#marcel mauss

[erotonia]

"Em última instância, é sempre a sociedade que se paga, ela própria, com a moeda falsa de seu sonho.

- Marcel Mauss.

[mayolfederico]

Michel Leiris - Tauromachie

Francis Bacon, Portrait of Michel Leiris, 1976Huile sur toile, 34 x 29 cm TAUROMACHIES  Donc, le matador se tient debout, les pieds impeccablement joints, rivés par sa peur dedéchoir au su du public en même temps quepar les bandelettes qui enserrent sa cheville,masquées par le bas rosevomi et le clinquant desescarpins. Roideur d’homme seul, roideurd’épée. La muleta lentement déployée couvre…

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[hidrogenio-incandescente]

"Dugin merece crédito por ter levado para a Rússia, ou melhor, para a cultura acadêmica e popular russa, autores profundamente ocidentais e considerados 'indesejáveis' pelo então regime soviético nos anos anteriores, pensadores de vários tipos que se tornaram pontos de referência para ele em sua formação filosófica e política: da Alemanha, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Hegel, Ferdinand Lasalle, Ernst Jünger, Ernst Niekisch, Oswald Spengler; do Reino Unido, Halford Mackinder; da França, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Alain De Benoist, Georges Sorel, Marcel Mauss, Serge Letouche, Roger Garaudy, Christian Jambet, Jean-Claude Michéa, René Guenon; do Brasil, Darcy Ribeiro; da Romênia, Mircea Eliade; da Itália, Nicola Bombacci, Antonio Gramsci, Curzio Malaparte, Julius Evola, Costanzo Preve, Massimo Cacciari, Giorgio Agamben, Diego Fusaro. Essa lista ampla, embora incompleta, de pensadores das mais diversas épocas, geografias e orientações era quase estranha ao mundo russo da produção cultural devido ao filtro ideológico imposto pela União Soviética, deixando inacabado o trabalho de metabolização, interpretação e comparação que pertence a toda cultura, especialmente no mundo globalizado". - Lorenzo Maria Pacini (Dugin e Platão)

[publicatiosui]

The body is man's first and most natural instrument. Or more accurately, not to speak of instruments, man's first and most natural technical object, and at the same time technical means, is his body. -- Marcel Mauss, Techniques of the Body

[goreprofonde]

“Doubtless, as we have seen, in every sacrifice the victim has something of the god in him.” 

- Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function.

[accuratepicuresofanthropologists]

Happy birthday to Marcel Mauss, born this day of 10 May in 1872! Widely regarded as ‘a’ father of ethnology, if not ‘the’ founder, Mauss was a follower of his uncle Emile Durkheim. Brilliant, socialist, flamboyant, and a habitual procrastinator, he isn’t someone you’d imagine would become an academic organizer. Originally a specialist in philology and the history of religion, he trained a generation of ethnologists, only for them to fall in the first World War. Undaunted but aging, he then trained a second generation of ethnologists, only for them to be carried away to the gas chambers of Auschwitz or to executed by the Nazis as members of the French resistance. After World War II, he lived long enough for Lévi-Strauss to meet him and claim his legacy.

I don’t know the provenance of this picture, but it is on the cover of the English edition of Fournier’s biography of Mauss, so it must be of him. 

[ganj-is-trying]

12th January 2021 -3/109 Days of Productivity

Got a reading done today: Techniques of the Body by Marcel Mauss for my Anthropology of the Body class. My mother and I also managed to find some nice stuff at the market and bought enough chillies to make nasi goerang!

A pretty chill day overall, had only one class where we did a few introductions and she let us go!

Hope everyones feeling happy and healthy!

[perkwunos]

Contrasts between highland hoarding zones and lowland urban centres have often been seized upon as evidence for deeply rooted cultural, linguistic, or even racial difference. Among the categorical oppositions framed around these contrasts we find ‘nomad versus settled’, ‘tribal versus urban’, ‘barbarian versus civilized’. Since the late nineteenth century, spectacular burials of metalwork (‘hoards’) have also been frequently linked to postulated migrations of Indo-European-speaking groups (‘hordes’). But such contrasting and symmetrical patterns of wealth consumption are not limited to the Bronze Age. Later examples include the rich tumulus burials of the Scythians, aligned across the margins of the Hellenic world and vividly described by Herodotus; the distribution of Roman coin hoards along the eastern coastline of the Indian subcontinent (distantly echoed on the Empire’s north-west European frontier); and the vast numbers of central Asian dirhams recovered from Viking hoards and burials in Scandinavia and northern Russia, where they mark the termini of riverine supply routes that fed slaves and furs to the markets of the Middle East. We are dealing, then, with a phenomenon of extremely long duration in the history of Eurasia.

In seeking alternative explanations, some historians have appealed to comparisons with the Potlatch ceremonies conducted by indigenous societies along the Pacific coastline of America and Canada. Potlatch was a ritual tournament. Its aim was to secure legal access to intangible rights and privileges such as ranks, titles, and land tenure. The public destruction of particular kinds of wealth, notably woven blankets and sheets of copper, formed an important part of the ritual process. As Marcel Mauss (2002 (1923-4): 47) wrote in The Gift:

In a certain number of cases, it is not even a question of giving and returning gifts, but of destroying, so as not to give the slightest hint of desiring your gift to be reciprocated. Whole boxes of olachen (candlefish) oil or whale oil are burnt, as are houses and thousands of blankets. The most valuable copper objects are broken and thrown into the water, in order to put down and ‘flatten’ one’s rival. In this way one not only promotes oneself, but also one’s family, up the social scale.

Native American rituals of this kind were observed in recent centuries by European colonists, missionaries, and scholars, and were eventually prohibited under colonial law as wasteful, uncivilized customs. In reality, their expansion—and the incorporation into them of Western trade goods, including money—had a strategic function for local communities confronted by the growing influence of industrial commerce. The economics of sacrifice, to borrow a phrase from Susanne Kuechler (1997), often served the interests of preserving traditional cultural values. Sacrificial rituals involving the destruction of wealth focused upon sensitive resource areas (e.g. mines, forests) and major routes of contact, embedding the movement of people and goods within dense symbolic infrastructures, and forestalling the transformation of these areas into passive supply zones for distant centres of urban consumption. Outside commercial interests were also directly represented and symbolically subverted through the destruction of imported commodities, along with more established symbols of rank.

We might then ask whether similar strategies of resistance were adopted in other parts of the world, in earlier periods of history, and in less overwhelming circumstances than those created by recent European expansion (backed up by large-scale military force and the catastrophic effects of diseases introduced upon local populations)? Mauss in fact assigned ritual systems of the Potlatch type a distinct and important place in his comparative history of social contracts. He felt they must once have been ‘shared by a very large part of humanity during a very long transitional phase’. Intriguingly, he defined this transitional phase as lying midway between Neolithic forms of contract, based upon the reciprocal obligations shared by members of a kin group, and the modern world of impersonal contract: ‘of the market where money circulates, of sale proper, and above all of the notion of price reckoned in coinage weighed and stamped with its value’ (original emphasis).

… the relationship between sacrificial economies (of Potlatch type) and the development of economies based on the use of ingot currencies does not conform to Mauss’s vision of social evolution. The former did not develop into the latter, as he envisioned. Theirs was a relation in space rather than time; one of contiguity rather than succession. …

David Wengrow, What Makes Civilization: The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West