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Marcel Mauss: A Biography

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University of Montreal sociologist Marcel Fournier is now the world's expert on Marcel Mauss, Durkheim's nephew but by no means his mere shadow. In his clearly written and finely detailed intellectual biography, Fournier offers a wealth of new information on Mauss and his relations with many historians of religion, sociologists, and ethnologists working in the first half of the 20th century. Fournier is especially good at characterizing the institutional milieux where Mauss taught, conducted research, and served as administrator. The reader is privy for the first time to the complicated academic politics preceding his and others' appointments at Mauss's three berths: the section of religious science at the École Pratique des Hautes Études from 1901; the Institut d'Ethnologie from 1925; and the preeminent Collège de France from 1930-40. Reading Mauss's short works on sacrifice and magic (with religious historian Henri Hubert); primitive classification (with Durkheim); and, most famously, his seminal "The Gift" against this institutional background produces a greater understanding of their importance for the history of religion, sociology and the fieldwork-oriented anthropology arising in France after World War I. Drawing on the materials deposited by the Hubert and Mauss families at the Collège de France, including many letters, Fournier shows us the several ways Mauss was a unique scholar and personality. Unlike his uncle, Mauss avoided grand theory and focused instead on factual descriptions of far-flung and immensely varied religious rites, rituals, symbolism and cosmologies. He had a tendency to procrastinate, which annoyed his uncle and later collaborators, and probably caused him to despair of his thesis on prayer and books he planned on Bolshevism, nationalism and Melanesian religion. Also demanding were his socialist activities and work in the cooperative movement and people's universities, his own special gift to the principle of reciprocity he added to Durkheim's stress on social solidarity. Collaboration with his uncle, colleagues and students clearly took a toll on his own scholarly research; after reaching the apex of French academic life in 1930 as the leading representative of the "Durkheim School," he would go on to publish just an article a year on average. Most of Mauss's intellectual labor was spent on the many book reviews he placed in the "Année Sociologique" (1898-1913) and its two reincarnations (1925-27 and 1934-40) as well as the onerous editing of Durkheim's and others' posthumous publications. Fournier discreetly supplies some suggestive personal clues to Mauss's widely dispersed and fragmentary writings and seemingly desultory approach to his own work. For example, in 1914 Mauss wrote his mother that he was "utterly ill suited to the intellectual life" (70), preferring to socialize with both colleagues and students, or to hike in the forests around his birthplace in Alsace-Lorraine. Mauss also avoided the rigors of marriage and family for many years until he finally married a woman he had known for ten years in 1934, at the age of sixty-two. Fournier alludes to the possibility of a "domestic anomie" (121) leading the unattached bachelor to disorganization and dissipation, which both his mother and uncle claimed to see in his living habits. His earnings were very modest until 1930 and his budgeting spotty, so his mother subsidized him until her death the same year at eighty-two, the day before Mauss got the job at the Collège de France. Unlike Durkheim, who was austere, dour and workaholic, Mauss was lively, impetuous, and frequently dandyish in dress. As a researcher, he liked to read widely and take notes, but the demanding work of writing and publication put him off. In the French university system, many professors did not publish much if at all, so Mauss's shyness did not result in penalty. Ultimately, Fournier's characterization is particularly apt: "He remained a student at heart his entire life and at the end of his career wanted to become the pupil of his pupils" (4).
Today mainly anthropologists commemorate Mauss by referring to, and extending, his thoughts on gift-giving and receiving, although this theme is making its way into other disciplines as any library search will attest. In his day, Fournier demonstrates, while Mauss was always seen as Durkheim's loyal standard-bearer, he was also identified with descriptive ethnography in all the courses he gave. It's therefore not surprising that he became teacher and mentor to a generation or more of French fieldworkers who left Paris starting in the late twenties to study tribal cultures in Africa, Latin America and Oceania. A floating group of fledgling anthropologists followed his courses at all three of his institutions to imbibe his encyclopedic wisdom and bibliographic riches. In helping to launch this movement, Fournier says, Mauss moved beyond sociology's armchair focus on primitive religions to father French ethnography in the field. The Institut d'Ethnologie, where the young anthropologists acquired Mauss's detailed questionnaire for fieldwork, we learn, was "not a specifically Durkheimian enterprise" (3). Even the future structural anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, who did not attend Mauss's courses, made sure to contact Mauss while he was preparing for fieldwork in Brazil during the 1930's and finishing up his classic book on kinship in the 1940's. As for everyone else who wanted to do anthropology then, Mauss was his touchstone. The kinship book started with "The Gift," Lévi-Strauss wrote Mauss from New York City on October 2, 1944, after Mauss, a Jew, had been forced to resign his academic posts by the Vichy regime. The younger man paid homage again with an introduction to six essays by Mauss appearing just after his death in 1950 at seventy-seven. With Lévi-Strauss's appointment to Mauss's old position at the École Pratique in this same year, the distinctive legacies of the grand-theorist uncle and the more modest and self-effacing nephew would combine to yield still another unique intellectual trajectory. As the founder of structural anthropology, Lévi-Strauss would gain fame for his "bold philosophical taste" as well as the "death of the subject" heralding the structuralist movement in other disciplines besides his own.
I can think of no other book on French intellectual life after Durkheim's death in 1917 that offers such rich detail on its purely academic dimensions. Biographies of Bataille, Beauvoir, Beckett, Camus, Genet, Gide, Matisse, Picasso and Sartre necessarily describe milieux outside the university and the grandes écoles: the world of journals, publishing houses, theaters, studios, galleries and cafés. To be sure, books on Aron, Barthes, Foucault and Lacan contain some information, but not in such great detail. In his introduction, Fournier says that the Hubert-Mauss collection of letters and other archival materials "opened countless avenues" (5) for further research. The same may assuredly be said of Fournier's masterly study, which now beckons us to explore "the scope and breadth of Mauss's influence" (6) during his lifetime and beyond.