Announcement Calenda 1210157
Published in the Année sociologique journal in 1925, Marcel Mauss's "Essai sur le don" quickly became a timeless classic of the human sciences. We continue to comment on it, clarifying Mauss's intuitions or pursuing his main hypotheses by putting them to the test in new anthropological fields.
Sociology, anthropology, history, political science, neuroscience, linguistics, economics, the history of religion... there are countless disciplines that were once attracted by the discovery of what Mauss considered, in 1925, to be one of the human rocks on which our societies are built: how the thing given binds giver and giver, but also confers power on the one who accepts it.
After 100 years, what remains to be said and perhaps still to be learned from this essay? What can we continue to salvage from the Maussian approach, which at the time was intended to be profoundly subversive? These are the two questions that this online seminar will tackle, with two speakers per session offering a reading of part of Mauss's text, before attempting to pursue his gesture, either by opening it up to current research or, on the contrary, by trying to show how it may be time to move beyond the paradigm of the gift to consider other human "rocks".
