ABSTRACT
Marcel Mauss collaborated with scholars including the sociologists Paul Fauconnet and Emile Durkheim seeking to identify overarching patterns to cultural institutions. At the time of Marcel Mauss’s writing of The Gift, French sociology was dominated by the work of Mauss’s uncle, Emile Durkheim. The backdrop for Durkheim’s sociology, in turn, was French philosophy’s turn-of-the-century rejection of English utilitarianism—a philosophical and liberal political tradition that presumed individual rationality was the elemental, positive force driving modern economic life. Mauss’s approach was methodical and evidence-based. Like Boas, he resisted deductive theories about the impact of evolutionary, psychological, geographical, racial, or economic forces on social systems and individual behavior. Mauss does, however, concentrate his study on existing archaic societies similarly placed on an evolutionary scale. He also looks at societies that came before modern Indo-European societies and searches for “survivals” in present-day customs. Looking backward, he proposes a model for how the primordial societies managed economic exchanges.
