Background

Marcel Mauss was born in Epinal, France on May 10, 1872, to a pious Jewish family against whose traditions he rebelled as a young man.

Education

He attended the University of Bordeaux, where he studied philosophy; one of his professors was his uncle, the sociologist Emile Durkheim. Although Mauss did not receive a degree, he placed high in the national Agrégation competition in 1895. He then studied history, philology, and religion at the University of Paris and, in 1897-1898, took a study tour including Oxford, where he met Edward Tylor, who was considered to be the founder of anthropology.

Career

Mauss taught Hindu and Buddhist philosophy at the University of Paris from 1900 to 1902, when he succeeded to a chair in the history of religion of primitive peoples. He taught there until 1930 and then at the College de France until 1939. He also taught ethnography from 1927 to 1939 at the Institute of Ethnography, which he helped to found in 1927. These lectures were compiled in the Manual of Ethnography (1947). Although Mauss was not himself a fieldworker, he trained French anthropologists who were, and he stressed ethnography more than other Durkheimians. Mauss is best known for his contributions to L'Année sociologique, the journal founded by Durkheim and his students, appearing in 12 volumes between 1898 and 1913. The journal was intended primarily as an outlet for specialized researches. Mauss edited the sections on religion and classification of the science of sociology. He took seriously Durkheim's dictum that science progressed through collective effort and neglected his own researches. In 1908, as a result, Durkheim decided to publish the journal only every third year.

Most of Mauss's early published work was in collaboration with other scholars and was published in L'Année. With Henry Hubert, he wrote The Nature and Function of Sacrifice (1899), Prolegomena to a General Theory of Magic (1904; a work which influenced Durkheim's classic Elementary Forms of the Religious Life in 1912), and Introduction to Religious Phenomena (1908). With Durkheim, he wrote Primitive Classification (1903) and collaborated on numerous articles and reviews. Mauss never knowingly violated Durkheim's sociological teachings, although the division of labor between them had left examples (both classical and ethnographic) to Mauss and theory to Durkheim. When Durkheim died in 1917, Mauss became director of L'Année. His own work became more ethnographic after World War I as he tried to maintain the old scope of L'Année. His The Gift (1925) built on Bronislaw Malinowski's ethnographic studies of exchange and social structure in Melanesia. Mauss defined exchange patterns cross-culturally, using Roman, Hindu, and Germanic as well as primitive examples to demonstrate that exchange was a "total social fact" in which economic and social motives were inseparable. Mauss wrote extensively for the Journal of Normal and Pathological Psychology and served as president of the Society of Psychology from 1923 to 1926. He believed that data about primitive cultures were necessary to the science of psychology, and he wanted to facilitate exchange of information between it and sociology.

He died on February 10, 1950.

Achievements

• His views on the theory and method of ethnology are thought to have influenced many eminent social scientists, including Claude Levi-Strauss, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and Melville J. Herskovits.
  
  He was a founder of the Ethnology Institute of the University of Paris.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Manual of Ethnography

    ( Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) was the leading social anthro...)

  • A General Theory of Magic (Routledge Classics) (Volume 37)

    (First written by Marcel Mauss and Henri Humbert in 1902, ...)

  • Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social Morphology (Routledge Library Editions: Anthropology and Ethnography)

    (Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo is one of the first boo...)

  • Primitive Classification

    ( Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss maintain that society i...)

  • Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions

    (Format Paperback Subject Social Sciences General Publishe...)

  • On Prayer: Text and Commentary

    ( Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) never completed his Doctoral t...)

  • Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function

    (Book by Henri Hubert, Marcel Mauss)

Politics

A political activist for many years, he supported Alfred Dreyfus in his famed court battle, aligned himself with the socialist leader Jean Jaures, and assisted in founding the socialist daily L’Humanite (1904). He actively fought against anti-semitism and racial politics both before and after World War II.

Connections

Uncle:

Emile Durkheim

References

• Marcel Mauss: A Biography
• Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss