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Marcel Israël Mauss (French:; 10 May 1872 – 10 February 1950) was a French sociologist and anthropologist known as the "father of French ethnology". [1] The nephew of Émile Durkheim , Mauss, in his academic work, crossed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology .
Godelier suggests that Mauss's depiction of the spirit of the gift as the ultimate explanation for its reciprocation - not just as a symbol or bonds of knowledge of social relations – resulted from Mauss's inability to adequately resolve his own questions, thereby leaving objects with agency, free of the people who created it.
The Gift has been very influential in anthropology, [3] where there is a large field of study devoted to reciprocity and exchange. [4] It has also influenced philosophers, artists, and political activists, including Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and more recently the work of David Graeber and the theologians John Milbank and Jean-Luc Marion.
The concept of the habitus was used as early as Aristotle.In contemporary usage it was introduced by Marcel Mauss and later Maurice Merleau-Ponty; however, it was Pierre Bourdieu who used it as a cornerstone of his sociology, and to address the sociological problem of agency and structure.
Titmuss follows Mauss' (1950) ideas of gift giving as a system of total services (production, distribution, and consumption) where self-interest interacts with social and moral obligations that are collectively imposed to maintain social relationships and guarantee the reproduction of society. [8] Titmuss' work was very influential at a policy ...
Marcel Mauss theorized the impetus for a return as "the spirit of the gift," an idea that has provoked a long debate in economic anthropology on what motivated the reciprocal exchange. [1] Claude Lévi-Strauss, drawing on Mauss, argued there were three spheres of exchange governed by reciprocity: language (exchange of words), kinship (exchange ...
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For Marcel Mauss (Durkheim's nephew and sometime collaborator) a total social fact (French fait social total) is "an activity that has implications throughout society, in the economic, legal, political, and religious spheres". [8] Diverse strands of social and psychological life are woven together through what he came to call total social facts.