Marcel Mauss's National Internationalism: An Approach to the Essai sur le don

Abstract

Mauss's National Internationalism: An Approach to the Essai sur le don Luke Bresky In the genealogy of French structuralist and post-structuralist thought, Marcel Mauss established himself as an ancestor when his Essai sur le don appeared in the first volume (1923-24) of the Annee Sociologique, second series. At the time, of course, the postwar return of the Annee had greater significance than any one part of its contents; by confirming the resumption of Emile Durkheim's sociological project, this event fulfilled an objective to which Mauss had devoted himself since the end of the war. Nevertheless, Mauss had undertaken the revival of the Durkheimian school's official forum in a mood more bereaved than triumphant. Many of Durkheim's most promising students had died in the recent conflict, and Durkheim himself, after losing his only son, had succumbed to a profound depression and died in 1917. Thus the re-inaugural volume opens with Mauss's scholarly elegy, In Memoriam. L'œuvre inedite de Durkheim et ses collaborateurs, followed immediately by the Essai sur le don. Plainly, the First World War asserts itself in an immediate and literal sense as a feature of le don's cultural context, and Mauss concludes this study of archaic forms of exchange appropriately with a prayer for peaceful trade in Europe: Pour commencer, il a fallu d'abord savoir poser les lances. C'est alors qu'on a reussi a echanger les biens et les personnes, non plus seulement de clans a clans, mais de tribus a tribus et de nations a nations et—surtout—d'individus a individus.... [CJ'est ainsi que demain, dans notre monde dit civilise, les classes et les nations et aussi les individus doivent savoir s'opposer sans se massacrer et se donner sans se sacrifier les uns aux autres. (278¬ Here, under the heading Conclusions de morale (258), Mauss argues that the ceremonial and competitive generosity informing the exchange of goods and services in archaic societies forges healthy bonds between individuals and social groups otherwise disposed to interact more violently. Bronislaw Malinowski had