becoming ever more inclusive. His vehicle for this was extending the range of human economy. He started from “the real economic movement,” a concept of social change as self-expression that was* “by no means committed to revolutionary or radical alternatives, to brutal choices between two contradicitory forms of society. It will be made by a process of building new groups and institutions, alongside and on top of the old ones.”
He did not make an abstract appeal for turning the existing economy on its head. He showed us a concrete road to “other economies” based on the possibilities revealed to us by history and anthropology. I draw together here what kind of world society he aimed for, formed by an economics with a human face and founded on a moral politics that transcended markets and states -and gave vent to the the mutual solidarity of ordinary people in their daily lives.
He expected that such an approach would offer a new direction and emphasis to what people are already doing for themselves. Effective solutions, he thought, must build on democratic feedback from people in society. If more of us commit to engaging with the economy differently, who knows what we might conclude about the need for systematic change. And that would be a revolution. This was inspirayion for a collection, K. Hart, J-L. Laville and A.D. C1..attani eds The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide (2010).