Assignment 4

Isis Balico
19th Century American Economics
Professor Rainville
Assignment 4/ Marcel Mauss

        Marcel Mauss was born in Epinal, France in 1872, and died in 1950. He was the nephew of the famous sociologist Emile Durkheim, and he himself was a sociologist and an anthropologist. He “attended the University of Bordeaux, and studied philosophy under his Durkheim, Alferd Espinas and Hamelin”, (The Ethnological Theory of Marcel, Seth Leacock (1)). Mauss taught for a very long period of time, beginning his teaching career at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Esutdes at the University of Paris in 1900 (1). In 1902 he became the head of a course called “ ’ L’ histoire des religions des peuples non-civilses’ and taught this course till 1930, until he began to teach the course at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Estudes, and then the same course at the College de France” (1). His interest and research varied quite widely, everything from “sacrifice and magic to various aspects of psychology and suicide among Celts” (1).  He was a follower of Durkheim, and “worked in conjunction with Durkheim, Paul Fauconnet, Henri Hubert, F. Simiand, Henri Beuchat, Maxime David, and Robert Hertz; practically all of his early work was written in conjunction with another member of this group” (1). His personal life does seem to have influenced his work. Durkheim was his uncle and Mauss “applied many of his uncle’s ideas to his work” (1), this may have to do with fact that many of his colleagues, including Beuchat, David, and Hertz were killed during or died during World War two: his uncle, Durkheim also died after the war. It is believed that “this was emotional incentive and beyond intellectual conviction, which operated to keep Mauss faithful to Durkheim’s ideas” (1).


         Marcel Mauss was a respected sociologist and made two major theoretic contributions to the field. Which have led others to develop them. The first contribution is a theory called “The Gift” (1924); in this theory Mauss  “explores gift exchanges in various cultures and highlights the reciprocal nature of gifts and the obligation of the receiver to repay the debt” (The Gift (2)). In essence this theory states that the object given is in part a piece of the giver and it is the responsibility of the receiver to give a gift in return of equal value (2). The other theory that Mauss developed was “’ The Body’” (2), where Mauss describes the “’techniques of the body’ as highly developed body actions that embody aspects of a given culture” (2).  It is Mauss’s theory of “The Gift”, though, that portrays some of his ideas of what value is; Mauss thought of the gift exchange as a way to “create alliances and obligations between individuals or groups who might otherwise have nothing to do with one another” (Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, David Graeber, page 27 (3)). The idea of value arises  “the recipient feeling compelled to return a counter gift of roughly equal value” (page 35) (3). This approaches the question of value when the recipient thinks of what is of equal value to be used as a counter gift, what is valuable?







Bibliography

1)"The Gift." N.p., n.d. Web.
2)Graeber, David. "Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams [Paperback]." PALGRAVE, n.d. Web. Sept. 2012.
3)Leacock, Seth. "The Ethnological Theory of Marcel Mauss." N.p., n.d. Web.