Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss ( born May 10, 1872 in Epinal, † February 10, 1950 in Paris) was a French sociologist and anthropologist.

Biography

Marcel Mauss came from a Jewish family who ran a small Seidensticker factory in the Vosges. Fourteen years was his uncle, Émile Durkheim, his mentor.

Mauss taught at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in the Department of Religious Studies, the " religions of uncivilized peoples " (where he " uncivilized " rejected the label ). Together with Durkheim, he founded the journal L' Année Sociologique and 1925, together with Paul Rivet ( 1876-1958 ) and Lucien Lévy -Bruhl, the Institut d' Ethnology in Paris. Shortly thereafter, he became professor of sociology at the Collège de France; the application for that he had, in 1908 still refused to the annoyance of his uncle.

Politically Mauss was closely associated with the Workers' International, founded the Mouvement Socialiste Magazines and L' Humanité published and appropriate reform socialist article. His political idol was Jean Jaurès. In 1934 he married his secretary. During the German occupation he was pressed out of position. He himself remained true unmolested, but closest colleagues ( such as Maurice Halbwachs ) were killed.

After the war he lived in social isolation, were added to personal problems, and his spirit sank into derangement.

Unlike Durkheim, Mauss was strongly empirically oriented. He tried to see social phenomena in their totality and understand. The exchange in archaic societies, he ( 1923/24, first; German "The Gift " under the title ) in his Essai sur le don is, in his view, is a comprehensive social activity. It provides a "social phenomenon Total " represents, at the same time includes economic, legal, moral, aesthetic, religious, mythological and socio - morphological dimensions and goes far beyond the human image of the rational homo economicus and its economy.

Central to his exploration of the gift is the question of why you have to reciprocate gifts. The answer lies in the fact that mingle in the gift of person and property, while giving you is a part of himself and makes a foreign experience of the other in business administration so far. Mauss examines this mixing of person and cause not only in foreign cultures, but also in various European legal systems ( with the Romans or Teutons ) to finally the reconciliation of foreign and ancient cultures to the present societies, where the moral implications of the practices of explore gift.

The Essai sur le don, was the first major comparative ethnographic work on the gift. As a systematic and comparative study, they analyzed the system of gift exchange and indicates its function in the framework of the social order. Mauss represents the moral, psycho- economic principle of the gift out in its coercive nature and his guilt causation and brings the gift along with the ambiguous English poison. He can analyze the principles of service, labor, welfare state and welfare. Mauss coined to this as the " gift economy "

Alumni and friends

One of his students was Jean Rouch. Friends were Robert Hertz, Henri Hubert, Maurice Leenhardt, students were, inter alia, the founder of the Collège de Sociologie, Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois, but also Louis Dumont, André Leroi - Gourhan, Claude Lévi -Strauss and Henri Lévy -Bruhl. His book The administration practiced beyond from effects on the thinking of Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, Marcel Hénaff, Maurice Godelier, Marshall Sahlins, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Baudrillard and is a standard reference work for anthropologists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists and scientists.

Works

French editions

• Oeuvre. Présentation par Victor Karady, Paris: Minuit, 1968/1969: I. La fonction sociale du sacre, Paris: Minuit, 1968.
• II Représentations collectives et diversité of Civilization, Paris: Minuit, 1968.
• III. Cohésion sociale et de la sociologie division, Paris: Minuit, 1969.

• Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l' échange dans les sociétés archaïques. Introduction de Florence Weber, Quadrige / Presses universitaires de France, 2007.

German -language editions

• The gift. The form and function of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Foreword by E. E. Evans -Pritchard. Translated by Eva Moldenhauer. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1968 ( reprint 1984/1990 and other reprints, most recently in 2009 ).
• Sociology and anthropology. Two volumes. Frankfurt am Main ² 1999 ISBN 978-3596274314 and ISBN 978-3596274321.
• Writings on the sociology of religion, edited and introduced by Stephan Moebius, Frithjof Nungesser and Christian Papilloud, with an afterword by Stephan Moebius. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3518296325.
• Handbook of ethnography. Translated by Lars spelled, Andreas Haarmann. Edited by Iris Därmann, Kirsten Mahlke. Fink, Munich, 2013, ISBN 978-3-7705-4013-6.