Marcel Mauss

French sociologist and anthropologist (1872-1950)

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Lived 1872–1950, aged 78France

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43 languages
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Era
1872–1950
Aged 78

Summary

Updated 2026-06-09

Émile Durkheim's nephew who turned gifts, magic, and sacrifice into science — and in doing so built the scaffolding for how we study what holds societies together.

Biography

About

Born 10 May 1872, Marcel Israël Mauss followed his uncle Émile Durkheim into sociology but refused to stay inside its borders. He ranged across cultures, mapping the invisible rules behind magic, sacrifice, and exchange — treating ritual not as superstition but as social glue. His 1925 essay The Gift argued that seemingly free gestures carry obligation, that generosity binds people in webs of debt and reciprocity. The work became a foundation stone: Claude Lévi-Strauss built structural anthropology on it, and Mauss earned the title "father of French ethnology." He died 10 February 1950, having…

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In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss

saidundated

[I]n these 'early' societies, social phenomena are not discrete; each phenomenon contains all the threads of which the social fabric is composed.

— p. 1

Marcel Mauss

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The connection of exchange contracts among men with those between men and gods explains a whole aspect of the theory of sacrifice.

— p. 13

Marcel Mauss

saidundated

Among the first groups of beings with whom men must have made contracts were the spirits of the dead and the gods. They in fact are the real owners of the world's wealth.

— p. 13

Marcel Mauss

saidundated

Sacrificial destruction implies giving something that is to be repaid. All forms of North-West American and North-East Asian potlatch contain this element of destruction.

— p. 14

Marcel Mauss

saidundated