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When Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le Don becomes The Gift: variations on the theme of solidarity

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Abstract

Since the early 1970s, Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le Don (1923), translated into English as The Gift in 1954, has been a standard reference in the social science and bioethical literature on the use of human body parts and substances for medical and research purposes. At that time, three social scientists—political scientist Richard Titmuss in the United Kingdom and sociologist Renée C. Fox working with historian Judith Swazey in the United States—had the idea of using this concept to highlight the fundamental structure of the biomedical practices they were studying, respectively, blood donation, and hemodialysis and organ transplantation. The fact that these first applications of Mauss’s essay should emerge in English- rather than in French-speaking countries raises the question of what the translation of the essay, and notably of the word don as gift, may have to do with this fact. Reading Mauss in translation undoubtedly inspired a seminal approach to interpreting medical and research practices based on bodily giving. This article posits that something may have also been lost: a much broader concept of giving with unquestionable links to the Durkheimian concept of solidarity, which Mauss conceptualizes not only as an obligation but also as a liberty to give.

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Notes

  1. Symposium on Sharing Bodies Within and Across Borders, organized by Kristin Zeiler and Erik Malmqvist in Uppsala, Sweden, May 21–23, 2014. The publication derived from this presentation [9] ultimately inspired the questions raised in this article.

  2. There is a discrepancy between the date printed on the Année Sociologique (1923–1924) and the year in which the journal was actually published (1925). I have chosen to use here the printed date of publication. Moreover, because The Gift is known in the English-speaking world as a short book, I have used italics even in citing the French title, despite the fact that the essay was originally published as a long article in a journal and later in a collection of articles.

  3. I will systematically quote from the Halls translation, except in those cases where I cite excerpts from Titmuss [1] and Fox and Swazey [2] who used the Cunnison translation.

  4. A close friend, collaborator and co-author of many papers.

  5. I have edited very slightly Halls’s translation of this passage to render more completely Mauss’s choice of very strong words (see French in italics).

  6. A specialty later named ‘social policy’.

  7. This could also be translated as ‘opposite’ or ‘converse’. Paradoxically, Halls translated obligation de rendre as ‘obligation to reciprocate’, whereas Cunnison preferred, in my view more correctly, ‘obligation to repay’ or ‘obligation to return’.

  8. However, in a paper co-authored earlier by Fox with Talcott Parsons and Victor Lidz on ‘The Gift of Life and Its Reciprocation’ [35], Mauss’s three obligations are reduced to two: ‘Mauss stressed not only the ubiquity, in human cultures, of the theme of the giving of gifts, but also how this giving creates, for the recipients of gifts, an obligation to reciprocate, which on occasion can be onerous indeed’ [35, p. 371].

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  1. Centre de Recherche Médecine, Sciences, Santé, Santé Mentale, Société (CERMES3), Campus CNRS de Villejuif, 7 rue Guy Môquet, 94801, Villejuif Cedex, France

    Simone Bateman

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Bateman, S. When Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le Don becomes The Gift: variations on the theme of solidarity. Theor Med Bioeth 37, 447–461 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-016-9384-6

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