Mauss, Marcel

Mauss, Marcel (märsĕl`mōs), 1872–1950, French sociologist and anthropologist. Nephew of eminant sociologist Émile Durkheim, Mauss graduated from the Univ. of Bordeaux and the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he later served on the faculty. He also taught at the Collège de France and cofounded the Institut d'Ethnologie of the Univ. of Paris. Advocating a close relationship between anthropology and psychology, he sought to practice Durkheim's rules of sociological method by relating the collective representations of a group to its social organization. He studied the phenomena of primitive exchange as a total institution that structures social bonds and found that although giving, receiving, and repaying appear to be voluntary and disinterested, they are in fact obligatory and interested. Mauss's writings include The Gift (1925), a well-known work on the process of exchange, and a collection of essays entitled Sociology and Anthropology (1950).

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Mauss, Marcel

(born May 10, 1872, Épinal, Fr.—died Feb. 10, 1950, Paris) French sociologist and anthropologist. Mauss was the nephew of Émile Durkheim, who contributed much to his intellectual formation and with whom he collaborated in such important works as Suicide (1897) and Primitive Classification (1901–02). His most influential independent work was The Gift (1925), a highly original comparative study of the relation between forms of gift exchange and social structure. He taught at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and Collège de France and cofounded the University of Paris's Institut d'Ethnologie. His views on ethnological theory and method influenced Claude Lévi-Strauss, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Edward Evans-Pritchard.