Marcel Mauss asked why a present seems to demand repayment
No gift is ever quite free, argued Marcel Mauss in 1925. Handing something over binds giver and receiver in obligation and honour, because part of the giver travels with the object. Durkheim's nephew and pupil, he helped turn French sociology toward fieldwork and shaped Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Mauss was born in Épinal in the Vosges on 10 May 1872, into a Jewish family; his grandfather Moïse Durkheim had been the town's rabbi, and his uncle Émile Durkheim was fourteen years older than him. He had a religious upbringing and a bar mitzvah but stopped practising by eighteen. He joined his uncle at Bordeaux in 1890 to study philosophy, and Durkheim, who sat on the exam board, coached him for the agrégation, which he passed in 1893.
The letters between them show a demanding mentor. Durkheim scolded his nephew for slowness and for complicating simple tasks, yet leaned on him too: Mauss compiled the statistical tables for Durkheim's Suicide and helped launch L'Année sociologique, recruiting contributors and running the section on religion. Together they wrote Primitive Classification, which traced how different cultures tie ideas of space and time to social patterns. Rather than teach at a lycée, Mauss went to Paris to study Sanskrit and comparative religion.
He was politically active in a way his uncle was not, drawn to the socialism of Jean Jaurès, stirred by the Dreyfus affair, and involved in editing left-wing papers including L'Humanité. He served as an army interpreter from 1914 to 1919 and later criticised the Bolsheviks for violence and for wrecking the market economy. In the 1920s he founded the Institut Français de Sociologie and the Institut d'Ethnologie, training a generation of field researchers, and in 1931 became the first chair of sociology at the Collège de France.
The Gift framed exchange as a total social fact, the phrase his student Maurice Leenhardt developed, staking the honour of both parties and blurring the line between material and spiritual. Objects, Mauss wrote, never fully separate from the people who trade them, which is why receiving creates a duty to return. Occupation and antisemitic laws drove him from his post and from Paris in 1940, and he died isolated on 10 February 1950.
Source: Marcel Mauss
