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Intro Work Marcel Mauss
First published in 1987. Claude Levi-Strauss is one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, a leading exponent of structuralism and a great social anthropologist. His Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss , originally written to preface the earliest major collection of Mauss's writings, Sociologie et Anthropologie (1950), was hailed as a seminal text by leading structuralists such as Derrida, Lacan and Barthes. This edition, the first English translation to be published, should prove invaluable to anthropologists, philologists, psychologists, and all those interested in one of the most important intellectual movements generated by the twentieth century. Levi-Strauss uses an approach combining anthropology and structural linguistics to assess Marcel Mauss's achievements and intentions arguing that Mauss - who at the time represented the mainstream of French anthropology - was in fact structuralist manque. He goes on to formulate the central tenets of structuralist the belief in societies being organised on immutable and unconscious laws, this foundation then providing the basis for true scientific study; multi-discplinary methodology combining anthropology, lingusitics and psychoanalysis; and a faith that a comprehensive science of communication can be made by the application of mathematical reasoning.
104 pages, Paperback
First published January 15, 1987
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181 people want to read
About the author
Claude Lévi-Strauss
232 books858 followersClaude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist, well-known for his development of structural anthropology. He was born in Belgium to French parents who were living in Brussels at the time, but he grew up in Paris. His father was an artist, and a member of an intellectual French Jewish family. Lévi-Strauss studied at the University of Paris. From 1935-9 he was Professor at the University of Sao Paulo making several expeditions to central Brazil. Between 1942-1945 he was Professor at the New School for Social Research. In 1950 he became Director of Studies at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes. In 1959 Lévi-Strauss assumed the Chair of Social Anthroplogy at the College de France. His books include The Raw and the Cooked, The Savage Mind, Structural Anthropology and Totemism (Encyclopedia of World Biography).
Some of the reasons for his popularity are in his rejection of history and humanism, in his refusal to see Western civilization as privileged and unique, in his emphasis on form over content and in his insistence that the savage mind is equal to the civilized mind.
Lévi-Strauss did many things in his life including studying Law and Philosophy. He also did considerable reading among literary masterpieces, and was deeply immersed in classical and contemporary music.
Lévi-Strauss was awarded the Wenner-Gren Foundation's Viking Fund Medal for 1966 and the Erasmus Prize in 1975. He was also awarded four honorary degrees from Oxford, Yale, Havard and Columbia. Strauss held several memberships in institutions including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society (Encyclopedia of World Biography).
Some of the reasons for his popularity are in his rejection of history and humanism, in his refusal to see Western civilization as privileged and unique, in his emphasis on form over content and in his insistence that the savage mind is equal to the civilized mind.
Lévi-Strauss did many things in his life including studying Law and Philosophy. He also did considerable reading among literary masterpieces, and was deeply immersed in classical and contemporary music.
Lévi-Strauss was awarded the Wenner-Gren Foundation's Viking Fund Medal for 1966 and the Erasmus Prize in 1975. He was also awarded four honorary degrees from Oxford, Yale, Havard and Columbia. Strauss held several memberships in institutions including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society (Encyclopedia of World Biography).
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January 24, 2011
This introduction originally prefaced a collection of Mauss’s essays, but was later published separately and it is, appropriately, a meditation on the more important of Mauss’s essays. It is difficult enough to read, and the reader will find it much easier if he has already read some of Mauss’s own essays. This introduction is in three chapters or sections.
Lévi-Strauss’s first short chapter considers three late essays, L’idee de mort (1926a) and Les Techniques du corps (1934) and Rapports reels et praticques de la psychologie et de la sociologie (1924). These, claims L-S, provide what at the time was a radical approach to the human body and the manner in which it is variously used in different societies. L-S uses the latter article to consider the relation between psychological pathology and such phenomena as shamanism where the trances (etc) of the priest are sometimes thought to resemble madness. He notes that although shamans are not, in the ordinary sense, mad, nevertheless, because of the similarity between madness and shamanism “shamanism could play a double roles with respect to psychopathologic ally disposed personalities: on the one hand, exploiting the disposition, but on the other hand, channelling and stabilising it.” It follows that “Ethnologists who seek to dissociate certain rituals completely from any psychopathological context are inspired by a somewhat timorous good will. The analogy is manifest, and perhaps the links are even measurable.” L-S complains that “Mauss still thinks it is possible to develop a sociological theory of symbolism whereas it is obvious that what is needed is a symbolic origin of society. As we refuse to allow that all levels of mental life can be included within the competence of psychology. P21 so we will accordingly have to concede that psychology alone (in combination with biology) can account for the origin of the basic functions ”p22 And he asserts the complementarity of individual psychical structure and social structure, which can provide the basis for a collaboration called for by Mauss between psychology and ethnology. P22
The next chapter turns to Theorie de Magie (1902), Essaie sur le don (1923-4) and La Notion de personne (1938). These, says L-S, bring to the fore the notion of “the total social fact” p24. This notion of the total social fact is in direct relation to the twofold concern to link the social and the individual on the one hand, and the physical and psychical on the other. P27 Any sociological phenomenon is also a psychic phenomenon and vice versa. L-S interprets this relationship as a complementarity. “It arises from the simple fact that the psychical is both at once a simple element of signification for a symbolic system which transcends it, and the only means of verification of a reality whose manifold aspects can only be grasped as a synthesis outside it” P28 “There is much more to the notion of total social fact, therefore, than a recommendation that investigators remember to link agricultureal techniques and ritual, or boat-building, the forms of the family agglomeration and the rules of distribution of fishing hauls.” Pp28-9 “The situation peculiar to the social sciences - - - has to do with the intrinsic character of the object of study, which is that it is object and subject both at once; or both ‘thing’ and ‘representation’, to speak the language of Durkheim and Mauss” p29
In Le Don, which is Mauss’s most important essay, “For the first time, the social ceases to belong to the domain of pure quality – anecdote, curiosity, material for moralising description or for scholarly comparison – and becomes a system, among whose parts connections, equivalences and interdependent aspects can be discovered. P38 ” Unfortunately, says L-S, Mauss failed to follow up some of these ideas and so Malinowski himself (an inferior theorist, says L-S) developed these ideas and developed a naively empirical notion of “function” signifying “what they are useful for”, instead of the more algebraic notion of function – a “constant relation” - which Mauss espoused. Pp42-43
In the third chapter, L-S again considers Le Don. “In this essay, Mauss seems – rightly – to be controlled by a logical certainty, namely that exchange is the common denominator of a p45 large number of apparently, heterogeneous social activities. But exchange is not something he can perceive on the level of the facts. Empirical observation finds not exchange, but only, as Mauss himself says, ‘three obligations: giving, receiving, returning’. So the whole theory calls for the existence of a structure, only fragments of which are delivered by experience- just its scattered members, or rather its elements. If exchange is necessary, but not given, then it must be constructed. But how?” p46
“There is here a precept Mauss had already formulated in the Essai sur la magie: the unity of the whole is even more real than each of the parts. But instead, in the Essai sur le don, Mauss strives to reconstruct a whole out of the parts.” And to do this he uses the notion of hau. P47Hau is a New Zealand theory and he uses it to explain the way that gifts create bonds of human relationsh. And in using hau in this manner, he echoes his earlier work on magic when he used the Polynesian term mana in an inherently similar way.
L-S interprets these exotic concepts (mana, hau) as having a similar meaning for Mauss as they do for the indigenous peoples who first used them. They are “the subjective reflection of the need to supply an unperceived totality”. He says, “Exchange is not a complex edifice built on the obligations of giving, receiving and returning, with the help of some emotional-mystical cement. It is a synthesis immediately given to, and given by, symbolic thought, which, in exchange as in any other form of communication, surmounts the contradiction inherent in it; that is the contradiction of perceiving things as elements of dialogue, in respect of self and others p58 simultaneously, and destined by nature to pass from the other to the other.” P59 And later, “I believe that notions of the mana type, however diverse they may be, and viewed in terms of their most general function - - - represent nothing more or less than that floating signifier which is the disability of all finite thought (but also the surety of all art, all poetry, every mythic and aesthetic invention), even though scientific knowledge is capable, if not of staunching it, at least of controlling it partially. - - - I see in mana, wakan, orenda, and other notions of the same type, the conscious expression of a semantic function, whose role is to enable symbolic thinking to operate despite the contradictions inherent in it. That explains the apparently insoluble antinomies attaching to the p63 notion of mana, which struck ethnographers so forcibly, and on which Mauss shed light: force and action; quality and state; substantive adjective and verb all at once; abstract and concrete; omnipresent and localised. And, indeed, mana is all those things together; but is that not precisely because it is none of those things, but a simple form, or to be more accurate, a symbol in its pure state, therefore liable to take on any symbolic content whatever? In the system of symbols which makes up any cosmology, it would just be a zero symbolic value, that is, a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above that which the signified already contains, which can be any value at all, provided it is still part of the available reserve, and is not already, as the phonologists say, a term in a set.” P64
And in these passages, I believe, we witness L-S making the change within himself from an anthropologist of kinship to an anthropologist of myth. Ten or more years later, the British Association of Social Anthropologists was to devote an entire conference to L-S’s work on myth and totemism taking its keynote paper a translation of the already published Geste d’Asdiwal. It is something that has not happened before or since. And for me, reading that particular article changed my entire view of anthropology. But the entire essence of his argument in Geste d’Asdiwal is contained (in radical abstraction) in the final chapter of this short book. For it is here that L-S propounds the idea that myth (or mana, hau etc) can appear to resolve contradictions that exist (but cannot in reality be resolved) in ordinary social life.
Lévi-Strauss’s first short chapter considers three late essays, L’idee de mort (1926a) and Les Techniques du corps (1934) and Rapports reels et praticques de la psychologie et de la sociologie (1924). These, claims L-S, provide what at the time was a radical approach to the human body and the manner in which it is variously used in different societies. L-S uses the latter article to consider the relation between psychological pathology and such phenomena as shamanism where the trances (etc) of the priest are sometimes thought to resemble madness. He notes that although shamans are not, in the ordinary sense, mad, nevertheless, because of the similarity between madness and shamanism “shamanism could play a double roles with respect to psychopathologic ally disposed personalities: on the one hand, exploiting the disposition, but on the other hand, channelling and stabilising it.” It follows that “Ethnologists who seek to dissociate certain rituals completely from any psychopathological context are inspired by a somewhat timorous good will. The analogy is manifest, and perhaps the links are even measurable.” L-S complains that “Mauss still thinks it is possible to develop a sociological theory of symbolism whereas it is obvious that what is needed is a symbolic origin of society. As we refuse to allow that all levels of mental life can be included within the competence of psychology. P21 so we will accordingly have to concede that psychology alone (in combination with biology) can account for the origin of the basic functions ”p22 And he asserts the complementarity of individual psychical structure and social structure, which can provide the basis for a collaboration called for by Mauss between psychology and ethnology. P22
The next chapter turns to Theorie de Magie (1902), Essaie sur le don (1923-4) and La Notion de personne (1938). These, says L-S, bring to the fore the notion of “the total social fact” p24. This notion of the total social fact is in direct relation to the twofold concern to link the social and the individual on the one hand, and the physical and psychical on the other. P27 Any sociological phenomenon is also a psychic phenomenon and vice versa. L-S interprets this relationship as a complementarity. “It arises from the simple fact that the psychical is both at once a simple element of signification for a symbolic system which transcends it, and the only means of verification of a reality whose manifold aspects can only be grasped as a synthesis outside it” P28 “There is much more to the notion of total social fact, therefore, than a recommendation that investigators remember to link agricultureal techniques and ritual, or boat-building, the forms of the family agglomeration and the rules of distribution of fishing hauls.” Pp28-9 “The situation peculiar to the social sciences - - - has to do with the intrinsic character of the object of study, which is that it is object and subject both at once; or both ‘thing’ and ‘representation’, to speak the language of Durkheim and Mauss” p29
In Le Don, which is Mauss’s most important essay, “For the first time, the social ceases to belong to the domain of pure quality – anecdote, curiosity, material for moralising description or for scholarly comparison – and becomes a system, among whose parts connections, equivalences and interdependent aspects can be discovered. P38 ” Unfortunately, says L-S, Mauss failed to follow up some of these ideas and so Malinowski himself (an inferior theorist, says L-S) developed these ideas and developed a naively empirical notion of “function” signifying “what they are useful for”, instead of the more algebraic notion of function – a “constant relation” - which Mauss espoused. Pp42-43
In the third chapter, L-S again considers Le Don. “In this essay, Mauss seems – rightly – to be controlled by a logical certainty, namely that exchange is the common denominator of a p45 large number of apparently, heterogeneous social activities. But exchange is not something he can perceive on the level of the facts. Empirical observation finds not exchange, but only, as Mauss himself says, ‘three obligations: giving, receiving, returning’. So the whole theory calls for the existence of a structure, only fragments of which are delivered by experience- just its scattered members, or rather its elements. If exchange is necessary, but not given, then it must be constructed. But how?” p46
“There is here a precept Mauss had already formulated in the Essai sur la magie: the unity of the whole is even more real than each of the parts. But instead, in the Essai sur le don, Mauss strives to reconstruct a whole out of the parts.” And to do this he uses the notion of hau. P47Hau is a New Zealand theory and he uses it to explain the way that gifts create bonds of human relationsh. And in using hau in this manner, he echoes his earlier work on magic when he used the Polynesian term mana in an inherently similar way.
L-S interprets these exotic concepts (mana, hau) as having a similar meaning for Mauss as they do for the indigenous peoples who first used them. They are “the subjective reflection of the need to supply an unperceived totality”. He says, “Exchange is not a complex edifice built on the obligations of giving, receiving and returning, with the help of some emotional-mystical cement. It is a synthesis immediately given to, and given by, symbolic thought, which, in exchange as in any other form of communication, surmounts the contradiction inherent in it; that is the contradiction of perceiving things as elements of dialogue, in respect of self and others p58 simultaneously, and destined by nature to pass from the other to the other.” P59 And later, “I believe that notions of the mana type, however diverse they may be, and viewed in terms of their most general function - - - represent nothing more or less than that floating signifier which is the disability of all finite thought (but also the surety of all art, all poetry, every mythic and aesthetic invention), even though scientific knowledge is capable, if not of staunching it, at least of controlling it partially. - - - I see in mana, wakan, orenda, and other notions of the same type, the conscious expression of a semantic function, whose role is to enable symbolic thinking to operate despite the contradictions inherent in it. That explains the apparently insoluble antinomies attaching to the p63 notion of mana, which struck ethnographers so forcibly, and on which Mauss shed light: force and action; quality and state; substantive adjective and verb all at once; abstract and concrete; omnipresent and localised. And, indeed, mana is all those things together; but is that not precisely because it is none of those things, but a simple form, or to be more accurate, a symbol in its pure state, therefore liable to take on any symbolic content whatever? In the system of symbols which makes up any cosmology, it would just be a zero symbolic value, that is, a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above that which the signified already contains, which can be any value at all, provided it is still part of the available reserve, and is not already, as the phonologists say, a term in a set.” P64
And in these passages, I believe, we witness L-S making the change within himself from an anthropologist of kinship to an anthropologist of myth. Ten or more years later, the British Association of Social Anthropologists was to devote an entire conference to L-S’s work on myth and totemism taking its keynote paper a translation of the already published Geste d’Asdiwal. It is something that has not happened before or since. And for me, reading that particular article changed my entire view of anthropology. But the entire essence of his argument in Geste d’Asdiwal is contained (in radical abstraction) in the final chapter of this short book. For it is here that L-S propounds the idea that myth (or mana, hau etc) can appear to resolve contradictions that exist (but cannot in reality be resolved) in ordinary social life.
September 4, 2021
Mana is a "floating signifier". A floating signifier has "zero symbolic value". What does this mean? This means that its existence is the existence of a surplus of signifiers over signifieds. This is accomplished by its very existence, it has no need to signify this. Thus, it is "a symbol in its pure state": it has no signified, i.e., it has zero symbolic value.
This is what enables it to perform the "semantic function" of "symbolic thinking", to bridge the gap between the "signifier-totality" (finite) and the "signified [...] but no less unknown" universe (infinite).
Note: These technical points on structuralism are from page 59-64.
This is what enables it to perform the "semantic function" of "symbolic thinking", to bridge the gap between the "signifier-totality" (finite) and the "signified [...] but no less unknown" universe (infinite).
Note: These technical points on structuralism are from page 59-64.
October 12, 2024
Classic structuralist work, I mostly read this one because it appears to be the origin of the critique of Mauss' gift analysis as relying too much on ethnographic spiritual concepts. Not too long of a work, and although I disagree with Lévi-Strauss' reading of Mauss it was still a pretty approachable text.
August 8, 2020
very clear introduction & very peculiar structuralist-symolist twist of "mana" in chapter 3
January 3, 2022
releitura
November 2, 2022
insane that marcel mauss predicted shiftok 100 years before it developed
June 26, 2016
C'est sûrement très savant très érudit très pertinent mais j'ai du mal a supporter le ton de Lévy-Strauss - sans compter le fait que je comprends la moitié de ce qu'il raconte (et encore je suis sympa avec moi-même) tellement c'est complexe. On va voir comment est L'essai sur le don en lui-même (j'ai peur)
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews