Powerpoint Templates Excerpts from By Marcel Mauss ADAO, PEREZ, TABLANTE, TAN, YAO.

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By Marcel Mauss

ADAO, PEREZ, TABLANTE, TAN, YAO

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• French sociologist

• Nephew of Emile Durkheim

• Most famous book is “The Gift” (1923)


• In all societies, gifts, which are supposed to be given voluntarily, are actually OBLIGATORY.

• All social phenomena are connected with each other, therefore they are total, and all kinds of institutions are expressed through them.


CHAPTER 2

Section 3 - 7


• Gift economy (Gift exchange)– Functions in a manner at once

interested and obligatory– The obligation takes the form of interest

in the objects exchanged.– The objects are never completely

separated from the men who exchange them, and the communion and alliance they established.


• Gift economy (Gift exchange)– Direct expression of the manner in

which sub-groups within segmentary societies of an archaic type are constantly embroiled with and feel themselves in debt to each other

• Indian societies of the American North-West– Barter is unknown there – Only the formality of the POTLATCH


•Tlingit and Haida of Alaska, and the Tsimshian and Kwakiutl of British Columbia


• Live on the sea or on the rivers• Depend more on fishing• Most substantial houses• Highly evolved cedar industry• High standard of material culture


• Winter: concentrate in towns– Social life becomes intense– Feasts of long duration– Reckless consumption of everything which has

been amassed during the course of summer and autumn


• Associations (e.g. Banks of Islanders of Melanesia)– Part of the gifts and counterprestations to pay

one’s way into the successive steps of the associations

– Prestations are the type of gift exchange between groups; appear “disinterested and spontaneous” but are obligatory and enacted under a highly specific system of reciprocity

• Potlatches are given in all directions, corresponding to other potlatches to which they are the response– Give-and-take


• Potlatch is really nothing other than gift-exchange.

• The only difference are in the violence, rivalry and antagonism aroused, in a lack of jural concepts and in a simpler structure.

• The collective nature of the contract is more apparent than in Melanesia and Polynesia.


• Credit– Time has to pass before a

counterprestation can be made.– Thus the notion of time is logically implied

when one pays a visit, contracts a marriage or alliance, makes a treaty, etc.

• Is there a notion of credit in traditional societies?– Yes, of course.


• In contrast to modern ideas of legal and economic theory that claims…– “in primitive societies, barter alone is found; in

those more advanced, direct sale is practiced. Sale on credit characterizes a higher stage of civilization…” (Cuq, 1910)

• In fact, the origin of credit is different.– A gift necessarily implies the notion of credit.– Barter arose from the system of gifts given and

received on credit, simplified by drawing together the moments of time which had previously been distinct.


• Honour– No less important is the role which honour

plays in the transactions of the Indians.– The prestige of an individual is closely

bound up with expenditure, and with the duty of returning with interest gifts received in such a way that the creditor becomes the debtor.

• What do they do?


• In some potlatch systems one is constrained to expend everything one possesses and to keep nothing.– The principles of rivalry

and antagonism

• Everything is conceived as a war of wealth.


• Sometimes there is no question of receiving return: one destroys simply in order to give the appearance that one has no desire to receive anything back.

• Wealth is continually being consumed and transferred.


• Progress up the social ladder is made in this way not only for oneself but also for one’s family.

• Such transfers are aristocratic types of commerce characterized by etiquette and generosity. When it is carried out in a different spirit (i.e. immediate gain), it is viewed with the greatest disdain.

• The notion of honor exists even in the most primitive of peoples and the potlatch consists of considering the mutual services rendered as acts of honor.


• Potlatch is… – Religious, mythological and shamanistic

• chiefs taking part are incarnations of gods and ancestors

– Economic• assess the value, importance, causes and effects of

transactions

– A phenomenon of social morphology• reunion of tribes, clans, families, and nations

– A contractual form (jural point of view)• material objects of the contracts have a virtue of their own

which causes them to be given and compels the making of counter-gifts


• One of the important ways for a chief to keep his authority is to demonstrate his fortune by expending it to the humiliation of others, by putting them "in the shadow of his name"

"It is said that one of the great mythical chiefs who gave no feast that he had a "rotten face”

"For to lose one's face is to lose one's spirit"


The potlatch - the distribution of goods - is the fundamental act of public recognition in all spheres,

military, legal, economic and religious.


• It is the veritable persona which is at stake, and it can be lost in the potlatch (not just in wars, in gift-giving, or error in ritual)


• In all these societies one is anxious to give;– There is no occasion of importance when

one is NOT obliged to invite friends to share the produce of the chase or the forest which the gods or totems have sent.

– To redistribute everything received at a potlatch

– To recognize services from chiefs, vassals or relatives by means of gifts


• To fail these obligations corresponds to violation of etiquette and lost of rank (esp. for nobles)

• The obligation to invite is particularly evident between clans or between tribes, fateful results can happen if neglected


• One does not have the right to refuse a gift or a potlatch. To do so would show fear of having to reply, and of being abased in default.

• In certain circumstances, however, a refusal can be an assertion of victory and invincibility– The one who refused must carry out a potlatch.

more particularly, he has to contribute to the "fat festival" in which a ritual of refusal may be observed.

– The chief who considers himself superior refuses the spoonful of fat offered to him, fetches his copper and returns with it to "extinguish the fire"


• However, you must speak your appreciation of food offered to you but you accept a challenge at the same time.

• You receive gift "on the back". You accept the food and you do so because you mean to take up the challenge and prove that you are not unworthy.

• Failure to give or receive, like failure to return gifts, means a loss of dignity.


• Normally, the potlatch must be returned with interest like all other gifts. The interest is generally between 30 and 100 percent, a year.

– Example:If a subject receives a blanket from a chief, he must return two in any occasion of the chief's family.


• The obligation of worthy return is imperative. Face is lost forever if it is not made, or if equivalent value is not destroyed.

• The sanction for the obligation to repay is enslavement for debt.– The person who cannot return a loan or

potlatch loses his rank and even his status of a free man.


• There is a certain power that forces the objects to circulate, to be given away and repaid. (among the Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, etc)

• Property is distinguished into two:– Ordinary items of consumption and– Valuable family property

•Ex. Talismans, decorated coppers, skin blankets, etc.

•Treated with the same solemnity as that of giving women away for marriage


• These things are loaned rather than sold and ceded (the transactions are not economic, not done to maximize profit or minimize loss)

• Similar to distinctions made by the Haida– They reify (concretize) a being called the

“Property Woman”, whom they believe to be the mother, the founding goddess

– Precious family articles are considered to have been given by the spirits to their founding hero


– Each one has its own name, quality, and power

– Everything is considered to have their own voices, their own personalities, not just inanimate objects built by the chief and his people

– The house personally welcomes and casts out spirits and people

– Each of these precious things are replicas of the never ending supply of tools; they are both a surety of life and a surety of wealth


• Decorated coppers are the most important articles in the potlatch– Considered a living being, object of cult

and myth– Identified with salmon, another object of

cult– Has its own name and individuality in

respect with each of the clan chiefs’ families, and its own value


– Coppers are believed to attract other coppers, as wealth attracts wealth, and as dignity attracts honors

– With the Haida and Tlingit, coppers are “fortresses” for the princess who owns them

– Elsewhere, a chief who owns them is rendered invincible

– “flat divine objects” of the house


– Myth identifies coppers together with the spirits who gave them away, the owners, and the coppers themselves

– It is believed to speak and demand to be given away or destroyed

– Covered with blankets to keep it warm just as a chief is smothered in the blankets he is to distribute


• We also see the transmission of wealth and good fortune– The spirits of an initiate allow him to own

coppers and talismans, which allow him to get more of those, more wealth, a higher rank, and more spirits

– A man who obtains wealth obtains a spirit which in turn possesses him, allowing him to overcome obstacles heroically

– Then the man is later paid for shamanistic services, ritual dances and trances; from here the cycle repeats


• Everything is tied together; things have personalities, and personalities somehow permanently own the clan

• Talismans, titles, coppers, and spirits of chiefs are homonyms and synonyms, having the same nature and function

• The circulation of goods is the same as that of people, festival ritual, ceremonies and dances, jokes and injuries


• Things are given and returned because one gives and returns “respects” and “courtesies”

• More than that, in giving them, a man gives himself and he does so because he owes himself (along with his possessions) to others


• From the study of four groups, we find the potlatch, along with its leading motive and its typical form, in two or three of them

• In all groups we see the archaic form of exchange – the gift and the return gift

• In these societies we note the circulation of objects alongside the circulation of persons and rights


• The spirit of gift exchange is characteristic of societies which have passed the phase of “total prestation” (between clan and clan, family and family) but have not yet reached the stage of pure individual contract, the money market, sale proper, fixed price, and standard currency.


“Through studies of this sort we can find, measure and assess the various

determinants, aesthetic, moral, religious and economic, and the material and

demographic factors, whose sum is the basis of society and constitutes the common life, and whose conscious

direction is the supreme art – Politics in the Socratic sense of the word.”

-Marcel Mauss

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Powerpoint Templates Excerpts from By Marcel Mauss ADAO, PEREZ, TABLANTE, TAN, YAO.

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