Insight: Mauss’s Memory By James Clifford arcel Mauss’s erudition was the mot and passed it on to his friend. or anyone working to expand the recognized legendary. Claude Lévi-Strauss Unlike Durkheim, Mauss was less categories of the human spirit. For Mauss, Mreports that the audience would concerned to defend the specific terrain of the “mind” is neither a given product of the leave his lectures at the Collège de France or sociology than he was to build bridges intellect nor a biological inheritance, but the Ecole Pratiques des Hautes Etudes between diverse perspectives – psychological, rather a complex historical mix of shaking their heads: “Mauss knows sociological, ethnographic, historical – on psychological, emotional, social and political everything”! He could uncannily retrieve apt “l’homme total”. The scope of his interventions. An emergent anthropology’s details from a seemingly limitless reading of anthropological vision was summed up best, ability to map and classify this totality is, he historical and ethnographic sources in a perhaps, in a famous intervention at the thinks, still precarious. And it has no choice dozen languages. A passing reference to Société de Psychologie in 1924. Discussion but to build its science on the assumption of earrings could trigger a fascinating half-hour, had turned to the philosophical problem of its own historical and cultural relativity. with unexpected asides, on earrings in identifying fundamental categories of the Unlike Lévi-Strauss, Mauss had no Polynesia, India, Australia, South America, human mind: organizing model, drawn from structural Africa, Ancient Rome, etc. Lévi-Strauss: linguistics, to order the vast diversity of The Aristotelian categories are not in human symbols and categories. Indeed, he In his work, and still more in his fact the only ones that exist in our teaching, unthought-of comparisons saw social, mental, or moral orders as minds, or that have existed in the tentative, constantly menaced by disorder, flourish. While he is often obscure by mind and have to be dealt with. the constant use of antitheses, produced by historical transformation or Above all it is essential to draw up ruin. This was particularly evident in his shortcuts and apparent paradoxes the largest possible catalogue of which, later on, prove to be the result work after the First World War shook his categories; it is essential to start with belief in the stability of civilized institutions. of a deeper insight, he gratifies his all those we are able to know men listener, suddenly, with fulgurating have used. It will then be apparent Mauss’s best-known work, The Gift, intuitions, providing the substance that there have been and still are builds this awareness of disorder into its for months of fruitful thinking. quite a few dead, or pale, or obscure survey of one of humankinds basic means for An essay called “Techniques of the Body” moons in the firmament of reason. creating social stability: reciprocal exchange. gives a hint of Mauss’s oral style. Here are a Small and large, animate and Mauss portrays the fragility of agreements to few lines from what is essentially a long list inanimate, right and left have been give and receive. More disturbingly, he of the things people in different parts of the categories. Among those familiar to stresses the affinities between agonistic world do with their bodies: us, take as an example that of giving and violent competition, the thin line separating festival and war. Human sociality It’s normal for children to squat. We substance with which I have dealt in a highly technical way: how many – for the Durkheimian, human essence – no longer know how to squat. I depends on entering into relations of consider this to be an absurdity and vicissitudes has it not undergone? For example, it had among its prototypes, reciprocity: giving and receiving relatives, inferiority of our races, civilizations, commodities, money, visits, words, or any societies. […] especially in India and Greece, another notion: the notion of food. symbolic tokens binding the person to The notion that sleeping is something others, groups to other groups. But one natural is completely inexact.[…] All the categories are merely general cannot be related to everyone; there must be Nothing is more dizzying than to see symbols which, like other symbols, exclusions. a Kabylie come downstairs with have been acquired by humanity very slowly. We need to describe this Mauss’s survey shows that hospitality or babouches on. How can he stand gift-giving often have a dangerous side. They without losing his slippers? I’ve tried labour of construction. Indeed, this is one of the main chapters of sociology may be violently excessive like the Kwakiutl to watch, to do it, I don’t see how. potlatch. (This was the aspect of Mauss’s And I don’t understand either how understood from the historical point of view. For this labour was itself essay that most interested Bataille and which women can walk in their high heels. he would extrapolate in his curious work of […] complex, perilous, chancy. Humanity has constructed its mind by every “economics”, La part maudite.) For if The Gift Hygiene of natural body functions. Here means: technical and non-technical, most explicitly portrays exchange as a check I could list numberless facts.[…] mystical and non-mystical; making on violence and potential war, it also shows Finally, it must be understood that use of its mind (senses, feelings, “normal” social contexts in which giving dancing while embracing is a product reason) making use of its body; appears to go haywire, where the agonistic of modern European civilization. This taking advantage of chance choices, element takes over. Here, the equilibrium should show you that things quite things and times; taking advantage of model of exchange tips over into the natural for us are historical; they may nations, their accomplishments, their experience of pure spending, ludic or violent horrify everyone else in the world ruins. excess. Mauss’s model of social order does except us. not exclude this ever-present reality. The Our general concepts are still stakes remain high. His story of reciprocity Mauss was Emile Durkeim’s nephew and unstable and imperfect. I sincerely always contains an “or else” – like the chief inheritor of the Année Sociologique believe that by concerted efforts, Kwakiutl ritual he cites: tradition after 1917. Until 1941, as an coming from opposite directions, our influential Paris university professor, he psychological, sociological, and Part of the ceremonial opens with the inspired several generations of historical sciences will someday be “ceremony of the dogs”. These are anthropologists and sociologists. Mauss wrote able to attempt a description of this represented by masked men who or contributed to classic studies of magic, painful history. And I believe that the come out of one house and force their social morphology, primitive classification, best philosophy will perhaps be way into another. They commemorate prayer, sacrifice, reciprocity, and the category inspired by this science, this the occasion on which the people of of “the person”. His ideas also ricocheted in awareness of the present relativity of the three other tribes of Kwakiutl the literary and artistic world. For example, our reason. Allow me to conclude proper neglected to invite the clan something said at a lecture, “taboos are made thus. which ranked highest among them, the Guetela who, having no desire to to be broken”, crystallized Georges Bataille’s This founding statement of modern theory of transgression – at least according remain outsiders, entered the dancing anthropology (in Lévi-Strauss’s reading) has house and destroyed everything. to ethnographer Alfred Métraux who heard much in it that could also attract a surrealist, The prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan, (Leroi-Gourhan) For a period of two if it still existed, a dusty heap, uncatalogued remembers his teacher as “a man of inspired years when I was attending nearly all somewhere in the Musée’s labyrinthine confusion… [who] managed to concentrate his courses it was agreed that a basements? a number of crucial things in very few comrade and I – a Russian Jew, Yes, I was told when I went to look, of articles”. In an interview Leroi-Gourhan was Deborah Lipschitz, who died in the course, the Mauss collection was catalogued asked what he recalled of his teacher’s Nazi deportation – would take notes long ago. Also, the record of its contents is speech: in turn and in a way that would let us missing. No way to tell the things that were His silences, if I may put it thus. I compare them to determine the real kept and those discarded. But would I like to can’t provide an imitation; so many content of Mauss’s teaching. And we see what remains in storage? years have passed, and I have an never managed to construct anything coherent because it was too rich and Some metal shelves in the dark, covered idealized image of Mauss; but he con- with dust. Resting on them, a series of structed his sentences in a way that always ended up at the horizon. Later, a record of his course was wooden drawers of different sizes evidently suggested things without declaring once belonging to a single large cabinet: them inflexibly. His discourse was all published by a group of former students. Well, there was a total Mauss’s fichier de travail, his working card- articulations and elasticity. Most of file. his sentences came up empty, but it divergence between what they noted was an emptiness that invited you to and what Deborah and I took down. The drawers are numbered 1-15, with build. That’s why I said the most This is the secret, I believe, of the two missing.