Mauss - Obligatory Expression of Feelings PDF

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Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 82, Number 1, Winter 2009, pp.
279-309 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/anq.0.0046
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SOCIAL THOUGHT & COMMENTARY
Mauss Redux: From Warfares

Human Toll to Lhomme total 1
Chris Garces
Sarah Lawrence College
Alexander Jones
Sarah Lawrence College
Abstract
After his 1919 demobilization, yet before writing The Gift (1925), Marcel Mauss
developed his concept of the total human being (lhomme total) as a
methodological spur in works such as Lexpression obligatoire des sentiments
(1921). This translation and introduction to The obligatory expression of feelings highlights Mausss post-war transition to psycho-physiological research
and the concept of totality. Here, Mauss considers Australian greeting by
tears as a synchronized performance of mind, body, and soul. We argue that
Mausss post-war concerns had crystallized around the omnipresent threat of
loss-of-humanity and his war-survivors scepticism toward absolute conceptions of individual and collective sovereignty. [Keywords: Marcel Mauss,
Comparative Ethnology, Gift Exchange, Sovereignty, War, Tears, The Body]
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 1, pp. 279310, ISSN 0003-549. 2009 by the Institute for Ethnographic
Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.
279
Mauss Redux: From Warfares Human Toll to Lhomme total
escribing his work in a 1934 interview with an American sociologist,

Marcel Mauss noted: My major interest is not to set up some broad general theoretical scheme that covers the whole field (an impossible task!), but
only to show something of the dimensions of the field, of which so far, we
have only touched the edgesHaving worked in this way, my theories are
scattered and unsystematic (Mauss and Eubank 1989:165).
Despite the legendary breadth of his learning, Mauss would never complete a large and formally structured monographor his dissertation
during his lifetime. Although he dedicated much of his academic career to
editing colleagues works, most notably after World War I had decimated
the cadre of Durkheimian sociologists, Mauss independently gained wide
renown for provocative essays, commentaries, and book reviews in French
scientific journals, socialist circulars, and newspapers. His contemporaries
would have viewed his 1934 self-assessment, avant la lettre, as all-toopuckishly true to form: Mauss used his considerable erudition to reinterpret the growing field of comparative ethnology and to propose new questions, preferring tentative suggestions and tantalizing connections over
sociological conclusions. This approach to scholarship comes through with
remarkable clarity in The obligatory expression of feelings. His essays
very structure gave a powerful incitement to theoretical and methodological integration between the fields of sociology and psychology. But it also
heralded a major shift in the subject of comparative ethnology.
Mauss published The Obligatory Expression of Feelings in 1921 in the
Journal de psychologie. His essays call for new topics for collaborative
work reflected the circumstances in which it was produced: the end of a
six-year hiatus in his work caused by the First World War. 2 Several of
Mausss dearest academic colleagues, including his close friend Robert
Hertz, had died in combat. Many of his students also lost their lives on the
European battlefronts. Emile DurkheimMausss uncle, academic mentor, and fierce intellectual collaboratorwas disconsolate after his only
sons death and likewise died before the armistice. Facing the disorder
into which the Anne school had been cast by European historical events, 3
and feeling duty-bound to defend and consolidate its considerable legacy, Mauss attempted a curious rapprochement between sociology and psychology immediately upon re-entry into French academic life. Mausss
homecoming should have led him to explore questions that sociologists
abandoned with the onset of international hostilities, or to resume his
programs of study on prayer, social morphology, and the archaic cate280
CHRIS GARCES & ALEXANDER JONES
gories of human thought. The potential for a scientific reassessment of

the Anne sociologiques previous results had filled him with hope during his military service (cf. Fournier 2005:218). But the human toll of
mechanized warfareeven ones deliverance from military command
often necessitates a period of self-questioning introspection. For Mauss
and other soldier-intellectuals, the return to a peacetime routine was shot
through with a hard-to-articulate impulse to work through ones personal
losses (cf. Hollier 1997). At this juncture of his academic and civil re-emergence, in any case, Mauss took it upon himself to analyze the phenomenon of greeting by tears in Australian funerary cults and their parallels
in Polynesian, North American, and South American case studies.
The decision to examine what ethnological literatures had to say about
tears was neither accidental nor entirely academic. Mausss return to academic life starts with a project on death and mourning in aboriginal societies, a course of study deeply informed by his personal exposure to
mechanized warfare. Over a span of six years, entire generations of men
had been decimated to advance the interests of nation and homeland, a
military stalemate and legacy of complicit brutalization that plunged
European countries into a dangerous post-war environment of recriminations and counter-accusations over the War-to-End-All-Wars moral and
geopolitical worthlessness. Mourning for those who never returned from
the battlefieldsi.e. those masses of individuals whose deaths could not
be assimilated within the logic of national sacrificequickly assumed a
spectral quality of unresolved political significance. The obligatory
expression of feelings thus symptomatically draws attention to our
much missed Robert Hertz and Emile Durkheim and to these fallen compatriots studies of Australian funerary rituals. In re-reading his colleagues ethnological works, Mauss would rediscover Hertzs and
Durkheims arguments that aboriginal women, more than other segments
of so-called archaic societies, occupied a mediating role between the
living and the dead. He also noticed the prevalence of greeting by tears
not just in Australia, but sheer across the ethnological record. Mausss
essay claims to have located a non-Western practice that allows cosmological imbalances of death and cycles of malevolent accusations to be fully
resolved. Could ethnologically-informed models of conflict resolution
help to reduce the appeal of international belligerence? Might reconciliation with the dead perhaps curtail a second lapse into open warfare?
Moreover, should the European calamity motivate scholars to question
281
the necessary relationship between masculinity and politics-as-usual?

Mauss did not explicitly address these questions during the 1920s. But he
consistently drew upon lessons gained from wartime in seeking new comparative and self-critical methodologies as he resumed ethnological studies with an eye to dangerous political undercurrents.
In what follows, we provide a social and historical background for
Mausss unheralded essay on greeting by tears. We interpret the web of
his personal, disciplinary, and political entanglements that moved him to
question the boundaries of ethnology and to challenge his colleagues on
the psycho-physiological significance of crying in a period marked by
death, mourning, and loss. This critical introduction is followed by a full
translation of Lexpression obligatoire des sentiments. We did not originally set out to re-examine the influence of World War I on Mausss ethnological thinkinga question normally handled in the fields of French
comparative literature and European intellectual history. Over time,
however, the daily task of revisiting, translating, and critically situating
The obligatory expression of feelings has led us to view the document
as an essay that subtly traces Mausss intellectual displacement from his
pre-war ethnological commitments and migration toward his understanding of the gift.
From todays perspective, Mausss inter-war writings provide a timely
model for anthropological critique in the wake of international bellicosity and looming political economic crises. His essays from 1920-25 defended what might be called an epistemological standpoint of multidisciplinary inductivism, a radical challenge that he described in various ways
across his formal and occasional writings. By the early 1920s, Mauss had
gained a reputation for revalorizing non-Western societies demonized rituals and practices, generating a sense of empirical intrigue among his colleagues and inspiring a younger generation to problematize the logic of
sacrifice and collective life in ethnographic contexts. 4 We claim that
Mausss theory of the gift, along with its remarkable intellectual
resilience, is largely attributable to the multidisciplinary inductivism he
developed in The obligatory expression of feelings and other works
from the early 1920s. Mauss continually recalibrated his methodological
stance in response to the political and economic developments of his age;
we do not find it surprising that anthropologists, writing in the aftershocks of the bloody 20th century, would continue to invest his major
post-war texts with contemporary significance nearly a century after they
282
were written. Todays ethnographers still have much to gain from revalorizing his ethnological scepticism, perhaps now more than ever, as
anthropologists turn to philosophically derived principles such as sovereignty, ethics, and the body, in order to illuminate assemblages of power
in a world of incontrovertible global transformations.
* * * *
After WWI, Mauss argued that human existence included a variety of
miscellaneous facts that could not be resolved within Durkheimian sociology proper, including the spiritual force of the collective, the significance of corporal technologies, and the socially conditioned nature of
interpersonal obligations. In his 1925 Essai sur le don, Mauss notably
argued that after having
divided things up too much, and abstracted from them, the sociologists must strive to reconstitute the whole. By doing so they will
discover rewarding facts. They will also find a way to satisfy the psychologists. The latter are strongly aware of their privileged position;
the psychopathologists, in particular, are certain that they can study
the concrete. All these study or should observe, the behaviour of
total beings, not divided according to their faculties. We must imitate them. The study of the concrete, which is the study of completeness, is possible, and more captivating, more explanatory still in
sociology. (Mauss 1990[1925]: 80)
This statement offers his most generalized account of the phenomenon
of totality. But Mausss sociological entreaty to consider the whole person
was also described in a number of his more speculative and politically oriented essays. These occasional works dealt primarily with 1920s geopolitical problems, the standard-normative analysis of which typically
betrayed subtle forms of ethnocentrism, including European and Russian
nationalism, the impress of technology upon racialized bodies, the socialist cooperative movement, and thanatomania (i.e. the violent negation
of the life instinct by the social instinct). Lexpression obligatoire des sentiments, an early endeavour in this line of inquiry, considered the internationally problematic role of feelings in mourning for dead loved
ones. The contemporary reader would be amiss to ignore the articles
timeliness. Mauss did not take up the study of emotion in aboriginal
283
funerary rituals as an end in itself, but viewed it as a fruitful comparative

question to explore after the Great War had left continental Europe
wracked with loss and mourning. Nor was he alone in questioning the psycho-physiological grounds for collective sentiments. A handful of his most
prescient contemporaries also felt beholden to qualify these psychic
uncertainties in the emerging post-war environment. Freud, Benjamin,
and Lvi-Bruhl, each of whom were unsettled by the pull of 1920s nationalistic seductions, would independently analyze how irrational sensory
experience lent meaning to collective existence. 5 In Mausss own scholarly context, the need to reconcile the Anne sociologiques unwavering
socio-centrism with budding psychological, physiological, and linguistic
research developments seemed undeniable.
Lhomme total is the figure of speech that he adopted to generalize
these holistic representational concerns; the expression is perhaps best
understood as the total human being, informed by contrastive communication and systems of agonistic reciprocal obligations. Although developed
as a means of circumventing philosophical imbroglios, Mausss concept of
lhomme total would presage (if not singularly foment) the heterogeneous
scholarly programs all-too-loosely categorized under the rubric of French
structuralism. For Mauss, however, the empirical challenge of representing
lhomme total was both philosophical and methodological: for, by all
appearances, he wrote, everything mingles here, [interweaving the] body,
soul, and societyThat is what I propose to call phenomena of totality, in
which not only the group participates, but also, through it, all the personalities, all the individuals in their moral, social, mental, and above all corporeal and material interests (Fournier 2005:240). The study of lhomme
total entailed an intellectual wager that sociologists could move beyond
their dependence on social facts, or the Durkheimian science of the concrete, by which collective representations, when acted upon, assume
empirical value and give license to the discipline of sociology. These preoccupations shifted comparative ethnologys focus to the integral sense of
debt and reciprocity that draws all people together, rendering permanent
and complex interpersonal obligations to others more intelligible. The
notion of totality in play is separate and distinct from the totalistic interpretations undermined by 1980s and 90s anthropological critiques. His
analyses of total social facts took great pains to identify and reject essentialist over-determinations guided by particular theoretical interestshowever well-situated and justified.
284
Mauss oft-repeated obsessions with the facts exemplified his postwar concerns with representing the super-abundance of motivating factors in any social phenomenon. In his view, lhomme total offered a
panacea for the thought-restricting academic formalisms of his time:
Whether we study special facts or general facts, it is always the complete man that we are primarily dealing withFor example,
rhythms and symbols bring into play not just the aesthetic or imaginative faculties of man but his whole body and his whole soul
simultaneously. In society itself when we study a special fact it is
with the total psychophysiological complex that we are dealing. We
can describe the state of an individual under an obligation, i.e.,
one morally bound, hallucinated by his obligations, e.g., by a point
of honour, only if we know the physiological and not just the psychological effect of the sense of that obligation. We cannot understand why man believes when he prays, for example, that prayer is
effective, unless we realize that when he speaks, he hears his own
words and he believes, he exhales in all the fibres of his being
(Mauss 1979:27; emphasis added)
For all intents and purposes, the total human being was a complicated,
polymorphous, and unfinished creature. Whether discussing prayer or contemporary European politics, lhomme total could be shown to assume
many and irrepressibly different internal and external embodiments. In
The obligatory expression of feelings, Mauss analyzed the psycho-physiological experience of ritualised bodily techniques in the act of crying for
dead loved ones. The goal of this new methodology was not to locate or critique the origins of Reasona project that Mauss embarked upon with
Durkheim a quarter-century earlier in Primitive Classification. 6 Instead,
Mauss wanted a full reappraisal of the corporal and emotional significance
of collective existence.
The dangerous appeal of collectivism seemed all-too-apparent by the
end of international hostilities. Even before the War, Mauss had located a
representational problem at the heart of studying collective life; a paradox
that betrayed both the power and limitations of the sociological enterprise:
there is no social phenomenon that is not an integral part of the social
whole, and yet a whole in itself is only a relationship (Mauss 1927:1389; f. Fournier 2005:250). The wide net cast by this form of ethnological scep285
ticism can be traced to a remarkably prescient conjecture. By the early

1920s, Mauss had begun to embrace a contrastive understanding of agonistic and language-based social relations more commonly associated with
late-20th Century post-structuralismconcerned with adopting the
natives preoccupations, along with the excess value of fetishized
objects and irrational processes, even if this kind of perspective meant
being fooled by the native. This tendency in Mausss work was initially
pointed out, and first decried, by Claude Lvi-Strauss himself (1987[1950]).
Did his personal experience(s) on the Western Front influence Mauss to
detach comparative ethnology from its European philosophical bearings
and pretensions to absolute rational principles? One way or another, Mauss
began to argue that to isolate and/or grant philosophical privilege to any
single human capacityfor example: the mind, the ego, the body, the self,
personhood, existence, conciousness, etc.was effectively to cordon off
ones subject of analysis from the myriad social contingencies that inform
and intrude upon all communicative practices. Indeed, his abiding methodological concerns with lhomme total would quickly alienate and distance
him from his most provocative students intellectual agendas. When
Bataille, Leiris, Caillois, and other members the College de Sociologie
schematized the ontological dimensions of modern European life (Hollier
1988), Mauss by contrast advocated an increasingly self-critical approach to
sociology: he began to cultivate an excessive empirical openness to doubt,
suspicion, induction, etc., in reappraisals of the always-growing and contradictory bodies of ethnological literature.
In his private correspondence for example, Mauss heaped all the
ridicule he could manage upon Roger Caillois (his former student and a
founding member of the College de Sociologie) who suggested that French
citizens self-reflective decadence could be remedied by revitalizing the
role of myth in French society. Caillois unconscionable mistake, as Mauss
diagnosed it, was not that his theory provided intellectual fodder for
nationalistic sentiments in a period of looming international hostilities;
instead, Mauss characteristically objected to Caillos arbitrary delimitation of comparative analysis to but one society as an all-explanatory
rubric for interpretation: 7 What I believe is a general derailmentof
which you yourself are the victimis the sort of absolute irrationalism
with which you conclude in the name of modern myth: the labyrinth of
Paris. (Fournier 2005:327). The great ethnologist was keenly suspicious
of any principle that closed the ranks of inquiry to one social collective,
286
a critical stance that he developed and refined at least a decade before

WWI unfolded. 8 In the aftermath of international warfare, any type of
sociological closure seemed methodologically narrow-minded and conceptually impoverished on moral grounds.
And yet, an intellectual program of inveterate comparative and self-critical examination was not a simple undertaking. Nor was it easy to convey
the type of multi-disciplinary inductivism he advocated, of which lhomme
total and systems of total services were his most poignant methodological and empirical spurs.9 As the editor of LAnne sociologique in the 1920s,
Mauss explained to potential contributors that the problems in
voguelead to imitation by everyone wanting to write the book of the
moment (Fournier 2005:252). He then advised that [e]veryones goal
should be to create [analytic and empirical] strengths that can be directed
towards unknowns. It is the unknown that needs to be revealed (ibid).
Mausss resuscitation of the Anne sociologique would not survive more than
two editions due in no small measure to the weight of his impossible expectations. The problem he personally wished to resolve was indeed the obligatory expression of feelings, an empirical juggernaut that, combined with
his unparalleled capacity for ethnological speculation, would draw Mauss
alone into the rediscovery of potlatch as a trans-cultural system of obligatory and usurious religious and legal servicesand the principle of gift
exchange. We claim in this article that the research involved in the present
essay helped to prepare Mauss for the discoveries of the gift, concerned as
it is with the problematic relation between obligation and inner volition.
We therefore pause to consider the socio-political juncturethe eventuality itselfout of which Mauss emerged from World War I only to conjoin
sociological and psychological resources
* * * *
Mauss wrote The Obligatory Expression of Feelings to publicize and
elaborate upon a private exchange of letters with George Dumas in
response to the latters 1921 essay, The Language of Laughter. Mauss perhaps took more than a little umbrage at Dumass reference to primitive
populations without specifically addressing Hertz and Durkheim, his
Anne colleagues, on the shedding of tears in aboriginal funerary rituals.
His essay responds to this perceived affront by showing how recent ethnological findings on the greeting by tears only revalidated their pre-war
investigations. Importantly, his deceased collaborators materials recon287
firmed the performative significance of crying in public rituals for dead

members of the community. Onedoes more than show ones feelings
[through tears], they are shown to others, because they must be shown to
them. They are shown to oneself through expressing them to others and
for the others account (Mauss 1921; translated below). These collective
expressions of grief and mourning were not only obligatory from the perspective of Australian societies; tears, which are normally viewed as the
prerogative of the sovereign individual, were also coordinated with songs
and shouts, in which stereotypy, rhythm, unison, [and] all these [oral
rites,] are at the same time physiological and sociological (ibid; emphasis
added). In effect, as Mauss indicated by the mere fact that they are let out
together, these cries have a significance evidently different from that of a
pure interjection without importThey have their efficacy (281). Any
language of simultaneous emotional expressions depended upon the
collective recognition and synchronization of performed bodily experience. In order to analyze the dynamic interplay between internal and
external embodiments of tears, the comparative ethnologist would
require the intellectual resources of psychology to assess how their symbolic form and content could be incorporated as well as publicly manifested.
For Mauss, the resolution of this problem seemed more than French sociology could accomplish on its own.
According to Fournier, when Durkheim had established his work plan,
it had been possible to believe that sociology was seeking to reduce psychology to subsistence wages. (2005:222) But Mauss was not an intellectual Oedipus in his endeavouring to locate conceptual bridges between
psychology and sociology. Nor did he seek to annex psychologys material
and intellectual resources to Durkheimian sociology. In the half-decade
following his demobilization, he published The obligatory expression of
feelings and a variety of speculative essays in French psychology journals,
and even served as president of the Socit de Psychologie from 1923 to
1926 (Leacocks 1954:68). Whether his cross-disciplinary movement
amounted to a sudden about-face is open to conjecture and debate. Mauss
himself provides key insight into his vision of a common object of study
that would justify formal collaboration with psychologists in his 1923
address to the Socit. Mauss said there that both sociology and what he
viewed as the most progressive wing of its sister disciplineexemplified by
the work of Georges Dumastook as the object of study the coordination
of three elements: the body, [the] individual consciousness, and the collec288
tivity (Mauss 1969: v. 3, pp. 280-1). His 1923 lecture speaks in terms of a
methodology nearly identical to that of his Essai sur le don (1925) and to
his lecture on bodily techniques delivered nine years later (1934). Recently
published histories of French sociology describe Mausss awakening to
lhomme total under the philosophical guise of total social facts x. By
contrast, this introduction to The obligatory expression of feelings
explores post-war ambiguities in French ethnologys explanatory rubrics
and how Mauss developed his concept of lhomme total in part to resolve
them. His multidisciplinary musings would find their most succinct expression in the Essai sur le don, but lhomme totals methodological program
was likewise developed across a number of works on the social and religious nature of interpersonal obligations. Mausss experimentations with
inter-war psychology should not be written off as marginalia, or viewed
merely as a reaching out beyond the narrow ranks of sociologists to generate ideological allies for Durkheimian projects.
Most notably, Lexpression obligatoire des sentiments elaborates a
cross-disciplinary methodology in opposition to European philosophical
currents. The essay is both an immediate precursor to his studies on agonistic systems of reciprocal debt and obligation, and a speculative
methodological entre into the study of total social phenomena: an
exploration of crying as a fully integrative social and psycho-physiological
response to bereavement. The essay radically undercuts the subject of
moral philosophy. Our understanding of Mauss is potentially transformed
by these minor details by which he arrived at the problem of the gift.
Studying lhomme total would redefine the labors of sociology and psychology by spurning any reliance on the liberal philosophical subject.
Mauss persuasively defined the complementary agenda of these young
but maturing fields in terms of their shared oppositionality:
A discussion of the relation between our two sciences seems
imposing and philosophical, but it is certainly less important than the
smallest advance in fact or theory on any particular pointFor it is no
longer a matter of philosophy. We do not have to defend either psychology or sociology. Thanks to forty years of effort, our sciences have
become phenomenologies. We know that two special realms exist: the
realm of consciousness on the one hand, and the realm of collective
consciousness and the collectivity on the other. On these two basic
pointsthe phenomenological and experimental character of our two
289
sciences, the division between our scienceswe are all agreed. The
only questions which separate us are questions of measurements and
questions of facts. (Mauss 1979:2-3)
Mauss clearly endeavoured to advance social inquiry under the aegis of
lhomme total. And yet, it would be mistaken to view his advocacy of
lhomme total as the endorsement of a purely scientific mythologeme,
measured against the absolute principles that justify totalitarian or complete-consensual rule, which todays human sciences nearly take for granted. Instead, his labours across the 1920s sought to countenance the ambiguities of European inter-war scholarship when confronted with increasingly
abundant cross-cultural moral and political difference. The socioeconomic
theory he soon developed famously argued for the productivity of archaic
systems of exchange. But the methodological impetus behind the gift lay in
a completely reformulated notion of the economic and socio-political subject, psycho-physiologically hallucinated, i.e. not rationalized, by [his or
her] obligations (Mauss 1979:27). Understood in this light, our introduction
to Mausss essay draws attention to a seductive trap by which todays anthropological scholarshipfaithfully indebted to lhomme total and its allencompassing philosophical implicationsmay actually forsake the abiding
methodological considerations that lent Mausss hermeneutics their crosscultural intrigue across the humanities and social sciences.
At the same time, we are mindful of the limitations of attempts to span
the history of the discipline and to place a set of Mausss observations
about 1920s French ethnology in conversation with current anthropological projects. For one, comparative ethnology is a long-superannuated intellectual movement of anthropologys early specialization rather than a
research program to resuscitate and promote. The material and theoretical interdependence of this mode of inquiry with Euro-American colonialism needs to be noted (cf. Asad 1973), along with critiques of representation by post-colonial and feminist researchers in opposition to
evolutionary and functionalist theoretical frameworks. 11 But we also
depart from the rising intellectual tide that would delegitimize comparative ethnological (and comparative ethnographic) questions as symptoms
of Euro-American fantasy worlds. Across the inter-war period, Mauss
attempted but failed to complete a critical history of nationalism and dedicated most of his work to critiques of evolutionary and diffusionist arguments for national race superiority. Although personally trained in
290
Durkheimian sociology and the primacy of the conscience collective, his

wartime experience certainly gave him a more sceptical view of the nationalistic uses and abuses of the authority of collective representations. 12
* * * *
Regarding the translation itself, we have attempted in so far as possible
to preserve Mausss distinctive grammatical flourishes, making adjustments
only where the ultimate (disciplinary, historical, and personal) meanings
might be obscured by formal slavishness. We possibly hew closer to the
essays original French structure than a faithful translation should: the writing in this text is not especially elegant, nor does it attempt to communicate
itself at a poetic level. Yet we think that Mausss writing stylewith its many
interjections and long sentences, its habit of piling on qualifying adjectives
and strings of citationsis deeply characteristic of his ethnological scholarship and intrinsically reflects his way of thinking. The most difficult problem
raised by this project is how to translate Mausss idea of sentiment in lexpression obligatoire des sentiments. Initially drawn to its English cognate,
we have since decided upon the more informal and emotive connotations of
the French sentiments by translating it as feeling. 13 The English sentiment has an analytic tone of emotional distance and abstraction that would
appear to undercut the radically integrative character of Mausss argument.
Notions of the universal human subject are dealt a greater blow if feelings
in themselves are understood as socially and psycho-physiologically influenced facts, and never, in the final analysis, represented as the privilege of
autonomous and private opinion. Feelingsand their obligatory expressionwould seem more than sentiments to convey this critical point.
* * * *
The Obligatory Expression of Feelings no doubt reflects the intellectual strains and preoccupations of its day and age. Mauss and his fellow ethnologists lived and worked during a period of unprecedented cross-cultural interpenetrations that unsettled European conceptions of politics,
society, and civilization. In the Great Wars aftermath, the aporia of these
very ideals turned moral and aesthetic foundations of right and/or ritual
order into questions of singular importance (eg. Stocking 1987, Fournier
2005). Although Mauss makes a case for the socially conferred nature of
emotional life, his essay implicitly accepts the universality of French and
Indo-European loan words (e.g. sorrow, anger, fear,), and of their fas291
cinating total referents in comparatively marginalized non-Western societies. If one must be a good philologist to be a good sociologist, as Mauss
confided to an acquaintance early in his career (Fournier 2005:59), then we
may observe that by 1921 Mauss had not yet introduced the disruptive ethnological language of difference implied by generalized analysis of
words/practices such as mana, hau, and potlatch (for which no precise lexico-grammatical corollaries exist(ed) in Indo-European languages). This type
of epistemological provocation would have to wait another four years until
his publication of the Essai sur le don (1925).
The obligatory expression of feelings deals more narrowly with the
interpersonal and psychic force of tears. Mausss argument turns on a
description of oral rites in Australian funerary practices, and how spoken
ejaculations to ward off evil spirits (koi) phenomenologically evoke the
mind, body, and souls synchronized conjuration and expulsion of malfeasance (baubau). Despite undermining the idea of a universal human subject, the task of describing the social influence of emotional life comes
dangerously close to a predetermined interpretive procedure: one of
observing and subsequently expecting which particular emotions are
exhibited by categories of individuals in given social moments and performative contexts (as in the collectively staged and witnessed formality of
Australian funerary rituals). To do so with circumspection, to remain attentive to the empirical person, however, was Mausss great challenge to sociologists and psychologists. In lectures and publications, Mauss would advocate the study of lhomme totals unpredictable qualities from inveterately
inductive rather than classically philosophical points of view.
After the War to End All Wars, in any event, Mauss did not observe the
need to uphold Durkheims combative stance against other disciplines on
the unchallengeable primacy of the social. How did the give-and-take of
social life ever lead to such a devastating international and sub-human fratricide? Once again, Mausss research program comes alive in the attempt to
explain subjective experience when threatened by death, warfare, and the
negation of ones humanity. The Essai sur le don may have crystallized his
post-war concerns with non-rational economic systems. However, The Gifts
methodological raison detre was to locate the most deeply ensconced social
and psycho-physiological grounds of agonistic opposition to open warfare.
Only lhomme total could have illuminated how the potential loss of
humanity is paradoxically central to gift exchange as a moral system; the
person who fails to giveas well as the person who receives but cannot or
292
will not respond with counter-prestations in kind, with all the understated decorousness of good timingloses not only ones honor vis--vis the
unreciprocated gift, but also forfeits ones total status as a full and productive participant in collective life. Mausss sociology of the gift is radically humanistic; but his major comparative study of systems of total services, in which he outlined the achievement of personhood in gift exchange,
always entails the underlying threat of dehumanization. In other words,
Mausss theory of the gift was conditioned by his formulation of lhomme
total and the ways in which open warfare always transgresses human
beings interpersonal restraints on the productivity of conflict.
Insofar as Mausss oeuvre remains critically important for working
anthropologists, the key point of departure is to obliterate the philosophical subject as a category of individual agency, conditionality, and temporality. 14 Feelings are drawn cross-culturally from the human repertoire
only to be experienced and displayed in socially choreographed ways.
Speaking to his colleagues, Mauss would outline a complementary division of labor between psychology and sociology that encouraged troublesome yet revitalizing forms of disicplinary miscegenation based upon his
new methodological observations:
[S]ociology, just like human psychology, is a part of that part [sic] of
biology called anthropology; i.e., the sum-total of the sciences that
consider man as a living, conscious and sociable being.
Here, allow me, who, insofar as I transgress the narrow circles of
my science, claim to be only a historian or anthropologist, and, from
time to time, a psychologist, to say more precisely what is to be understood by this: that sociology is exclusively anthropological. Whereas
psychology restricts itself no more than physiology to the study of
man; whereas, for example, our colleagues [in the various fields of
psychology]chose the subjects of their experiments through the
range of animals, we observe and record only human facts.
Note this point well. I know that here I am touching on the difficult question of animal societies. The latter will, I hope, one day
attract the attention of young scientists who will no doubt make new
advances in the subject. But in the meantime it is necessary to proceed with vigour and a certain arbitrariness in all these preliminary
delimitations. Human societies are, by nature, animal societies, and
all of the traits of the latter are also found in them. But there are
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other traits which distinguish them to the point of their constituting

a new orderIn the behaviour of the most highly formed groups of
anthropoid apes,we do not, I claim, find general wills or the pressure of the consciousness of the ones on the consciousness of the others, communications of ideas, language, practical and aesthetic arts,
groupings and religionsthis is for me a primordial fact, an Evidenz,
a cogito ergo sumthat make us not only social man, but even man
as such. (Mauss 1979:5; translation by Ben Brewster)
As this passage would seem to indicate, Mauss considered himself profoundly beguiled by human decision-making faculties and called upon academic
disciplines at large to dramatically widen the scope of humanistic discussion.
Were these post-war inquiries informed by Western scholars intellectual
betrayals, justifying state-centric forms of logic that stripped nations and
entire peoples of their common or shared humanity? One may never entirely know. After the First World War, however, Mauss quickly marshalled any
social science methodology that could illuminate the complex human relationships between obligation and inner volition to arrest an alarming direction he observed in the human sciences. Henceforth, Mauss psycho-physiological turn became the most fruitful calling he could imagine: a study of the
life-threatening boundaries between the human and non-human. By sociologically re-founding the psychological, Mauss sought to identify age-old
forms of moral judgment entirely distinct from the rarefied abstractions of
rational economic and political inquiries. Psychological research held not
only the keys to unlocking a more explanatory sociological discipline; it also
seemed absolutely crucial to the elaboration of a truly comparative humanism. As Mauss himself would argue, Whatever the collectivitys power of
suggestion, it always leaves the individual a sanctuary, his consciousness,
which belongs to you [: the psychologists]. 15
* * * *
In his pursuit of lhomme total, Mausss disciplinary shadow continues to
haunt any number of anthropological projects that borrow from philosophical currents as incontrovertible ethnographic standpoints. Notably, Mausss
1921 essay casts a harsh perspective on Georgio Agambens widely heralded
account of religious sociologys fascinations with totems and taboos
(1998:75-80). Agambens thesis on comparative ethnologythat early
anthropologists preoccupations with the ambivalence of the sacred in rit294
ual prohibitions were simply the empirical projection of Occidental political

sovereignty (i.e. the paradoxical capacity to exclude by inclusion) upon socalled primitive populationshas exercised a powerful influence on
ethnographers all-too-ready to discount ethnology as a justification of
anthropologys early colonial applications.16 These claims about comparative
ethnology should be interrogated in light of Mausss inter-war research projects in addition to his turn-of-the-century collaborations.
Mausss displacement of French sociology in writings such as The
obligatory expression of feelings turns Agambens thesis on its head. The
essay clearly destabilizes sociological over-determinations (including
functional evolutionary models that allow for one-to-one allegorical comparisons between societies); Mausss post-war reliance on lhomme total
to guide ethnological analysis rejected any unitary conception of technique or technology that might be instrumentalized to justify a universal
socio-political order. His multidisciplinary inductivism might even be said
to dissolve sociological arguments for the sovereignty of the collective.
Mausss 1920s research program openly resisted the prevalent continental
idea that individual and national social bodies were the only things that
mattered. Had not the European nations pragmatically decided, and individuals like himself and the troops under his personal command, ultimately ratified the war by their own participation? For the post-war
Mauss, the triangulated psychic powers of social life, i.e. the body, the
individual consciousness, and the collectivity, demanded that comparative ethnologists avoid the tempting instrumentalization of any one of
these powers as an exclusive means to justify social endseven in a critique of these endsand to always be mindful of the great and terrifying
total social facts of human temporal commitments. 17 The messianic
impulse of European nationalism had destroyed most of his dearest social
relationships. Contemporary life would never again be the same.
The obligatory expression of feelings should be read in hindsight as a
kind of eulogy for the pre-war battles Mauss fought to defend Durkheimian
sociology from its many detractors. By the early 20s, Mauss had survived the
tumult of mechanized warfare and personally observed its forms of solidarity and anomie up closewhat Nathan Schlanger has provocatively called
his fieldwork of modernity 18 (2006:16). Writing to Durkheim from the battlefront, he often said that [the] war ought to provide new facts and new
perspectives (Fournier 2005:181). But Mauss might not have expected the
perspectives gained from exposure to warfare to bear upon his own life. As
295
he lectured to the Socit de Psychologie in 1923, he noted that the war has
made us inexorably feel and live experiences reminiscent of the societies
explored by comparative ethnology (Mauss 1979:30). The same lecture
extolled the happy, secular, [and] civil (ibid) ambitions of post-war French
society. And yet, Mauss did not hesitate to signal his weariness of the violent movements and absolute inhibitions which [such happy, secular, and
civil] expectation arouses in us (ibid.) National publics from all corners of
Europe had justified the War to End All Wars as a rational and secularhumanistic defence of civilized ideals. But Europeans civil deliberations
provided no sure means of avoiding lhomme totals vendetta ritual [in]
and of the determination of responsibility, (c.f. Mauss 1921; translated
below) i.e. of using the collective and moral force of ones tears to psychologically excuse further belligerence.
The need to purge Euro-American cycles of violence had clearly failed
to necessitate a revalorization of the conscience collective, or any process
of individuation through the organic specialization of divisions of labor
(Durkheim 1893). Instead, Mausss post-war labours sought to identify the
psycho-physiological (and more ethnographically grounded) dimensions
of gift exchange in all their hierarchical and transformative complexities. 19 But Mausss theory of the gift was not fashioned overnight. First he
needed to reevaluate his methodological commitments in light of his war
survivors experience.
In studying Australian societies funerary rituals, Mauss discovered yet
another country of the dead (Mauss 1921, translated below) highly different from that of his own post-war France: a foreign land where people
could shout, sing, and cryfully engaging ones mind, body, and soulto
remediate unresolved tensions between those who depart from a malevolently ensorcelled world and those who remain to survive them. Mausss
essay describes the symbolic economy of these Australian funerary rituals,
but he also needed to qualify their efficacy as expressions of sentiments
which are essentially, not exclusively psychological phenomena, or physiological, but social phenomena, eminently marked with the sign of nonspontaneity, and of the most perfect obligation (ibid). These vague and
early formulations of lhomme total opened a new vantage point onto the
interplay of body, mind, and soul. Lhomme total proved irreducible to the
sovereignty of individual or collective life. By doubly serving as the psychophysiological basis of productive human exchange, the study of feelings and
their obligatory expression points to Mausss speculative movement toward
296
a fully elaborated theory of the gift. The masculinist defense of European

nationhood had obliterated or maimed entire generations of men throughout the continent. Nobody could forget the war. Yet warfares human toll
was neither easily interpreted nor uniformly assimilated. Reflecting upon
WWIs unprecedented loss-of-humanity and the failures of European masculinity, Mauss took up a comparative study of womens greeting by tears
at least in part to reappraise the gift and sacrifice of 20th Century co-existence. How must it have felt?
The bodies of his loved ones, mutilated in a fit of national pride and
destructiveness, floated in and out of his consciousness. Unresolved emotions welled up and flooded across his dispassionate scientific interests.
Lives were at stake. And so were future deaths. Of course he would resume
a course of ethnological study after the war subsided; but holding Spencer
and Gillen in hand, and other Australian texts that Durkheim thought were
keys to unlocking the earliest sociological repertoires, also drew him to the
memories of his loved ones and to the world-of-ideas they had co-founded.
It seemed he could only explore and regain this lost world through nostalgia. For the future comparative ethnologist of exchange and reciprocity,
however, it was precisely upon reaching this foreclosed and backwardslooking conclusion that he could no longer recognize himself in his words
or ideas. Was this not precisely the same impulse, to finalize the meanings
of social relationships, and to determine, once and for all, ones future, irrespective of the interests of others, that had fed so well into the collective
paroxysm of a War to End All Wars? He realized that tears for the departed were obligatory yet always self-deceptively choreographed. Inside his
gut, he could sense the repulsive symmetry between the victim and subject
of this unspeakable sacrifice, and immediately perceived the looming
threat of his feelings to his own scholarly interests. This was not a moment
to dwell upon his bodyor even to reflect upon the bodies of others. It
was, on the other hand, a uniquely appropriate moment to write against
what the time of dying had forcibly made of them. Or so we imagine.
The Obligatory Expression of Feelings (Australian oral funerary rituals)20
Marcel Mauss (1921)
This communication is tied to the work of M. G. Dumas on Tears,21 and to the
note I sent him on that subject. I mentioned to him the extreme generality
of this obligatory and moral use of tears. They serve in particular as a means
297
of greeting. Indeed, this practice is found to be quite widespread amongst

what we agree to call the primitive populations, above all in Australia and in
Polynesia; it has been studied in North and South America by M. Friederici,
who has suggested naming it Trnengruss, the greeting by tears.22
It is my intention to show through the study of oral ritual in the
Australian funerary cults that, in a considerable group of populations, sufficiently homogenous and sufficiently primitive in the literal sense of the
term, the guidelines that M. Dumas and I have provided for tears might
apply to numerous other expressions of feelings. It is not only crying, but
all kinds of oral expressions of sentiments which are essentially, not exclusively psychological phenomena, or physiological, but social phenomena,
eminently marked with the sign of non-spontaneity, and of the most perfect obligation. We shall remain focused if you will in the field of oral
funerary ritual that covers shouts, speeches, and songs. But we could
broaden our investigation to all sorts of other rites, manual in particular,
in the same funerary cults and amongst the same Australians. Several
examples, in conclusion, suffice to follow the question into a larger
domain. It has already been studied by our much missed Robert Hertz 23
and mile Durkheim24 on the subject of the same funerary cults that the
one attempted to explain, and of which the other made use to demonstrate the collective character of piacular ritual. Durkheim even posed, in
opposition to M. F. B. Jevons, 25 the rule that mourning is not the spontaneous expression of individual emotions. We shall resume this demonstration with a few details on the subject of oral rites.
* * * *
Oral funerary rites in Australia are composed: (1) of cries and howls,
often melodic and rhythmic; (2) of voceros often sung; (3) of actual
spiritism sances; and (4) of conversations with the dead.
Let us disregard for an instant the last two categories. This neglect is
harmless. These beginnings of the cult of the dead itself are highly
evolved and general facts. Furthermore, their collective character is
extraordinarily marked; these are public ceremonies, well regulated, part
of the vendetta ritual and of the determination of responsibility. 26 Thus,
amongst the tribes of the Tully River, 27 this entire ritual takes place during sung funerary dances of lengthy unfolding. The dead person is present, in person, by his or her shriveled corpse which is the object of a kind
of primitive necropsy. And it is a considerable audience, the whole camp,
298
or even the whole tribe that is assembled that sings indefinitely to give
the dances their rhythm:
Yakai! ngga wingir,
Winge ngenu na chaimban,
Kunapanditi warre marigo.
Translation: I wonder where he [the koi, the evil spirit] met you, we
are going to extract your viscera and see. Specifically, it is following this
tune and in a dancing rhythm that four magicians guide an old man to
recognizeand to extract from the corpsethe enchanted object that
caused the death. These rituals, repeated indefinitely until a divination
has been achieved, conclude with another series of dances, including one
by the widow who, taking a step to the right and one to the left, and waving branches, chases away the Koi from her husbands corpse. 28 In the
meantime the rest of the audience assures the dead man that vengeance
will be exercised. This is only an example. To conclude with these
extremely developed rites, it is sufficient to demonstrate that they result
in extremely interesting practices for the sociologist as well as for the psychologist. In a great number of Australian tribes of the center, south,
north, and northeast, the dead man does not content himself with giving
an illusory response to the tribal conclave that interrogates him: it is
physically, really, in which the collectivity that evokes him hears him
respond; 29 it is a genuine experience we willingly call in our teaching the
collective pendulum: the corpse that is carried on the shoulders of the
seers or future blood avengers responds to their questions, leading them
in the direction of the murderer. 30 One sees quite clearly from these examples, that these complicated and evolved oral rites show feelings and collective ideas in play, and even have the great benefit of letting us comprehend the group, the collectivity in action, or interaction if you like.
* * * *
The simpler rites which we shall develop a bit more, including shouts
and songs, do not have as much of a public and social character; however they utterly lack any character of the individual expression of feeling
experienced in a purely individual way. The matter of their spontaneity
has been resolved for a long time for the observers; to such an extent that
amongst them it has almost become an ethnographic clich. 31 They can299
not stop recounting stories about the way in which, in the middle of trivial occupations, of banal conversations, all of a sudden, at fixed hours,
dates, or occasions, the group, above all the women, begin to howl, to cry,
to sing, to shout invectives at the enemy and the devil, to conjure up the
soul of the dead; and then after this explosion of sorrow and anger, the
camp, except perhaps a few persons specifically designated for mourning,
re-enters the humdrum of day-to-day life.
In the first place such cries and songs are uttered by the group. It is
generally not individuals who let them out individually, but the camp.
The number of quotable facts is innumerable. Let us take one example, a
bit exaggerated by its very regularity. The cry for the dead is a very common custom in southern East Queensland. It lasts as long as the interval
between the first and second burial. It is assigned specific hours and
times. For approximately ten minutes at sunrise and sunset each camp
with a dead person to cry howled, cried, and lamented. 32 When the camps
assembled, there was even a true competition of shouts and tears
amongst these tribes, which could expand to sizeable congregations during the time of market fairs, the gathering of nuts (bunya), or initiations.
Yet not only are the times and conditions of the collective expression
of feelings fixed, so too are the agents of that expression. The latter do
not howl and shout solely in order to translate their fear, anger, or sorrow, but because they are appointed and obliged to do so. First, it is categorically not the de facto kin, so intimate as we conceive themfather
and son for examplerather, it is legal kin who control the show of
mourning. If kinship is by uterine descent, father and son do not participate considerably in the mourning of one another. We even have a curious proof: amongst the Warramunga, a central tribe of primarily masculine decent, the uterine family reconstitutes itself especially for the
funerary ritual. 33 Another notable case is that it is quite often cognates,
the simple allies who are obliged, even during occasions of the simple
exchange of delegates or inheritance, to show the most sorrow. 34
What finally demonstrates the purely obligatory nature of the expression
of sorrow, anger, and fear, is the fact that it is not shared amongst all relatives. Not only do predetermined individuals cry, howl, and sing, but the
responsibility to do so belongs, in law and in fact, to a single sex. As
opposed to the religious cults stricto sensu reserved in Australia for males,
the funerary cults are almost entirely assigned to women. 35 The authors are
unanimous on this point and the fact is well-testified for all of Australia. It
300
is pointless to cite innumerable references for a fact that is described and

attested perfectly well. 36 But even among the women, it is not only those
who maintain de facto relations (daughters, sisters in masculine descent,
etc.), but women determined by certain legal relations who play this role
literally.37 We know it is ordinarily the mothers38 (do not forget that we are
here in a country of kinship by group), the sisters,39 and above all the widow
of the deceased.40 Most of the time these cries, screams and songs accompany often very cruel mortifications that the women, one of them, or several amongst them, inflict upon themselves, and which we know are inflicted precisely to maintain the grief and the cries. 41
Not only is it the women and specific women that shout and sing in this
way, there is also a certain quantity of cries of which they must acquit
themselves. Taplin tells us there was a conventional quantity of cries and
shouts among the Narrinyerri. 41 Let us note that this conventionality and
regularity do not in the least preclude sincerity. No more than our own
funerary customs. All this is at the same time social, obligatory, and yet
violent and natural; the pursuit and the expression of grief go together.
We shall soon see why.
But first another proof of the social nature of these cries and feelings
can be extracted from the study of their nature and content.
In the first place, as inarticulate as they may be, these cries and
shouts are always to a certain degree musical and most often sung with
a rhythm and in unison by the women. 42 Stereotypy, rhythm, unison, all
these are at the same time physiological and sociological. This can
remain quite primitive, a melodic howl, modulated and with rhythm. 43
It is therefore, at least in the center, east and west of Australia, a long
ejaculation, aesthetic and consecrated, and accordingly social in at least
these two characteristics. These coordinated activities can evolve even
further: the rhythmic cries can become refrains, 44 interjections of the
Aeschylean genre, cutting in and giving rhythm to even more elaborate
songs. At other times they form alternate choirs, including the men with
the women. 45 But even when they are not sung, by the mere fact that
they are let out together, these cries have a significance evidently different from that of a simple exclamation. They have their efficacy. Thus we
now know that the cry of baubau, uttered over two low notes, which the
female criers of the Arunta and the Loritja let out, have a value of
, of conjuration, one might translate inexactly, of the
expulsion of maleficence more precisely. 46
301
Lastly, the songs; they are of the same nature. Needless to add that they
are set to rhythm, sungthey would not be what they are if they were not
, and as a consequence strongly molded in a collective form. As is their content. The Australians, or rather the female Australians have their voceratrices, criers, and imprcantes, singing the mourning and death, swearing and
cursing and casting a spell at the evil cause of death, always magical. We
have numerous texts of these songs. Some are highly primitive, barely
exceeding exclamation, assertion, interrogation: Where is my nephew, the
only one I have? 47 This one is rather widespread. Why did you abandon me
there?then the woman adds: My husband [or my son] is dead! 48 Two
themes can be observed here: a sort of interrogation, and a simple assertion.
The literature scarcely exceeds these two limits,49 the call out to and of the
dead man, on one side, and the story concerning the dead man on the other.
Even the longest and most beautiful voceros for which we have a text are
reduced to this conversation and this sort of infantile epic.50 Nothing elegiac
and lyric; barely a touch of feeling, once in a description of the country of
the dead. However there are in general, simple filthy insults, vulgar curse
against magicians,51 or means to reject the groups responsibility.52 All in all,
feeling is not excluded, but the description of facts and the ritual juridical
themes prevail, even in the most developed songs.
* * * *
Two words to conclude, from a psychological point of view, or if you
like, of inter-psychology.
As we have just demonstrated: a considerable category of oral expressions
of sentiments, feelings, and emotions are nothing if not collective phenomena, in a very great number of populations, and spread all over the continent. Let us mention straightaway that this collective character does not in
the least diminish the intensity of feelings, on the contrary. We may recall
the heaps that the Warramunga, Kaitish, and Arunta53 gather upon the dead.
But all these expressions of the individual and group feelings, collective,
simultaneous, compulsory, with moral value, are more than simple manifestations, they are signs of understood expressions, in other words, a language.54 These shouts are like sentences and words. They must be said, but
if they must be said it is because the whole group understands them.
One therefore does more than show ones feelings, they are shown to
others, because they must be shown to them. They are shown to oneself
through expressing them to others and for the others account.
302
It is essentially a symbolic.
* * * *
Here we encounter the very fine and curious theories that M. Head, M.
Mourgue, and the most well-informed psychologists have proposed about
the naturally symbolic functions of the mind.
And we have a field, facts, upon which psychologists, physiologists, and
sociologists can and must rally.
ENDNOTES
1
We acknowledge Leo Coleman and Ian Whitmarsh for generous commentary on preliminary drafts; Bob Desjarlais and Mary Porter for unstinting guidance and support; James
Boon for his longstanding heterodox readings of early comparative ethnology; and especially Marcel Fournier, whose departmental lectures raised new questions about Marcel
Mausss political engagement for graduate students and faculty at Princeton. We are also
grateful to Virginia Fumagalli and to AQs anonymous reviewers for comments on the
French-to-English translation.
Les origines de la notion de monnaie, Mausss last pre-war essay to be published,

appeared in 1914. A bibliography of Mausss academic writings, with the exception of
book reviews, can be found in Seth Leacocks The Ethnological Theory of Marcel Mauss,
American Anthropologist 1954.
Fourniers description of the First World Wars effect on Mauss remains the most comprehensive biographical analysis (2005:174-184).
Take for example Mausss provocative essay on techniques of the body [1934]: a major
yet underappreciated part of the works appeal lay in its comedic tone, parodying the
overwrought conceptual formalism of 1930s French sociology. The significance of Mausss
jokes about his outmoded swimming techniques that he could not, despite his best intentions, modify in practice, was not lost on his younger French students. With the lightest
touch, Mauss could demonstrate the imperative to open up comparative ethnology to a
more comprehensive set of ethnographic data streams; the ethnographer, in his view,
should catalogue how bodily posture and corporally-mediated knowledge serve as primary vehicles for technological education and social reproduction. Incidentally, Mausss
turn to the study of technique and technology took place after he assumed the presidency of the Institute of Ethnology, an office through which he partly subsidized and promoted the Dakar-Djibouti ethnographic mission to widespread critical acclaim.
See, for example, Lucien Lvi-Bruhls Primitive Mentality (1978[1923]), Sigmund Freuds
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (2001[1920]), and Walter Benjamins Outline of the
Psychophysical Problem (1996[1922-3])
We are indebted to Schlanger (2006:19) for this point.
Georges Bataille, Caillois philosophical interlocutor, good friend, and co-founder of the
College de Sociologie, was similarly wont to assert a universal (and masculinist) panacea for
contemporary French society: he would strongly advocate a return to virility, the
absence of which he dreaded as a calamity (Bataille 1988:13; and passim).
303
Along with Henri Hubert, for example, Mauss wrote an extended, veiled criticism of the
sociological insistence that magic and religion lie on separate continuums: i.e. the notion
that the left sacred of magic (a society of belief unto itself) is antithetical to the rational, moral, and congregational sociality of the Church sacredidentifiable with collective
life. Instead, Mauss and Huberts Essay on Magic showed that transgression of the law is
far from being inimical to its upholding; rather, the vast majority of archaic societies
found magical practices impossible to dissociate from religion at the level of concepts,
practices, and emotions ( sentiments) (Mauss 2001). Even within a single society, collective
life was never to be analyzed as a unitary or sovereign phenomenon.
Henri Hubert, perhaps Mausss closest intellectual collaborator, would note in a letter to
his friend, I dont yet understand very well the expression total servicesTheres a long
stream of words in discussing the facts that cannot take the place of formal generalization
or more precise definitionsIt is often rather vague. (Fournier 2005: 244)
10
See in particular the two works of Bruno Karsenti Marcel Mauss: Le fait social total (1994)
and LHomme total: Sociologie, anthropologie et philospohie chez Marcel Mauss (1997). Both
studies advance positions on sociologys relation to continental philosophy already staked
out by Georges Gurvitch (1950), writing in another post-war era.
11
Indeed, the similarities between Mausss work and feminist/postcolonial research projects abound. Mausss sociological interests were markedly non-evolutionary for the period in which he was writing, and functionalist only to the extent that practices exercise serial and reproducible effects. These latter phenomena were among the social facts
that most concerned him.
12
In keeping with Mausss sometimes contradictory practices, however, the great comparative ethnologist emerged from WWI as one of French socialisms elder statesmen, and
continued to defend the Parisian cooperative movement across the 1920s and 30s. As he
wrote The obligatory expression of feelings, for instance, he was also drafting propagandistic materials about the tremendous development of cooperatives in Russia (cf.
Fournier 2005:204-14). This ambivalence in praxis does not undermine the legacy of his
multidisciplinary turn, and his increasingly sceptical attitude toward the interpersonal
entanglements of collective consciousness.
13
Jane Marie Todd, who translated Marcel Fourniers biography Marcel Mauss, chose to
render the title The Compulsory Expression of Feelings. (Fournier 2005:219). We prefer
the term obligatory over compulsory and its connotation of instinct-as-judgment,
which seems more in keeping with Mausss speculative essay and its inter-disciplinary
argument.
14
Mausss essay highlights the influence of lhomme total on taken-for-granted notions of

practice and discourse, and may speak to now-classic anthropological interests in a variety of ways. For example, Mausss ethnological argument can be compared with ethnographic research on emotional subjectivityxv. Renato Rosaldo unforgettably describes the
accidental death of his wife, the anthropologist Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, and how this
unspeakable loss and its accompanying forms of mourning allowed him to comprehend
Illongot peoples justifications of head-hunting as a form of subjective amelioration and
self-recovery in personal loss (1980). Rosaldo investigated how ones personal experience
with death may situate and constrain ones ability to comprehend emotional phenomena, perfectly demonstrating the self-critical methodological inductivism in Mausss
appeal to lhomme total. Catherine Lutzs Unnatural Emotions has persuasively argued
that emotional experience is not precultural but preeminently cultural, and that subjectivity can be viewed as a cultural and interpersonal process of naming, justifying, and
persuading people in relationship to each other (1988:5). Lutzs work has emblematized
the problems that led Mauss to develop a methodological approach to the integrative yet
socially-conferred mind, body, and soul.
304
15
Mauss, 1924, The Place of Sociology in Anthropology, quoted in Fournier, Marcel

Marcel Mauss: A Biography p 223. For a longer version of this passage, see Ben Brewsters
translation in Mauss (1979:10).
16
For example, its unqualified rhetorical appeal to the secularisation thesis which separates Euro-American societies from other peoples for whom religion and tradition are discursively synonymous (cf. Asad 2003; but see also Weber 1992); the near-entire elision
of the historical influence of Christendom on notions of European sovereignty in favour of
a genealogy that bridges Greco-Roman law and politics directly to the 18th century revolutionary-constitutional period; and much else.
17
Schlangers pathbreaking essay on Mausss studies of technique and technology (2006),
takes great pains to elaborate upon the latters conception of bodily techniques. The
techniques of the body are held out as a providential methodology for secular humanists
more concerned with holistic than evolutionary theoretical models, citing Mausss comment on the subject: it is undoubtedly technique that will save humanity from the moral
and material crisis in which it is struggling (2006:23). And yet, we must also point out that
Mausss concerns with bodily techniques, as an expression of lhomme total, reflected his
complicit interpersonal experience as an ex-combatant within the raison detre of
European warfare.
18
In chronological, conceptual, and existential terms, Mausss unprecedented interest in

techniques and their study effectively emerged from his involvement in what may be conveniently called the fieldwork of modernitythat is, the life-shattering experiences of the
Great War and the intense intellectual organisation of political passions that ensued (as
Julien Benda put it in La Trahison des clercs (1927:40) (Schlanger 2006:16).
19
Take, for instance, Mausss argument in The Gift: Society is seeking to rediscover a cellular structure for itself. It is indeed wanting to look after the individual. Yet the mental
state in which it does so is one in which are curiously intermingled a perception of the
rights of the individual and other, purer sentiments: charity, social service, and solidarity.
The themes of the gift, of the freedom and obligation inherent in the gift, of generosity
and self-interest that are linked in giving, are reappearing in French society, as a dominant
motif too long forgotten (Mauss 1990[1925]:68).
20
Translation by Alexander Jones
21
Journal de psychologie, 1920; cf. Le rire Journal de psychologie, 1921, p. 47. Le langage
du rire
22
Der Trnengruss der Indianer. Leipzig, 1907. Cf. Durkheim in Anne sociologique, 11, p. 469
23
Reprsentation collective de la mort. Anne sociologique, X, p. 18 sq.
24
Formes lmentaires de la vie religieuse, p. 567 sq.
25
Introduction to the History of Religion, p, 46 sp.Sir J. G. Frazer, The Belief in Immortality

and the Worship of the Dead, 1913, p. 147, sees that these rites are regulated by custom,
but gives them an explanation that is purely animist and basically intellectualist.
26
Cf. Fauconnet, La responsabilit, 1920, p. 236 sq.
27
W. Roth, Bulletin (Queensland Ethnography) 9, p. 390, 391. Cf. Superstition, Magic, and
Medicine. Bulletin 3, p. 26, n 99, sqq.
28
On the Koi, see Roth. Ult. Loc., p. 17, n 65, p. 27, n 150, etc.; the word Koi refers to a
spirit, the ensemble of evil spirits, including human magicians and demons. Cf. ib., p. 33,
n 161, a Koi, Koi, the Koi.
29
Ex. A very good description of one of these sances in western Victoria. Dawson.
Aborigines of South Austr., p. 663; Yuin (New South-East Wales). Howitt. South Eastern
Tribes, 422, to cite only old facts long testified.
305
30
Examples of this ritual are found since Capt. Bedford (N. Queensland) among the
Kokoyimidir (V. Roth. Bulletin 9, p. 378, p. 383, p. 185, being dragged by the corpses spirit. Cf. Grammar of the Kokoyimidir Language, p. 33 the story of a woman who does not
believe in what she records down to Southern Australia Wyatt Encounter Bay Tribes, in
Woods, Tribes of Southern Australia, p. 164-65, cf. p. 178 s. v. wunna wunna; passing by
the Center: Gason Dieyeries, in Curr. Australian Race, II, p. 62, etc. It is equally testified
in New South Wales: Fraser. Aborigines, p. 83: Bonne; Customs, etc. R. Darling Journal of
the Anthropological Institute, 1882, p. 134; and even on the coast (Fort Stephens): W. Scott
in Howitt. South Eastern Tribes, p. 465.
31
Thus Taplin, Narrinyerri, p. 21 is almost literally repeated by Roth. Bulletin 9, 462, by
Spencer and Gillen. Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 540, and by Eylmann.
Eingeborenen, pp. 114, 233.
32
Roth. Bull. 9, p. 15. Tom Petrie. Reminiscences (the tribe of Brisbane), p. 59; cf. Roth.
Bulletin, p. 400.
33
Spencer and Gillen. Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 520. Cf. the equivalent among
the Diei, Howitt, South Eastern Tribes, p. 446.
34
Brothers-in-law howl when they receive the goods of the deceased (Warramunga),
Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, p. 522. Cf. Spencer, Tribes of Northern Territory, p.
147, for a remarkable case of ritual and economic intertribal presentations on the occasion of deaths among the Kakadu of Northern Australia. The sorrow manifested has
become a purely economic and juridical affair.
35
It is not helpful to explain here why the women are in this way the essential agents of
funerary ritual. These questions are of an exclusively sociological order, probably this
division of religious labor is due to multiple factors. However, for the clarity of our
account , and to make the incredible importance of these sentiments of a social origin
understood, let us indicate several of them: 1 woman is a being minoris resistentiae,
and is charged and charges herself with tiresome rites , like the stranger (cf. Durkheim,
Formes lmentaires, p. 572); she is, moreover, normally herself a stranger, she is
charged with the vexations that previously the group inflicted upon all its members (see
the collective rites of agony, Warramunga, R. Hertz Reprsentation coll. , p. 184: cf.
Strehlow. Aranda Stmme, etc., IV, II, p. 18, p. 25, where it is already only the women
who pile themselves upon the dead; 2 woman is a being especially connected to malignant powers; her menstrual blood, her magic, and her faults render her dangerous. She
is to some degree held responsible for the death of her husband. The text of a curious
story of Australian women is found in Roth, Structure of the Kokoyimidir Language (Cap
Bedford), Bulletin 3, p. 24, cf. Bulletin 9, p. 341, inaccurate translation p. 374. Cf.
Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes, p. 504. 3 in the greater part of the tribes, it is precisely interdicted for a man, for a warrior to cry under any pretext, in particular from
grief, and above all in the case of ritual tortures.
36
These are several of the oldest attestations. For southern Australian and Victoria, B.
Smyth. Aborigines of Victoria, II, 297, I, 101, 104. West of New Wales: Bonney, Tribes of
N. S. Wales, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, III, p. 126; Narrinyerri: Taplin,
Narrinyerri Tribe, p. 20, cf. fig., p. 75. Eylmann, Eingeborenen, p. 240. East of New Wale for
S. Kamilaroi. Curr. Austr. Race, II, 318, III, p. 29. Tribe of Signey: Collins. Journal, etc., II,
17; Fraser. Aborigines of N. S. W., p. 53.
37
The lists of these women are only given in full by the most recent and the best ethnographers see Spencer and Gillen. Native Tribes, p. 506, 507, Northern Tribes, p. 520, Tribes
of Northern Territory p. 255. (Mothers, women of a determined matrimonial class.)
Strehlow. Aranda Stmme. IV, II, cf. p. 25 (Loritja).
38
This emerges from the preceding note.
306
39
Ex. Grey. Journals of Discovery, II, p. 316, the old women sing our little brother, etc. (W.
Austr.).
40
The widow sings and cries for months among the Tharumba. Matthews, Ethnological
Notes, J. Pr. Roy. Soc. N. S. W., 1900, p. 274; the same among the Euahlayi, Mrs L. Parker,
Euahlayi Tribe, p. 93, among the Bunuroug of the Yurra, the famous tribe of Melbourne,
a dirge was sung by the woman during the ten days of mourning, Brough Smyth,
Aborigines of Victoria, I, p. 106.
41
Ex. Tribe of Glenormiton. Roth Bulletin 9, p. 394; Scott Nind Natives of King George
Sound, Journal of the Roy, Georg. Soc., I, p. 46, one of the oldest observers of the
Australian West literally says that they scrape and scratch the nose in order to cry.
42
Narrinyerri Tribe, p. 21. Roth. Ult. Loc.; Eylmann, Eingeborenen, p. 114 and 233, says,
translating perhaps his predecessors, pflichtgemsses Bejammern.
43
Grey, Journal, II, p. 331, says of the tribes of the Vasse River: shrill wailing, of the
femalesdirgeeven musical, chauntes really beautiful.
44
Ex. Brough Smyth, loc. cit., I, p. 101, Mrs Langloh Parker gives a rather good musical
description, loc. cit., p. 83.
45
Ex. Greville Teulon (Barkinji) in Curr. Australian Race, II, p. 204. One can hear nothing
more plaintive and more musical. Mathew (Kobi) in Curr., III, p. 165, the refrain is here
a cry, (plusthis can mean either no longer or more) a very musical phrase: my
brother (father) is dead.
46
Fraser, loc. cit. up higher (plus haut).
47
Spencer and Gillen, N. T., p. 506, cf. 506, cf. 504, cf. p. 226-227, where it is misspelled:
the meaning is clarified by Strehlow, IV, II, p. 28. We have among the Kakadu of the Golf
of Carpentarie, a prcis rite of oral conjuration of the soul of the dead Spencer. Northern
Territory, p. 241, cf. Virgil, Aeneid, III, 67, 68: Animanque sepulchro condimus et magna
supremum voce ciemus
48
Lumholtz, Among the Cannibals, p. 264.
49
Howitt. South Eastern Tribes, p. 159.
50
Ex. Roth. Bulletin 9, p. 385, cf. Bull. 5, p. 15 sq.
51
See Grey, loc. cit., II, p. 316, 317, one of the longest examples of Australian poetry. L.
Parker, loc. cit., p. 87-88, cf. p. 72, with description of the country the women cannot
make fire.
52
Roth. Bull. 3, p. 26, sung by the whole tribe.
53
Among the Mallanpara. Bull. 3, p. 26, n 26.
54
V. an excellent new description, Strehlow, IV, II, p. 24.
55
Cf. Dumas, Le rire, p. 47.
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309

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SOCIAL THOUGHT & COMMENTARY

Mauss Redux: From Warfares

Mauss Redux: From Warfares Human Toll to Lhomme total

escribing his work in a 1934 interview with an American sociologist,

CHRIS GARCES & ALEXANDER JONES

gories of human thought. The potential for a scientific reassessment of

Mauss Redux: From Warfares Human Toll to Lhomme total

the necessary relationship between masculinity and politics-as-usual?

CHRIS GARCES & ALEXANDER JONES

Mauss Redux: From Warfares Human Toll to Lhomme total

funerary rituals as an end in itself, but viewed it as a fruitful comparative

CHRIS GARCES & ALEXANDER JONES

Mauss Redux: From Warfares Human Toll to Lhomme total

ticism can be traced to a remarkably prescient conjecture. By the early

CHRIS GARCES & ALEXANDER JONES

a critical stance that he developed and refined at least a decade before

Mauss Redux: From Warfares Human Toll to Lhomme total

firmed the performative significance of crying in public rituals for dead

CHRIS GARCES & ALEXANDER JONES

Mauss Redux: From Warfares Human Toll to Lhomme total

CHRIS GARCES & ALEXANDER JONES

Durkheimian sociology and the primacy of the conscience collective, his

Mauss Redux: From Warfares Human Toll to Lhomme total

CHRIS GARCES & ALEXANDER JONES

Mauss Redux: From Warfares Human Toll to Lhomme total

other traits which distinguish them to the point of their constituting

CHRIS GARCES & ALEXANDER JONES

ual prohibitions were simply the empirical projection of Occidental political

Mauss Redux: From Warfares Human Toll to Lhomme total

CHRIS GARCES & ALEXANDER JONES

a fully elaborated theory of the gift. The masculinist defense of European

Mauss Redux: From Warfares Human Toll to Lhomme total

of greeting. Indeed, this practice is found to be quite widespread amongst

CHRIS GARCES & ALEXANDER JONES

Mauss Redux: From Warfares Human Toll to Lhomme total

CHRIS GARCES & ALEXANDER JONES

is pointless to cite innumerable references for a fact that is described and

Mauss Redux: From Warfares Human Toll to Lhomme total

CHRIS GARCES & ALEXANDER JONES

Les origines de la notion de monnaie, Mausss last pre-war essay to be published,

We are indebted to Schlanger (2006:19) for this point.

Mauss Redux: From Warfares Human Toll to Lhomme total

Mausss essay highlights the influence of lhomme total on taken-for-granted notions of

CHRIS GARCES & ALEXANDER JONES

Mauss, 1924, The Place of Sociology in Anthropology, quoted in Fournier, Marcel

In chronological, conceptual, and existential terms, Mausss unprecedented interest in

Translation by Alexander Jones

Reprsentation collective de la mort. Anne sociologique, X, p. 18 sq.

Formes lmentaires de la vie religieuse, p. 567 sq.

Introduction to the History of Religion, p, 46 sp.Sir J. G. Frazer, The Belief in Immortality

Cf. Fauconnet, La responsabilit, 1920, p. 236 sq.

Mauss Redux: From Warfares Human Toll to Lhomme total

This emerges from the preceding note.

CHRIS GARCES & ALEXANDER JONES

Fraser, loc. cit. up higher (plus haut).

Lumholtz, Among the Cannibals, p. 264.

Howitt. South Eastern Tribes, p. 159.

Ex. Roth. Bulletin 9, p. 385, cf. Bull. 5, p. 15 sq.

Roth. Bull. 3, p. 26, sung by the whole tribe.

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