Marcel Mauss – O Tempora, O Mores

I wrote only yesterday of Marcel Mauss’ book, The Gift, which has an intriguing section on the gift in ancient India. It was insightful, but left a sense of incompleteness that could not be fully gauged, until the realisation dawned upon me that the issue was hiding in plain sight, and oftentimes the most obvious — and appropriate, in this case — solution is always lying in plain sight.

In his study of ancient India, he refers to the Mahabharata, a Sanskrit epic of some antiquity and of more considerable length. But Mauss did not address the question of the gift and of sacrifice in that small yet integral part of the Mahabharata — the Bhagavad Gita — that is the religious and philosophic centrepiece of the entire epic. His analysis of the Indic system, particularly that of the Vedic tradition and the epics that follow them, are deep-reaching and show erudition, but the lacunae are serious, and it is my contention to only expose one part of the umbra to light. “The epic and the Brahmin law still survive in the old atmosphere,” Mauss argues. “presents are still obligatory, things have special powers and form part of human persons.”¹

Continue reading “Marcel Mauss’ Curious Indian Gift” →

Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls, Routledge Classics (London: Routledge, 2002), 72. ↩

Anne-Louis Girodet, The Sleep of Endymion, 1791. | Was Endymion’s gift of eternal beauty a fatal curse as well?

Marcel Mauss’ The Gift is an extraordinary book, one that contends with the common yet defeatist and fatalist line of thought that results in self-regulating markets and the ‘invisible hand’ of the market.¹ Mauss’ anthropological project is not just that: it lays bare a particular conception of the gift that Mauss sees. As we shall see, there are issues with this conception, but on the whole, the gift seems to be a particular contrivance of his with implications for the way in which we construe our socioeconomic relations and question the existence of a market unfettered from man. Mauss’ is out to prove that in most archaic societies, “exchange and contracts take place in the form of presents; in theory these are voluntary, in reality, they are given and reciprocated obligatorily” (3). His theory goes into remarkable detail about the operations of what he calls ‘potlatch’ in communities still extant around the world, but also examines how the ‘potlatch’ evolved from its primitive form to the more complex concepts we know today in the form of the market. Mauss’ book is rich, and I borrow liberally from it, at least in its descriptive form.

Continue reading “The Curse of the Gift” →

All inline citations are from: Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls, Routledge Classics (London: Routledge, 2002). ↩