25 Facts About Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist and anthropologist known as the "father of French ethnology".

Marcel Mauss had a significant influence upon Claude Levi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology.

Marcel Mauss was born in Epinal, Vosges, to a Jewish family, his father a merchant and his mother an embroidery shop owner.

Unlike his younger brother, Marcel Mauss did not join the family business and instead he joined the socialist and cooperative movement in the Vosges.

Marcel Mauss obtained a religious education and was bar mitzvahed, yet by the age of eighteen he stopped practicing his religion.

Marcel Mauss studied philosophy at Bordeaux, where his maternal uncle Emile Durkheim was teaching at the time.

Marcel Mauss was the first cousin of the much younger Claudette Bloch, a marine biologist and mother of Maurice Bloch, who became a noted anthropologist.

Marcel Mauss was particularly engaged around the anti-semitic political events of the Dreyfus affair.

In 1901, Marcel Mauss began drawing more on ethnography, and his work began to develop characteristics now associated with formal anthropology.

Marcel Mauss served in the French army during World War I from 1914 to 1919 as an interpreter.

Marcel Mauss secured Durkheim's legacy by founding institutions to carry out research, such as l'Institut Francais de Sociologie and l'Institut d'Ethnologie in 1926.

In 1901, Marcel Mauss was appointed to the Chair of the History of Religions of Non-Civilized Peoples at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes.

Later, in 1940, Marcel Mauss was forced out of his job as the Chair of Sociology and out of Paris due to the German occupation and anti-Semitic legislation passed.

Marcel Mauss remained socially isolated following the war and died in 1950.

Marcel Mauss has been credited for his analytic framework which has been characterized as more supple, more appropriate for the application of empirical studies, and more fruitful than his earlier studies with Durkheim.

Marcel Mauss's work fell into two categories, one being major ethnological works on exchange as a symbolic system, body techniques and the category of the person, and the second being social science methodology.

Such transactions transcend the divisions between the spiritual and the material in a way that, according to Marcel Mauss, is almost "magical".

Marcel Mauss describes how society is blinded by ideology, and therefore a system of prestations survives in societies when regarding the economy.

Rather than focusing on money, Marcel Mauss describes the need to focus on faits sociaux totaux, total social facts, which are legal, economic, religious, and aesthetic facts which challenge the sociological method.

Marcel Mauss did not have a great number of students like many other Sociologists did he taught ethnographic method to first generation French anthropology students.

Marcel Mauss modified post-structuralist and post-Foucauldian intellectuals because he combines an ethnographic approach with contextualization that is historical, sociological, and psychological.

Marcel Mauss served as an important link between the sociology of Durkheim and contemporary French sociologists.

Marcel Mauss impacted the Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales and David Graeber.

Marcel Mauss feels that Mauss overstated the magnitude of the obligation created by social pressures, particularly in his description of the potlatch amongst North American Indians.

Marcel Mauss describes the social context of Indian Jain renouncers, a group of itinerant celibate renouncers living an ascetic life of spiritual purification and salvation.