Mauss, Marcel (1872–1950)

Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and ethnologist. He studied at Bordeaux University as well as at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and the Sorbonne in Paris. From 1901 onward, Mauss taught History of the Religions of Uncivilized Peoples at the École. In 1925, he cofounded the Institut d’Éthnologie. Six years later, he received the chair in sociology at the Collège de France. Mauss was a nephew and student of sociologist Émile Durkheim, who deeply influenced his thinking. They collaborated on several research projects (e.g., Durkheim and Mauss 1963) and Mauss contributed extensively to Durkheim's journal L'Année Sociologique (1898–1913). Mauss served in the First World War (1914–1918). He was a socialist political activist for much of his life.

In The Gift, his most celebrated work, Mauss investigates the gift exchange systems organizing “primitive” societies. He describes the gift system as a “total social fact,” which governs religious, legal, moral, political, economic, and aesthetic institutions. In archaic communities, social relations are typically established through the exchange and circulation of presents—objects, services, and people—between clans, tribes, and families as well as between humans and nature, the dead, spirits, and the Gods. Gift transactions are neither voluntary nor disinterested but motivated by the social obligation to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. Refusing to exchange is considered an insult equivalent to rejecting social alliances. Although Mauss focuses on the peoples of Polynesia, Melanesia, and North America, he also underscores the importance of the exchange-gift principle in antiquity and its hidden operation in modern society.

Among the tribes of America's Northwest, gift exchange takes the form of the potlatch system. Potlatches are festivals of frequently hostile gift transactions. Participants seek to outdo each other in their presents—often giving all they have—and “even go as far as the purely sumptuary destruction of wealth” (Mauss 1990, 8). Through extravagant donations, the rivals aim to demonstrate their wealth to compete successfully for social honor and rank. Mauss identifies similar practices in other parts of the word, notably in Melanesia.

One of Mauss's (1990, 4) key questions is, “What rule … compels the gift that has been received to [Page 923]be obligatorily reciprocated? What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?” Archaic societies, he argues in response, cherish the notion that the thing given is not inactive but contains a “spirit” that connects it to the giver and makes it wish to return. The collective belief in the “spirit of the thing given”—variously named mana or hau—motivates people to pass it on. Mauss's argument was influenced by his inquiries into collectivities practicing magic and has generated considerable controversy in anthropology (e.g., Lévi-Strauss 1987, 45–66).

Mauss's thought has left an extraordinary legacy in several disciplines. His writings shaped the work of anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, influenced the outlook of the Collège de Sociologie and the anti-utilitarian movement in the social sciences (whose French acronym is MAUSS), and provided decisive inspiration for Georges Bataille's theory of expenditure, Jean Baudrillard's concept of symbolic exchange, and the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. More recently, social scientists have drawn on Mauss's work to distinguish between gift exchange and commodity exchange. The gift transactions of gift systems are obligatory and establish enduring social bonds. Things are inseparable from transactors and their alliances; the boundaries between legal codes concerning objects and those concerning humans are blurred. Commodity exchange, by contrast, is conceived as a transaction between independent agents who part ways once the transaction is completed. Things are treated purely as entities of use value and exchange value and deemed dissociable from transactors. Correspondingly, modern legal systems sharply differentiate between laws relating to objects and laws relating to people. Sociologists of consumption have employed this framework in their analyses of social relations and of relationships between people and consumer objects in contemporary capitalism.

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