Mauss’s social history of cultural categories utilized a methodology employed by Durkheim—the search for elementary forms
(see pp. 50–57). Ethnographic comparison could identify essen-
tial and primordial elements of human culture through the
study of primitive cultures. This search for underlying structure
is a recurrent theme in Mauss’s research.
For example, in 1899 Mauss coauthored a study of sacrifice
with Henri Hubert described as an attempt “to disentangle the
simple and elementary forms of an institution” by comparing
Hindu, Old Testament, Greek, and Latin sacrificial rites (Hubert
and Mauss 1964:7). Hubert and Mauss identified a schema of
sacrificial rites involving separation, consecration, sacrifice, and
“exit” or reintegration (a model that anticipated Arnold van
Gennep’s [1960] insights into rites of passage; see p. 248). Arguing that such diverse rites were not derived from a single form of
primitive ritual, Hubert and Mauss found the unity of sacrifice
in two principles: that all sacrificial rituals establish “a means of
communication between the sacred and profane worlds” via the
agent of the victim, but by the same token those two realms are
kept distinct because the victim—first consecrated, then killed—
is of neither realm; the sacrifice of a victim separates the two
realms “while uniting them” (Hubert and Mauss 1964: 97, 100).
In the closing pages of their essay, Hubert and Mauss discuss the
social origin and function of sacrifice, first contending that it consists of social facts rather than individual confusions about cause
and effect (an extension of Durkheim’s response to Tylor’s and
Müller’s theories of the origins of religion, see pp. 55–56), then
outlining the role of sacrifice in maintaining social norms, and finally concluding with a brief synopsis of nonreligious beliefs
and practices organized around the sacrifice ritual. Sacrifice, in
their analysis, is a primordial social category.
Hubert and Mauss’s essay employs the central methods followed by Durkheim and his students: the use of comparative
data, the search for elemental categories, and the assumption
that primitive societies preserved fundamental social patterns
lost in industrialized societies. As discussed in chapter 4, this rationale led Durkheim to analyze religious beliefs among the
Australian aborigines since their beliefs—in Durkheim’s view—
were most “elementary.” Durkheim and Mauss believed that
this strategy was superior to philosophical musings about the
origins of social concepts since it was based on ethnographic
“facts.”
Apparently, it never occurred to either Durkheim or Mauss
that traditional societies like the Australian aborigines were
other than semifossilized remnants of some prehistoric human
condition. In The Gift, for example, Mauss describes the Trobrianders and other cases studied as “good representatives of
the great neolithic stage of civilization” (1967:69). Such assumptions are not unique to Mauss or Durkheim; they are found in
the writings of numerous anthropologists of different theoretical
stripes. Mauss never justified his assumption, except to presume
that cultural patterns changed from simple to complex and to assume that traditional societies were less complex than modern
industrialized ones.
Overlooking this flaw, Mauss—solely and in collaboration
with Durkheim and others—pursued bold lines of investigation. For example, in Primitive Classification Durkheim and
Mauss explored the relationship between social systems and
cosmological categories “to investigate the most rudimentary
classifications made by mankind, in order to see with what elements they have been constructed” (1963:9). Arguing that systems of classification—categories of space, time, color,
organisms, etc.—are too complex for spontaneous invention
through individual observation and inference, Durkheim and
Mauss conclude that all systems of classification are learned
(1963:7–8). But what was the source or model of original, primitive classifications? Durkheim and Mauss contend that classifications are modeled on the categories of social life, a crucial
point that reemerges in Mary Douglas’s work (see pp. 278–84).
Turning first to the Australian aborigines, Durkheim and
Mauss summarized social organization as based on moieties,
dual social classifications that categorize clans into two equal
units; all individuals of the tribe are members of a clan that, in
turn, is subsumed by one moiety or the other. Durkheim and
Mauss wrote, “Now the classification of things reproduces this classification of men” (1963:11, emphasis in the original), and they developed this argument with additional data from Australia,
North America (Zuni, Sioux), and classical China. Durkheim
and Mauss showed that the spatial arrangement of clans within
the Zuni pueblo parallels the spatial division of the world, and
they analyzed the complexities of Chinese cosmologies as shad-
owy reflections of ancient clan totems. Durkheim and Mauss
concluded that different aspects of classification systems point to
their social origins: the description of relatedness in kinship
metaphors (“humans are members of the family Hominidae”);
the hierarchical nature of categories mirroring the nested social
units of subclan, clan, and moiety; and the spatial orderings of
people and things. Primitive classifications are not based on the
individual, Durkheim and Mauss asserted, but “society.” They
continue, “It is this that is objectified, not man” (1963:87).
In an introductory essay to his translation of Primitive Classification, Rodney Needham (1963) provides a detailed critique of
the logic, method, and evidence employed by Durkheim and
Mauss, exposing crippling faults in their essay. Yet, Needham
concludes that the essay’s great merit, and one that outweighs
all its faults, is that it draws attention, for the first time in sociological inquiry, to a topic of fundamental importance in understanding human thought and social life (1963:xxxiv).
With his polymath brio, Mauss consistently raised key issues
for the first time. His combination of insight and erudition characterizes his best-known work, The Gift.