Person and relation as categories: Mauss’ legacy

ABSTRACT

Marcel Mauss’ classic essay on the person (1938) remains to this day a central point of reference for all social scientists: be they social psychologists, social historians, sociologists, or any kind of anthropologist. Whilst there is no doubt that the notions of person and relation that he proposed are still among our central tools of analysis, his interpretation of their role as categories has changed significantly. One of the principal difficulties we experience today in reading Mauss’ unruly essay is what he means when he speaks of catégories de l’esprit humain. This paper traces the background of Mauss’ use of personhood and relation as categories to the French neo-Kantian school of philosophy (Charles Renouvier and Octave Hamelin in particular), and attempts to situate Mauss’ argument by relation to contemporary trends in anthropological thinking concerning relation and embodied cognition.

KEYWORDS:

• Person
• relation
• category
• classification
• mauss
• durkheim
• renouvier

Acknowledgements

I dedicate this paper to the memory of Hermínio Martins (St. Antony’s College, Oxford) who first alerted me to the role of Charles Renouvier. I am grateful to the BA and MA students in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent and to the students of the DANT programme at the University of Lisbon for their intellectual companionship over the years. An earlier version of this text was presented as a public lecture at IFCH, Unicamp (São Paulo, Brazil)—see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = hirxZIJ2DvI&t = 4s I thank Susana Durão for that opportunity and, as has so often been the case, Joan Bestard Camps, Stephan Palmié and Martin Fotta for their always wise suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Une Catégorie de L’Esprit Humain: La Notion de Personne, Celle de “Moi”,’ 1938; English translation Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes 1985.

2 Jane Guyer’s Preface to the new edition of The Gift (Mauss 2016 [1925]) delves quite a bit on this theme. The essays of Wendy James (1998) and N.J. Allen (2000) on Mauss’ categories, whilst addressing the matter from a different angle to mine, constitute worthwhile references. Some profound reflections on the ongoing importance of Mauss’ writing, though primarily focused on other aspects of his work, might be also found in Hart and James 2014.

3 As David Henig notes (personal communication) it is indeed the fact that Evans-Pritchard’s introductions to this long series of translations came to constitute a kind of canonical statement of how to read Mauss, with an influence that went well beyond English-language contexts.

4 For writing this essay, I used the French original (1938), but for the quotations in English I used the translation published in the collection edited by Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes (1985, 1–25), where one will find also a series of papers that I heartily recommend, as most of them have lost nothing with the passing of time.

5 https://www.museedelhomme.fr/fr/musee/musee-dethnographie-musee-lhomme-3717

6 I am grateful for Adam Kuper’s generous help in constructing this picture, both through his personal correspondence and through my long-term dependence on his many writings on the history of our discipline (e.g. see Kuper 2019).

7 Briefly, by ‘participation’ in the sense attributed to it by Lévy-Bruhl, is meant the disposition to combine one’s existence with that of another (see Pina-Cabral 2018); and by ‘primitivism’ the disposition to associate essentiality with primordiality (that is, things that are most simple are also considered to be more essential, and, therefore, anterior) (see Pina-Cabral 2018, 19).

8 Note that, at the time, German neo-Kantian thinking differed considerably from that of French neo-Kantians. Revisiting Mauss’ own reviews of Ernst Cassirer’s work, Keller notes that Cassirer ‘only observes the representations of live beings and of things (rites and words) and neglects their correspondence with [actual] things and social things. He sees spirit (Geist) where Durkheim and Mauss see the concrete: the spirits, the body … ’ (Keller 2004, 31).

9 Word of mouth claims that Lévy-Bruhl asked the young George Gurvitch to interpret the letter for him.

10 ‘A passing theory really is like a theory at least in this, that it is derived by wit, luck, and wisdom from a private vocabulary and grammar, knowledge of the ways people get their point across, and rules of thumb for figuring out what deviations from the dictionary are most likely.’ (Davison 2005 [1986], 107)