The gift as colonial ideology? Marcel Mauss and the solidarist colonial policy in the interwar era

Abstract

Marcel Mauss published his essay The Gift (1925) in the context of debates about the European sovereign debt crises and the economic growth experienced by the colonies. This article traces the discursive associations between Mauss’ anthropological concepts (“gift,” “exchanges of prestations,” and “generosity”) and the reformist program of French socialists who pushed for an “altruistic” colonial policy in the interwar period. This article demonstrates that the three obligations which Mauss identified as the basis of a customary law of international economic relations (i.e. the duty to give, the duty to receive, and the duty to give back) served as key references in the French debate about the relationships between metropolises and colonies in the interwar period. Mauss made this relation between colonial policy and the ethnology of the gift explicit in his book, The Nation. Moving beyond Mauss’ interwar writings, the article traces the genealogy of his later reflections to his involvement in prewar debates about chartered companies.

Decolonising in, by and through participatory design with political activists in Palestine

“…A series of artefacts are made, which can be received as a set of gifts [20] with propositional questions that might also have the potential to create an unequal expectation of reciprocity [75]. Recent interpretations of Maus's theories of the gift have been further explored in the context of solidarity building for inter-societal relations in response to colonisation highlighting their contextual specificity in long-term exchange [52,53]. Simultaneously, the activist's laughter and response also alluded to the more playful possibilities of these material forms and the potential for different kinds of solidarity.…”

Decolonising Durkheimian Conceptions of the International

“…Until now, with a few exceptions (Conklin 2013;L'estoile 2007;L'estoile et al 2005;Mallard 2018Mallard , 2019Sibeud 2004Sibeud , 2009, historians of the Durkheimian school of ethnology and sociology have paid little attention to the colonial context that was an intrinsic aspect of Durkheim's reflections on the international order. Amongst other things, the work of the doctoral students that Marcel Mauss gained after the creation of the Institute of Ethnology, which he founded in Paris in 1925, has often been neglected.…”

“…Should Mauss's involvement in the French Republic's experience with colonialism be seen as evidence of the association between ethnology and colonial apology -or an attempt to civilise colonialism to ensure its long-lasting presence -which has been condemned by post-colonial scholars like Talal Asad (1973)? Even though neither Mauss nor his students at the Institute of Ethnology, which he created in 1925 to institutionalise Durkheimian ethnology in Paris, contested the colonial principle that France had a civilising mission in the non-European world and that the exchanges between their societies and colonial societies were a priori useful to both the metropolis and the colonies, they did denounce the reality of colonial practices on the ground when the latter destroyed local solidarities and pre-existing modes of thought and when they failed to create the patrie plus vaste that Durkheim had imagined (Mallard 2018).…”

De-facto States and Aid Dependence: An Analysis of the Impact of Turkish Aid on the Economy of Northern Cyprus

“…Mauss defines gift-giving as common practice in primitive trade relations with an implied obligation of reciprocity. 9 An unreciprocated gift would place the recipient in an inferior position in the relationship. From this perspective, one could argue that even when aid is given as a gift, it is likely to have an embedded implication of reciprocity in terms of a hierarchical relationship or a political interest.…”