Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) was the founder of modern French ethnology and the single most influential figure in twentieth-century anthropology after his uncle Émile Durkheim. Trained as a philologist and philosopher, Mauss spent his career at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and (from 1931) the Collège de France, producing a relatively small body of published work whose analytical depth shaped generations of scholars including Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Dumont, and Pierre Bourdieu. His 1925 Essai sur le don demonstrated that gift exchange in pre-market societies operated through a triple obligation creating simultaneous economic, legal, moral, and social bonds. His 1934 lecture on techniques of the body established that human bodily practices are culturally transmitted rather than natural. His 1903 collaboration with Durkheim on primitive classification showed that systems of knowledge reflect social structure. A committed socialist and cooperative movement activist, he insisted throughout his work that economic analysis alone could never capture the total social facts constituting the fabric of social life.