Marcel Mauss: A Biography

Description

This book is the first intellectual biography of Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), the father of modern ethnology and a leading early figure in the French school of sociology. Mauss left a rich intellectual legacy in the social sciences, influencing the work of Claude Levi-Strauss and others. His masterpiece, the 1925 essay The Gift, on reciprocity and gif

Marcel Fournier is Professor of Sociology at the Universite de Montreal. This book is his abridgment of his monumental Marcel Mauss, published in France (Fayard, 1994). He is the editor of the international French journal Sociologie et Societes. Jane Marie Todd is the translator of some thirty books, including, most recently, Julia Kristeva's Colette.

"Fournier's book is an intellectual biography rather than just the biography of an intellectual, and has plenty of value to say about Mauss' ideas."--Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books "Fournier achieves with flying colors the ambitious goals of intellectual biography ... [T]he book is overall very fluid and engaging. It has great potential as a teaching tool and also makes excellent anthropologist bedtime reading."--Evelyn Dean, Anthropological Quarterly