Mauss’s Essai sur le don, as Evans-Pritchard (1967:ix) noted, is
essential for understanding Mauss’s significance as a scholar.
Extending Durkheim’s insights into social integration, Mauss
“acknowledged that society is built on solidarity, but he believed it also requires reciprocity for survival” (Fournier
2006:3). The Gift is a cross-cultural assay of an institution that
Mauss calls “total prestations”: exchanges that may appear to
be voluntary but in fact are obligatory and reinforced by recognized sanctions. Mauss situates The Gift within a larger study
of contracts—economic and social—a theme that runs through
French social theory to the Enlightenment and beyond (1967:3).
Mauss contributes to this debate by grounding it in ethnographic detail.
Mauss contends that the “natural economy”—in which individuals compete in a free and open market with exchange value
set solely by supply and demand—simply does not exist in traditional societies. Rather, Mauss argued, exchanges in “archaic”
societies occurred between groups or representatives of groups
(chiefs, clan leaders, groom’s family to bride’s family, and so on),
not between socially isolated individuals.
Further, the exchanges were not only of goods and services,
but also of “courtesies, entertainments, ritual, military assistance,
women, children, dances, and feasts”; the exchange of wealth
was only “one part of a wide and enduring contract” (Mauss
1967:3). Such exchanges, far from being voluntary, “take it or
leave it” negotiations between individuals, were surrounded by
socially recognized and sanctioned obligations. Although described in the voluntary language implied by the word “gift,”
such total prestations are defined by a triad of obligations: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to repay (Mauss 1967:37–41). While not all exchanges take this form,
total prestations are recurrent social phenomena.
In an exercise of extraordinary scholarship, Mauss documents total prestations in Oceania, Melanesia, the Northwest
Coast, ancient Rome, classic Hindu law, and tribal Germany. For
example, Mauss discusses the potlatch of the Northwest Coast,
an economic institution in which vast amounts of wealth are accumulated and given away or even destroyed in elaborate ceremonial displays (see Drucker 1965; Piddocke 1969; Schneider
1974). Mauss analyzes the potlatch as a form of antagonistic
prestation in which “consumption and destruction are virtually
unlimited.” The potlatch is “a war of wealth” (Mauss 1967:35).
To a Western economist, such destructive redistribution of
wealth is senseless. Mauss argues that such exchanges are comprehensible only within a certain cultural context. But more importantly, Mauss shows that exchanges like the potlatch or the
Kula ring are not solely economic transactions: they are total
phenomena.
The potlatch is certainly an economic institution, but it is also
a religious institution since the chief participants are viewed as
incarnations of spirits and ancestors. The potlatch is also a social
phenomena as different clans, families, and social groups come
together, social ties are reestablished, and points of conflict
reemerge. The potlatch provides the setting for movement up
the social ladder for gift givers and their families. It is thus a pivotal institution in Northwest Coast society, bridging different elements of economic, social, religious, and legal life (Mauss
1967:31–37). Mauss’s exploration of total prestations became a
key text in the substantivist versus formalist debate in economic
anthropology; it showed how the economy was “an embedded
process” (Polanyi 1957), undivorceable from other realms of society.
Many American anthropologists approach The Gift as a contribution to economic anthropology (e.g., Schneider 1974), but
Lévi-Strauss (1987) emphasized Mauss’s discussion of total social phenomena. Put another way, American anthropologists
consider the work to be a study on economy of which gift exchange is one form; Lévi-Strauss approached the work as a
model analysis of total social phenomena using gift exchange as
an example (see pp. 236–37).
For Lévi-Strauss, Essai sur le don is Mauss’s masterwork, not
because it introduced any new facts per se, but because in that
work
for the first time in the history of ethnological thinking . . . an effort was made to transcend empirical observation and to reach
deeper realities. For the first time, the social ceases to belong to
the domain of pure quality—anecdote, curiosity, material for
moralising description or for scholarly comparison—and becomes a system, among whose parts connections, equivalencies
and interdependent aspects can be discovered. (Lévi-Strauss
1987:38)
Mauss was aware of the importance of his concept, writing
that nothing “is more urgent or promising than research into ‘total’ social phenomena” (1967:78). Mauss’s concept was to link
the individual and social, specific and general, structure and
process.
We are dealing then with something more than a set of themes,
more than institutional elements, more than institutions, more
even than systems of institutions divisible into legal, economic,
religious and other parts. We are concerned with “wholes,”
with systems in their entirety. . . . It is only by considering them
as wholes that we have been able to see their essence, their operation and their living aspect, and to catch the fleeting moment when the society and its members take emotional stock
of themselves and their situation as regards others. (Mauss
1967:77–78)
Lévi-Strauss (1987:39–45) argues that Mauss stood on the
verge of structuralism (see pp. 236–38), a contestable claim (Clifford 1988:128; Panoff 1970). Seth Leacock offered a more cautious
assessment, arguing that Mauss’s emphasis on the integration of
social phenomena runs throughout his work (1954:67). Yet the
concept of “total social facts” remains elusive; it is not clear
whether all ethnographic facts are potentially total or if some facts
are total and others are not. As James Clifford (1988:63–65) has
pointed out, it is an ambiguous concept, indiscriminately validating different approaches to ethnographic research. The concept
“offers no guidance as to which code, key, or luminous example is
to be preferred,” Clifford writes (1988:64). “Social reality and the
moral world” are viewed “as constructed in many possible ways,
none of which may be privileged” (Clifford 1988:64).
Perhaps, Mauss seems most modern at this point; his concerns
are echoed in Clifford Geertz’s discussion of “thick description”
(see pp. 263–66); his emphasis on dynamic social phenomena anticipates Victor Turner’s concept of social drama (see pp. 250–54);
and Mauss’s explorations of multiple alternatives suggest a postmodernism of the early twentieth century (pp. 295–97). But any
such resonances remained undeveloped and were essentially unintentional. Mauss was primarily concerned with the analysis of
diverse but concrete social phenomena.