Abstract
The debates on a relational perspective in French sociology remained dormant until Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, which took advantage of Marcel Mauss’ work on the gift. Chapter 4 compares both authors on the gift, which led to their relational conception of social positions. Bourdieu and Mauss shared common insights regarding how the mobilisation of actors contributes to maximising and to classifying their social positions in hierarchical social structures. But they did not agree on the relation. Bourdieu’s relation is a given fact which freezes equal actors in rivalry. Mauss’ relation is a cycle embedding various activities which contribute to changing the social positions of actors within social hierarchies.
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Notes
- 1.
These two concepts are not the only ones to which Bourdieu pays attention, but they play a fundamental role in understanding how social norms are embedded not only in the minds of actors, but also in their bodies (for example Crick 1982, 299; Lock 1993, 137; Adkins 2003, 14; Dianteill 2003, 529–549), and, therefore, in their emotions (Karsenti 2011, 77).
- 2.
Coliot-Thélène, for example, goes even as far as to say that Bourdieu’s criticism of Mauss’ gift represents for Bourdieu “a fundamental turning point in the development of his theoretical position” (Coliot-Thélène 2005, 118).
- 3.
Mahé (1996, 237–264) has clearly highlighted the links between Maunier’s work on the taousa in Kabyle, and the conceptions of the gift in Maunier, Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Bourdieu.
- 4.
As Swartz says, “Bourdieu adopts the language of ‘strategy’ to distance himself from strict structuralist forms of determination by stressing the importance of agency within a structuralist framework” (Swartz 1997, 98). The concept of strategy is a way for Bourdieu to insist on the creativity of the actors, and in this regard, it represents “the general disposition to maximize opportunity and profit…, which might mean the direct manipulation and even avoidance of established ways of doing things” (Grenfell and Hardy 2007, 24).
- 5.
Dumont says that for Bourdieu “the truth that structural objectivism excludes—the ‘full truth’—is the temporal ‘structure’ of gift exchange” (Dumont 1999, 22).
- 6.
Alvin Gouldner has made reciprocity famous as a general moral norm of human exchanges (Gouldner 1960, 161–178).
- 7.
Lane has also stressed this: “Here, then, Bourdieu was attempting to give practical form to the theoretical role he had elaborated for intellectuals as early as ‘Questions de politique’ in 1977. The intellectual was to adopt a Socratic role, helping dominated groups to articulate a ‘heterodox’ discourse, which expressed the truth of a marginalized experience that the ‘orthodox’ discourse of the dominant class tried to silence and naturalize” (Lane 2006, 150).
- 8.
This can be seen in Bourdieu’s posthumous book, The Social Structures of the Economy (2005), in which he formulates a critique of the economy through an analysis of the French real estate market.
- 9.
Laine underlines this point when he comments on Caillé’s critique of Bourdieu, “As Alain Caillé has pointed out, there was an anthropological assumption underpinning Bourdieu’s field theory, the assumption that all agents were driven by the need to accumulate or preserve the different forms of capital on offer in the various fields” (Lane 2006, 148).
- 10.
According to Caillé, there is in Mauss “a powerful social theory which gives the guidelines not only for the construction of a sociological paradigm, but for the construction of the solely thinkable and bearable sociological paradigm” (Caillé 1996, 190).
- 11.
Mauss clearly says that his study on the gift in ancient societies is “incompatible with the development of the market, commerce, and production, and, all in all…anti-economic” (Mauss 1925 (2002), 69). Nevertheless, he also says that “the market is a human phenomenon that, in our view, is not foreign to any known society” (ibid. 5). Thus, Mauss remains ambivalent towards the relationship between gifts and economic exchanges, which do not represent two well-defined or well-separated domains of activity. Yet, when Caillé says that Mauss takes the gift out of the economy, he is actually saying that Mauss does not see the gift as an ancient form of modern capitalist economy. However, Caillé does not go as far as Hénaff, for example, who presents a different idea suggesting that the gift and economic exchanges are two forms of exchange that are fundamentally different (Hénaff 2010).
- 12.
When he speaks of negative anti-utilitarianism, Caillé means the most radical discourses against economic semantics (Caillé 1996, 192–193). According to these discourses, there is an asymmetry between gift and economy that must disappear—this will allow for radical critique of modern capitalism and, as a consequence, its removal in order to build a society on the basis of an anti-economic model.
- 13.
- 14.
Honneth, for example, restricts interpretation of the term “maximising” to the single idea of profit, and he consequently criticises the utilitarian nature of Bourdieu’s theory in terms close to those used by Caillé (Honneth 1986, 55–66).
- 15.
Speaking of the ambivalence of the things involved in the sacrifices, which ambivalence Mauss also finds in the gift, being, as it is, at the same time a poison and a present; Mauss refers to Robertson Smith even if he rejects his theory of religion (Isambert 1976, 41). The ambivalence of objects in sacrifices as well as in gift exchanges makes Mauss pay attention to the variety of sacrifices and gifts, their multiplicity and differences, as well as to the corresponding quantity of exchanges coming from them, which are necessary for the extension of the relational perspective contained in the contact. If we imagine that ambivalence is like fog, i.e. makes the things that come into exchanges indistinct from one another, this is, in fact quite the opposite for Mauss. For him, ambivalence is like a spectrum of colours, enabling us to consider the variety of objects and the corresponding exchanges that societies develop in order to deploy cycles of the relation.
- 16.
Bourdieu says that “The schemes of the habitus” are “the primary forms of classification” (Bourdieu 1984, 466). “The habitus is at once a system of models for the production of practices and a system of models for the perception and appreciation of practices. And in both cases, its operations express the social position in which it was constructed. As a result, the habitus produces practices and representations which are available for classification, which are objectively differentiated; but they are immediately perceived as such only in the case of agents who possess the code, the classificatory models necessary to understand their social meaning” (Bourdieu 1990a, 130).
- 17.
Mauss prefers to speak of the cycle of services and counter-services surrounding the gift, rather than of a “circle”, which evokes the kula on the Tribriand Islands described by Bronislaw Malinowski (Mauss 1925 (2002), 27).
- 18.
Mauss understands the kula as “none other than the system of gifts exchanged”, from which the potlatch only “differs…in the violence, exaggeration, and antagonisms that it arouses, and by a certain lack of juridical concepts, and a simpler and cruder structure” (Mauss 1925 (2002), 45).
- 19.
These criticisms are well known today. Let us recall them briefly. Mauss refers to Eldson Best to interpret the Maori term hau on the basis of the collection of the Dominion museum and of the articles that Best wrote for the Journal of the Polynesian Society (Mauss 1925 (2002), 115 note 30). The hau is the object of a great variety of possible interpretations (Best 1900, 190). It generally means a vital essence, or a principle of life (ibid. 189). It is also close to the notions of personality or resemblance (“ahua”; cf. ibid. 186, 189), wind, blows, respiration (ibid. 190), and in this sense, to the term “mana” (ibid.). It also means “king” or “supreme leader” (ibid. 190), and it is located in animate and inanimate objects (ibid. 191). In the tradition of Max Müller (ibid. 190), Best structures the concept to enable European scientists to understand its meaning. Mauss summaries Best’s numerous meanings of the hau, and he says that the hau seems to evoke the personality of the donor in the Maori gifts. This interpretation was the subject of several critiques. Raymond Firth said that Mauss had forced the translation of the hau, thus distorting the meaning of the Maori gifts. “In his Essai sur le don he had taken a Maori text as the pivot of his argument about reciprocity in the gift. But I felt he did not really understand the Maori, and in fact he glossed one word of the text quite wrongly. The Maori elder spoke of a gift having an immaterial essence which demanded a proper return. Mauss misread this as implying that part of the personality of the giver was involved. But while this distorted the Maori view, Mauss’s concept proved extremely stimulating” (Firth in James and Allen 1998, 23). Lévi-Strauss insists less on this translation issue, and instead underlines that Mauss simply invented this meaning of the hau. “In the Essai sur le don, Mauss strives to reconstruct a whole out of parts; and as that is manifestly not possible, he has to add to the mixture an additional quantity which gives him the illusion of squaring his account. This quantity is hau” (Lévi-Strauss 1987, 47; cf. also the critique of Claude Lefort in Lefort 1951, 1402; also Annette Weiner in Weiner 1985, 211–215). Starting in the 1970s, some authors relativised these critiques and rehabilitated Mauss’ contribution (for example Sahlins 1972, 155–170; Leach 1983, 536; Karsenti 1997, 381 note 1).
- 20.
As Wacquant recalls (Wacquant 1989, 26–63), ranking presupposes different principles of ranking according to the field or the sub-field in question. This means that the principles according to which social positions are ranked are specific ones. They concern one specific field and its sub-fields, and do not extend to other fields and sub-fields.
- 21.
Regarding this statement about the affirmation of the personal and social identity of disinterested artists, Sapiro points out the use of the concept of charism in Bourdieu, referring to Max Weber’s theory of people mobilising actors in order to support a cause that they want to bring to the attention of the public at their own risk (Sapiro 2003, 638–639). This can be seen as a good example—because it exaggerates a general trend—of the link existing between the maximisation of a social position and the mobilisation of the collective.
- 22.
In the original article “De quelques formes de classification. Contribution à l’étude des représentations collectives”, Durkheim and Mauss not only speak of “the relations which exist between things”, but more generally of “relations qui existent entre les êtres” (Durkheim and Mauss 1903a (1974), 82), meaning things, spirits, and human beings at the same time.
- 23.
From this viewpoint, we understand Rawls’ observation on the recurring misinterpretations of Durkheim and Mauss’ writings on the primitive forms of classification. For Rawls, it is wrong to see Durkheim and Mauss as two positivists who assume that the forms of classification are part of the collective representations in society, which actors would only use in their daily life. “An empirically valid category of classification only develops, according to Durkheim, when practices that enact moral relationships produce feelings of moral force” (Rawls 1996, 454). In other words, it is only when actors’ practical activities lead to manifest relations that they see their forms of classification as empirically valid. In our last chapter, we return to this type of legitimisation a posteriori—a posteriori because, as we shall see, legitimisation presupposes the establishment of a relational perspective in society in order to mean something to the collective.
- 24.
Bourdieu understands the fields and sub-fields that form a social space as being subjected to the field of power, one definition of which is “the space of relations of force between agents or between institutions having in common the possession of the capital necessary to occupy the dominant positions in different fields (notably economic or cultural)” (Bourdieu 1995, 215). The struggles within the field of power, i.e. between dominant actors in the other fields of society, determine the hierarchical order of the fields in society in determining the value of the different kinds of capital present in these fields.
- 25.
On the relationship between language and habitus in Bourdieu, see for example Kögler (2011, 271–300).
- 26.
One remembers Paul Veyne’s book, which takes up the same idea as applied to Greek mythology, according to which Greek myths generated reactions in Greek society, which range from belief to fiercest scepticism (Veyne 1983).
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Papilloud, C. (2018). Position: Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourdieu on Gift, Interest, and the Mobilisation of Actors. In: Sociology through Relation. Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65073-9_4
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