Life as Drama - About MAUSS

http://jcs.sagepub.com/Journal of Classical Sociology

http://jcs.sagepub.com/content/14/1/78The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/1468795X13494720

2014 14: 78Journal of Classical SociologyWendy James

Human life as drama: A Maussian insight

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Journal of Classical SociologyAdditional services and information for

http://jcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://jcs.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

http://jcs.sagepub.com/content/14/1/78.refs.htmlCitations:

What is This?

- Jan 28, 2014Version of Record >>

at PONTIFICIA UNIV CATOLICA on April 26, 2014jcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from at PONTIFICIA UNIV CATOLICA on April 26, 2014jcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://jcs.sagepub.com/

http://jcs.sagepub.com/content/14/1/78

http://www.sagepublications.com

http://jcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

http://jcs.sagepub.com/subscriptions

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

http://jcs.sagepub.com/content/14/1/78.refs.html

http://jcs.sagepub.com/content/14/1/78.full.pdf

http://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtml



Journal of Classical Sociology2014, Vol. 14(1) 78 –90© The Author(s) 2013

Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1468795X13494720jcs.sagepub.com

494720 JCS14110.1177/1468795X13494720Journal of Classical SociologyJames2013

Corresponding author:Wendy James, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford, and Fellow of St. Cross College. Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, 51 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PE, UK. Email: [email protected]

Human life as drama: A Maussian insight

Wendy JamesUniversity of Oxford, UK

AbstractRecent years have seen the beginning of new conversations between the ‘natural’ and ‘socio-cultural’ sides of the human sciences and the story of our long-term history as a species. Both sociology and the biological sciences, since the mid-twentieth century, have sought to avoid rigid models of individual or collective behaviour and to develop more flexible approaches. A concept finding favour today among very different scholars is ‘sociality’. It is well established in literary English (and French), but has only recently become a technical concept. Mauss was deeply interested in long-term history and in connections with our evolutionary past as it was then understood. He envisaged social life often as a scene in movement, a potentially creative experience of living encounters. He did not use the term ‘sociality’, but he did make frequent reference to the image of ‘drama’, explicitly and implicitly through the way he re-presented ethnographic evidence. This article argues that his insights anticipated our re-thinking of the ‘nature’ of social life today.

KeywordsArt, ceremony, dance, drama, games, Mauss, social brain theory, sociality

Mauss’s evocations of the drama

We might ask ourselves what we normally understand by ‘drama’ or the significance of ‘dramatic’ action. We mostly think not of an individual in isolation “even if we have kept a snapshot, curl of hair or other treasured memento”, but of persons in relation to each other – and, moreover, not just a pair of self and other, but persons in a wider setting; of ‘characters’, whether tangible or imagined. Furthermore, the situation in which they act is not simply one of the immediate present. It may be thought of as a plot, displaced from the immediacy of personal encounter, shaped by memories of the past or as a potential scenario, imagined far from the here and now, geographically or in the future. The ‘char-acters’ may be representations not of actual persons, but of imagined or promised

Article

at PONTIFICIA UNIV CATOLICA on April 26, 2014jcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from


James 79

persons, or even non-persons with assumed agency, such as trees, thunderstorms, or gods. The scenario may involve actual language, spoken or written, as in a play or ritual, but it will be capable of non-linguistic representation or enactment too, as in visual art, bodily gesture, musical performance, games, and so on. And while a drama relates to imagined settings, distant in time and space, it may provide an indirect commentary on present life – sometimes instructive, sometimes ironic. Its ‘symbolic codes’ are not pri-marily devoted to communication between individuals of a utilitarian or directly respon-sive kind, as we presume chimpanzees’ are. ‘Dramatic’ actions depend on collectively understood rhythms, not only of language and musical exchange, but also the give and take of social relations: promises or contracts as they must exist over time, the making and circulation of material goods, conduct in the workplace, the sports arena, and the family home. They are concerned with how things ought to be, or might have been, or could be, ‘if only’; and occasionally they are of such emotional impact that they can change our shared sense of reality, our relation to others or to the gods, and our course of present action.

In his little-known Manual of Ethnography (2007 [1947]), we find Mauss drawing attention to the ‘dramatic’ aspect of a wide array of phenomena that the field observer should note. Many games are imitations of useful activities; drama is always mimicry, as with children’s games that treat live animals cruelly as toys; games and rituals have much in common and relate to each other; dance is close to play and is at the ‘origin of all the arts’; ‘The Australians have an important artistic life; they have operas – the corroborees, which include actors, sets, poetry, drama’ (2007 [1947]: 72–74). ‘The first plastic art is that of the individual who works on his or her body: dance, gait, rhythm of the gestures, etc.’; ‘We must not forget also the rhythmic quality of drawing, which is a rhythm of markings’ (2007 [1947]: 75). More broadly, we read that ‘[d]rama is nearly always musi-cal, danced and pervaded by poetry; finally, very generally, it implies efforts at individual adornment, at architecture and painting’; ‘The forms of social life are in part common to musical art and the musical arts: rhetoric, mythology and theatre penetrate the whole life of a society’; ‘… man is a rhythmic animal. Among rhythmic animals, which are rare, we can cite the dancing bird, a bird from Australia which gives its dance a rhythm and a form’ (2007 [1947]: 84). There is a close connection also with mime; ballet is a modern survival, but mute: ‘In the societies that concern us, ballet corresponds rather to an opera that is danced and sung; mimicry, which is very expressive, is always understood (sym-bolically or not) by the spectators, who take part in the drama’ (2007 [1947]: 85).

Under the subheading ‘Drama’ itself, we read that it ‘exists everywhere’; there is evidence of the masquerade from as early as the Middle Palaeolithic:

The high point of dramatic art is to be found in religion; drama presents a large component of religion. … it corresponds to the search for another world, in which people have a degree of belief. … everyone participates in the drama.

In relation to puppets, Mauss makes the observation that ‘[A]lmost everywhere, people have come to objectify to themselves their own dramas.’ And of responses to drama, he points to feelings of exaltation, laughter, and relaxation. Of the latter reaction, he notes that this is due to



80 Journal of Classical Sociology 14(1)

… a series of expectations that have transported you elsewhere, into a setting which is not your own, one where even if you participate in the action, you know that it is in a different mode from the one in which you would participate in the same action in ordinary life.

(2007 [1947]: 89)

This imaginative distance (in my words) is a part of our relation to literature too: con-sider, for example, how in a legal hearing, ‘the adventure of the spider or of the hyena can serve as a legal precedent’. ‘As soon as an effort is made to speak well and not sim-ply to speak, there exists a literary effort’ (2007 [1947]: 91).

Through such detailed and numerous remarks made by Mauss (quite apart from his major ethnographic and theoretical essays) we can capture something of the essence of his vision of what today might be called ‘sociality’. It is certainly a vision of human life, despite the reference to an Australian dancing bird: the birds, of course, do not invent new styles of dancing, they do not make what he calls a ‘literary effort’ in their songs, and they do not laugh at situations removed from the immediate present as we do. The biologists point to endorphins – hormones which cause feelings of relaxation and warmth towards others by circulating through the brain; but what provokes the activity of these hormones? Large gatherings may be a direct stimulus and thus lead to the heightened emotional experience dubbed by Durkheim ‘effervescence’; but what are such gatherings, beyond simply being crowds? They are sites for the performance of spontaneous drama; of representational play, sound, and action which relate to worlds removed from the immediate present, whether to the presence of the gods or to some political utopia. The hormones themselves we share with the other vertebrate animals; but the promise of overturning the present and instituting other worlds is a stimulant peculiarly our own.

Much of Mauss’s writing remains in relatively informal language, even in note form. But as the above references indicate, some of the underlying presumptions of his thought are evident even through the rough drafting. I believe that sharp notes and observations of the kind I have picked out here from the Manual help illuminate the more polished formulations and analyses of social life for which he is well known. The social life of the Alaskan Eskimos is presented and analysed by Mauss and Beuchat (1979 [1904–1905]) in the very form of seasonal theatre against the background of summer and winter swings in climate and population density. The essay with Hubert on Sacrifice (Mauss and Hubert, 1964 [1899]) is explicitly structured as an episode of dramatic action, as the human, worldly domain gradually approaches that of the sacred, through the medium of an ani-mal or substance to be sacrificed. The theme of social drama is sustained throughout Mauss’s famous essay on The Gift (1990 [1925]), where it brings to life embodied, staged, and artistically elaborate exchanges such as the potlatch in vivid ways. I do not need to emphasize for present readers how extraordinarily fertile this work is; it is not simply a sketch of how people managed in those traditional days before the invention of money and the emergence of ‘the economy’ as a thing in itself (see articles in this issue: Chevalier, 2014; Graeber, 2014; Hart, 2014; Hyland, 2014).

To reinforce the point, and the relevance of this discussion to the long-term history of human group living, we should refer to Mauss’s late essay on the category of the person (1985 [1938]). Here it is clear that dramatic representations of imaginative scenarios (such



James 81

as masquerades) were the key means whereby communities created an understanding of social continuity and a vision of their wholeness over time; this wholeness lay elsewhere than the pragmatic interactions of biological individuals. Indeed an argument could be made for something similar in our modern life, perhaps through our imagination of lin-guistic, class, religious, or national entities within which we place ourselves and our neighbours. As a reminder, Mauss emphasizes many times the relational character of ‘per-sons’. The Kwakiutl

… installed in their settlements a whole social and religious system where in a vast exchange of rights, goods, services, property, dances, ceremonies, privileges and ranks, persons as well as groups give satisfaction to one another. We see very clearly how, from classes and clans, ‘human persons’ adjust to one another and how, from these, the gestures of the actors in a drama fit together. Here all the actors are theoretically the sum total of all free men.

(1985 [1938]: 7)

The ‘actors’, however, carry the names of categorical representatives of clans, chiefs and ancestors who are ‘reincarnated in their rightful successors’ and ‘live again in the bodies of those who bear their names’ – persons are here acting only ‘in their titular capacity’ (1985 [1938]: 8). In the ‘temporary masquerades’ of Australia,

… men fashion for themselves a superimposed ‘personality’, a true one in the case of ritual, a feigned one in the case of play-acting. Yet … there is only a difference of degree, and none in function. In both cases all has ended in the enraptured representation of the ancestor. … A whole immense group of societies have arrived at the notion of ‘role’, of the role played by the individual in sacred dramas, just as he plays a role in family life.

(1985 [1938]: 12)

It is worth noting that Mauss’s observations on the concept of the ‘self’ include the point that the notion itself has a history. How has it evolved? The question is ‘not the sense of “self” [moi] – but the concept that men in different ages have formed of it?’ (1985 [1938]: 3).

Our ‘selves’ as part of nature

In trying to specify what lies at the heart of the lives we share with our fellows, we human beings tend to contrast ourselves with the world of animals. In the current dis-course of science, as in many of the myths and cosmologies of old, this is a world from which we have become at least partially separated. This theme informed the evolutionary approach of both Durkheim and Mauss to the nature of social life; but the difference between us and our closest cousins, once apparently obvious, has come to be seen anew in subtle and sophisticated ways. On the one hand, there have been enormous advances in probing the complex history of our species and the genetic roots of our current human behaviour; and, on the other, we now have intimate and beautiful studies of animal life, revealing pretty well all creatures to be more intelligent and subtly communicative than we had ever realized, in some cases even with ourselves. Good-quality filming has had a




lot of influence here on popular sensibility, seductively undermining our sense of domin-ion and making us aware of our fragile position within the story of evolution.

At the same time, this general shift towards seeing ourselves as part of nature has spawned some narrow views about interpreting human behaviour ‘scientifically’. In their haste to demonstrate the importance of genetics in particular, some of the so-called ‘neo-Darwinists’ have applied their current theories to human behaviour, with absurd results. Some recent work in human evolution completely by-passes the historicity of social forms and culturally shaped agency, giving simple ‘genetic’ explanations for all sorts of phenomena we might have thought more complex, such as aggression, male/female qualities, co-operation with kin, suicidal tendencies – even altruism and religion. There are echoes here from earlier efforts to harness the rationality of evolutionary success to economism, utilitarianism, socio-cultural functionalism, and so on, of which we have, quite rightly, become wary.

In a piece in The Observer entitled ‘Science Is Just One Gene Away From Defeating Religion’, Colin Blakemore (2009) asked: ‘When we understand how our brains gener-ate religious ideas, and what the Darwinian adaptive value of such brain processes is, what will be left for religion?’ He argued that our feelings of freedom, the personal expe-riences and intentions on which we base our assumptions of similar consciousness in others, are based on a ‘false model’. Such feelings and intentions are increasingly seen by scientists as ‘an illusory commentary on what our brains have already decided to do’. But are we to ‘explain’, or more bluntly to ‘dismiss’, the whole of human history so easily – along with those (extraordinarily diverse) artistic and religious phenomena which have been so central to it? Blakemore failed to note the interactive, social, bodily character of religious practice – even individual prayer (compare Mauss, 2003 [1909]) – let alone its entanglement with innovations in music, art, language, architecture, medi-cine, discipline, diet, work, politics, and the rest. Is the whole of this history merely the outcome of one or more ‘false models’ of ourselves and others, leaving religion as a misconception ‘no more significant than a visual illusion’ (Blakemore, 2009)? For that matter, where does it leave the interpretations of scientists? Experiments surely, along with theory, do not stand independently of human ‘symbolic’ interaction and intention.

‘False models’ are worth thinking about for a moment. Do we not ‘act’, consciously or unconsciously, at some distance from our ‘selves’ – or at least from a good part of our-selves – most of the time? In her study of Shakespearean theatre, Kirsten Hastrup (2004) has demonstrated the wide relevance of professional actors’ perspectives on both perfor-mance and ‘ordinary life’. What would social life be like if we all operated on the basis of ‘true’ pictures of ourselves and others (presumably according to a transparent perception of how our genes are controlling our own brains)? There would be no metaphors, no role-playing, no collusive agreements over the rules of the game, no myths, no uncertain spec-ulations over trust, love, or security. But the capacity for sharing the imagination of such possibilities underlies all social life; ‘false models’ are what Homo sapiens is all about.

The emergent concept of ‘sociality’

Marilyn Strathern, in turning her back on ‘society’ as an assemblage of otherwise inde-pendent ‘individuals’, was one of the key social anthropologists to develop a new, strong



James 83

and positive use of ‘sociality’, thereby conveying better how the consciousness of persons is shaped in the context of their extending expectations of specific social networks and interactions. Rather than imagining ‘a “nature” upon which society and culture work to impose their rules and classifications … a Melanesian model of the person would already incorporate the fact of connection or relation’ (1988: 92-3). Strathern includes gender dif-ferentiation as fully part of the ‘sociality’ she wishes to highlight, and distinguishes this term explicitly from the deceptively similar ‘sociability’ in the sense of pleasant friendli-ness between whomsoever. She provides a clear explanation of her choice here among a number of other efforts by fellow anthropologists to seek more subtle ways of writing about the social forms of life which make us what we are and in which we participate (1988: 93–97, 357–358 fn. 20). The distinction between ‘sociality’ and similar terms actu-ally has a very long history, going back to its Latin beginnings, where it had reference to one’s role in public forms of association. We have a clear instance of its use by Frances Hutcheson in his inaugural oration as a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow in 1730, when he proclaimed (his words here translated from the spoken Latin):

As we enter on our view of human nature … we will discuss those parts of the human mind which make us sociable (sociabilis). Though many recent writers have taken the position that sociability (sociabilitas) is the source of nearly all our duties, they do not seem to have sufficiently addressed the general question of what those things are which are properly to be called natural to man, or the particular question of what the sociality (socialitas) of our nature consists in, or, finally, with what part of our nature we are rendered apt and inclined to society, whether it be society without human government or civil society.

What he had in mind was obviously much more than the immediate experience of chance encounters with others in the daily round. Even his title, ‘On the Natural Sociability of Mankind’ in this translation, used the term socialitate in its original Latin. Here, ‘society’ was to be found through the imagination, through stories or faraway places, as well as in vicinity. Hutcheson continued:

Nor is this concern for the condition of others only seen when they are present and before our external senses (in which case perhaps powerful reactions or emotions are visible) but whenever, in a quiet moment, we call up an image of others by reading histories or the narratives of travelers, or even when from the stories of drama we receive a certain image of human nature, even in the remotest nations or centuries where no advantage of our own is involved, with what heartfelt concern do we follow the fortunes of entire countries or honorable individuals?

(Hutcheson, 2006 [1730])

The concept has stimulated a range of thinkers, not all perhaps as sharp as Hutcheson; a substantial book of 1927 reflects philosophically (though in a somewhat ‘churchy’ way) on Sociality: The Art of Living Together, recommending to all a general, morally benign mode of living (Lee, 1927). The term is put to fruitful effect in some of the contributions to a collection of studies reflecting on Societies at Peace (Howell and Willis, 1989). In the second part of this volume, entitled ‘Sociality as Innate Capacity’, the play of children is highlighted by child psychologists; they follow Bateson and others in raising children’s




interactive play from a status of triviality to that of the ‘source and essence of everything human’ (Trevarthen and Logotheti, 1989: 180). Michael Carrithers (1989) argues that sociality, rather than aggression, is the ‘key human trait’. Anthropologists linked with Cambridge University have committed themselves to building on this start, specifically devoting a website to developing ‘sociality’ as a focus of a new research track (http://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/research/research-tracks/sociality/), and bringing out an edited volume demonstrating the analytical power of the concept (Long and Moore, 2012). This collection takes the debates around sociality boldly forward, avoiding any sense of cosi-ness and explicitly discussing violence in several chapters; extending its vision to the world of ‘virtual’ interactions; and away from purely human interactions to the zone where sociality overlaps the boundary between animals and human beings.

On the science side, the term is well established among animal behaviourists and evolutionary scientists. This is not the place for me to comment on some of the stronger arguments for ‘sociality’ being, as it were, exactly the same phenomenon even as between the other primates and ourselves. But there are increasingly nuanced approaches in the field, and in my view they point to a place where new conversations can begin. The notion of sociality is emerging on both biological and socio-cultural sides of anthropol-ogy as a potentially fruitful meeting point, given that interest on both sides is shifting away from fixed forms towards unfolding processes, subtleties in the experience of col-lective life, and change over time.

‘Lucy to Language’ and the ‘social brain’ idea

I would like to mention a particular area of work in the evolutionary field which places a new and strong emphasis on the social, in a way that I believe Mauss would have under-stood and approved of. This is the body of conceptual and empirical work stimulated by what has become known as the ‘social brain’ theory of primate evolution. To sum this up in one sentence: a link between growing brain size – more particularly the capacity of the neo-cortex or frontal lobes – and the size of population groups has been of selective advantage in human evolution. As group size increases, individuals have to monitor each other with more sophistication if the group is not to fall apart; in one formulation, ‘grooming’ is replaced by ‘gossip’, with consequences for the development of language. No other primate has settled on the round number of 150 as an optimum group size for survival, a figure apparently reached by our fairly late ancestors that is still characteristic of modern hunter-gatherers and arguably emerges in the friendship networks of modern industrial society. Robin Dunbar sums up how this theory has guided much current research in his very readable introduction, The Human Story (2004).

We are certainly more open today than formerly to recognizing the presence of ‘self-awareness’ and ‘social’ responsiveness among the higher animals. But we should not lose sight of the qualitative gap. Hilary Callan (1970) noted early on the deceptive slip-page of language between anthropology and animal studies which can obscure what we are trying to understand. Starting from the ability of some of the higher primates to make correct assumptions about the intentions of other individuals present or not too far away and even to deceive them deliberately, Dunbar and his colleagues have identified the beginnings of a ‘theory of mind’. Dunbar speaks of up to five ‘levels of intentionality’,



James 85

which find their way into our own stories and other imaginative work (as well as the political manoeuvrings of everyday life). Thus Shakespeare intended (level 1) that his audience realize (2) that Othello believed (3) that his servant Iago was being honest when he claimed to know (4) that his beloved Desdemona loved (5) Cassio (Dunbar, 2004: 162). Sixth-order intentionality was apparently beyond most of Dunbar’s student volun-teer subjects! Yet human beings attribute intentions all the time to a complicated range of characters in various overlapping settings. Of course, any script is easier to follow if ‘embodied’: that is, acted out on a stage with costumes, scenery, music, and essential material props such as Desdemona’s handkerchief. By allowing for the growth of a sphere accommodating such sophisticated communicative interaction, including an appreciation of ‘virtual’ scenarios, the ‘social brain’ approach is something anthropolo-gists can engage with.

The recent centenary project of the British Academy, ‘From Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain’, co-directed by Robin Dunbar with two archaeologists, Clive Gamble and John Gowlett, included much besides the workings of the brain as such. Linked studies included new research dealing with material culture and its manu-facture, geographical patterns of its spread and exchange, and the organization of human groupings in space and time. Their findings have already had wide influence in the human sciences generally. For a representative selection of reports already published, see Social Brain, Distributed Mind (Dunbar et al., 2010). The term ‘sociality’ is an emergent feature of this work, being employed by several contributors and appearing twice in its subheadings (Part II: ‘The Nature of the Network: The Bonds of Sociality’; Part III: ‘Evolving Bonds of Sociality’ – one chapter deals with the emergence of ‘relational-based forms of social organization: a major transition in the evolution of Homo sapi-ens’). In their introduction, the editors emphasize their search for continuities rather than a sharp break between the animal and the human; between the very earliest hominin times and the emergence of ourselves as a distinct species.

Let me offer a sample of the insights a social anthropologist or sociologist might find in this new archaeology. When it comes to early human inventions, John Gowlett’s work on human control of fire goes far beyond the older quest for technical advance as such. Both the use of wild fire and the making of domestic fire have enormous implications for the physical and spatial setting of human activity – especially enhancing home bases with hearths. Fire has significance beyond keeping warm in colder climates: it makes cooking possible, and with it an improved diet; it marks out social space, no doubt rein-forcing a pattern of return visits to central places and thus the development of ‘shared’ historical memory and specification of relations between local groups. Evening gather-ings around the hearth provide light as well as warmth, thus extending activities over the daily time-cycle. The hearth becomes the focus of a space and time for music and dance, song, language and story-telling, alongside negotiation of arrangements over mating/marriage, childcare, daily work; in short the development of what we can happily call sociality (Gowlett, 2010). The dead and absent friends in distant places can here be imag-ined, along perhaps with ‘planning’ larger seasonal festivals that could regularly bring together those who spend a lot of time dispersed. Here is a scenario corresponding to Durkheim’s vision of a gathering able to grasp a social whole both intellectually and emotionally, one larger than the spaces and times of everyday practical existence. Here




we can see the conjunction of Durkheim’s ‘effervescence’ with the biologists’ identifica-tion of those endorphins rushing to the brain, stimulating emotions and social bonding as they do so.

Clive Gamble approaches the interpretation of early material culture through social landscapes, as distinct from the older quest for ‘inventions’ as evidence of intellectual progress. His work demonstrates how artefacts, even simple hand-axes or the by-prod-ucts of their manufacture, can be distributed over a wide area, in some cases reflecting human movement, and in others indicating collaboration (we might suggest even ‘divi-sion of labour’) and intentional planning. Symbolic uses, including gendered symbols, and the social transfer of material artefacts (perhaps as gifts) are now considered seri-ously by archaeologists in a way that was once rare. Material inventiveness and the spread of fashions in production are linked with metaphorical understandings in fresh and stimulating ways. For example, Gamble has drawn attention to the special impor-tance in early human history of containers as against sticks or spears or other pointed tools: they can be used to carry water, food, or babies, thus enhancing mobility. Boats, which must have been part of global colonization by Homo sapiens some 60,000 years ago, are a dramatic example. Houses may be seen as ‘containers’, not only literally but metaphorically as groups of ‘related’ people; a woman’s body may be seen as a container for her baby; graves are containers for the dead. Perhaps one container inside another provides a tangible model for nested ‘categories’ within a wider scheme, such as a sys-tem of kinship and marriage (Allen et al., 2008). The material world also offers stimulus for creativity in that a large proportion of human activity upon it takes the form of break-ing or separation, followed by the recombining of parts into new forms with new uses – as even with the earliest hand-axes (Gamble, 2007). Here are the elementary forms of analysis and synthesis. We do not need, in other words, to wait for the age of cave-paintings (circa 40,000 years ago) or even the findings of beads and coded markings at Blombos Cave (circa 80,000 years ago) to admit the presence of ‘art’ and ‘science’. There is even evidence that early humans (long before Homo sapiens emerged) were using red ochre, albeit for purposes unknown – though we could guess this had some-thing to do with ‘dramatic’ action – 200,000 years ago or more (Watts, 2009).

In my own work I have emphasized the centrality of game-playing in all projects of social life: the locally understood rules behind bodily and intellectual turn-taking, the reciprocities involved in productive tasks, the way we work together on new kinds of spatial form and temporal rhythm, as kinds of sociality (James, 2003, 2007). These may have their analogues in the world of the animals, but what makes human varieties differ-ent is their malleability – their multiple coexistence in the life of an individual, their overlapping presence in communities, and their tendency to spread and be re-invented. The games we play can also very often be described as reference points in themselves and judged with reference to both political morality and aesthetic criteria.

Marcel Mauss, we could say, did not depend too much on the formulae which have come to stand for the teachings of Durkheim’s school – the opposition of society and the individual, for example, or a focus on ‘social facts’ tout court. Mauss’s approach is explicitly more fluid. Even the way a person’s body moves is ‘social’ (1979b [1935]), along with the way that money moves around (1990 [1925]); or how the whole pattern of collective life shifts between, say, the Arctic summer and winter for the Eskimos (Mauss



James 87

and Beuchat, 1979 [1904–1905]). Moreover, human beings have a general capacity to live and interact in plural worlds. There may be different kinds of language, music, or art in our social interactions, even with the same people over time; certainly many spiritual interventions and evocations in our life-experiences together; shifting, plural moralities in our economic transactions and political agreements; attempts to recapture memories and images of other times, other places, civilizations, and religious ideas. Our encounters often seem to mimic the way we might tentatively enter a game, and the outcome – whether on a local domestic scale or following the meetings of top bankers and heads of state – inevitably takes on the air of a drama, not least in the retelling.

Conclusion

Mauss himself was explicitly concerned with the long-term story of our humanity. Mike Gane (2005: x) has claimed with justification that Mauss’s contribution within the broader field of Durkheimian sociology became increasingly associated with anthropol-ogy, although neither wished to separate the two. He notes ‘their work was dominated by questions of the nature of the elemental forms of social and cultural structure’; and again,

… the overall strategy of the Durkheimians is clear: it is to establish a new type of comparative and evolutionary sociology that would avoid the errors of Comte’s positivist sociology, on the one hand, and all the variations of individualistic methodologies on the other.

(2005: xi)

Morphology (we might assume that our cousins the other primates share something of the kind) was to be distinguished from representations (of a kind they presumably could be said not to share) (2005: xv). Mauss’s commitment was to the elucidation of some fundamental questions underlying what we might label the social life of our species, Homo sapiens. Consider the following points he made in an address to psychologists in 1924:

I know that here I am touching on the difficult question of animal societies. The latter will, I hope, one day attract the attention of young scientists who will no doubt make new advances in this subject. … Human societies are, by nature, animal societies, and all the traits of the latter are also found in them. But there are other traits which distinguish them to the point of their constituting a new order.

(1979a [1924]: 5–6)

In animal societies, he claimed, we do not find ‘general wills or the pressure of the con-sciousness of the ones on the consciousness of the others, communications of ideas, languages, practical and aesthetic arts, groupings and religions’; but it is these character-istics of our life in common ‘that make us not only social man, but even man as such. … psychology is not just the psychology of men, whereas sociology is rigorously human’ (1979a [1924]: 6).




Mauss’s own studies suggest that he would have been sympathetic to the way that evolutionary scientists today seek elements of ‘sociality’ in early human history. As Gane notes, Mauss maintained a distinction between his political writings, on the one hand, very much concerned with modern society and its problems, and his more purely aca-demic work, on the other, which ‘focused precisely on anthropological themes’ (2005: xix). Bruno Karsenti has argued that in ‘conjuring up’ the figure of l’homme total, l’individu complet, or literally l’homme tout entier, Mauss’s work reveals its strategic aim: ‘… to take his own sociological heritage and to reorient it, to weave new relation-ships between sociology, biology, psychology, history, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, and to open up anthropology in this new space’ (1998: 73; see also 1997).

The piece on ‘Sociology’ that Mauss wrote with Fauconnet (2005 [1901]) contains a remarkable anticipation of the ‘social brain’ theory of human evolution. One characteris-tic of all human groups, they say,

… is that they are formed by a plurality of individual conscious minds, acting and reacting upon one another. By the presence of these actions and reactions, these interactions, one recognises societies. … Are there phenomena which are what they are because the group is what it is?

(2005 [1901]: 5, emphasis in original)

Only on this condition, they suggest, will there be a sociology rightly so called, ‘for then there will be a life of society as distinct from that led by the individuals or, rather, distinct from the life they would lead if they lived in isolation’. Society serves as ‘a theatre’ for the performance of individual organic and psychological functions (2005 [1901]: 5). There are ways of thinking and acting which ‘the group imposes’ and from which society ‘does not tolerate any exemption’ (2005 [1901]: 9). We are reminded here of Dunbar’s search for the ways in which ‘free-riders’ could have been controlled in early human groups (2004).

Mauss and Fauconnet explicitly raise evolutionary questions of a kind being consid-ered afresh by today’s human scientists. Thus, they reflect on social aggregations without institutions: they are either unstable and ephemeral, like crowds,

… or else those which are in the process of formation. We may say of both that they are still not societies as such, but only societies in the process of becoming, with this difference: some of them are destined to reach the end-point of their development and to achieve their social nature, whereas others disappear before arriving at their definitive constitution. At this point we are on the boundaries which separate the social field from lower fields. The phenomena in question are on the way to becoming social but are not yet social. … Sociology, of course, should not reject all interest in them.

(Mauss and Fauconnet, 2005 [1901]: 11)

In their conclusion, Mauss and Fauconnet emphasize that sociology must encompass evidence both from ethnography (then seen as the study of contemporary ‘savage’ peo-ples) and from the history of ‘barbarous’ or ‘civilized’ nations; and it must incorporate under its definitions the ‘most elementary as well as the most evolved phenomena’ (2005



James 89

[1901]: 28). This was as wide a scope as could be claimed for the fundamental aims of a liberal anthropology at that time. Today, inspired by work in biology and evolutionary psychology, especially on the ‘social brain’ theory, we can extend the scope of our imagined common humanity much further back in history, while retaining a Maussian view of the theatrical arenas where we have to find our ‘selves’ in order to interact effec-tively with others.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

References

Allen NJ, Callan C, Dunbar R, and James W (eds) (2008) Early Human Kinship: From Sex to Social Reproduction. Oxford/Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Blakemore C (2009) Science is just one gene away from defeating religion. The Observer, 22 February 2009, p. 31.

Callan H (1970) Ethology and Society: Towards an Anthropological View. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Carrithers M (1989) Sociality, not aggression, is the key human trait. In: Howell S and Willis R (eds) Societies at Peace: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Routledge, 187–209.

Chevalier S (2014) Turning commodities into presents. Journal of Classical Sociology 14(1): 54–64.Dunbar R (2004) The Human Story: A New History of Mankind’s Evolution. London: Faber &

Faber.Dunbar R, Gamble C, and Gowlett J (2010) Social Brain: Distributed Mind. (Proceedings of the

British Academy 158.) Oxford: Oxford University Press.Gamble C (2007) Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Gane M (2005) Introduction. In: Mauss M and Fauconnet P, The Nature of Sociology: Two Essays,

trans. Jeffrey W. Oxford/New York: Berghahn/Durkheim Press, ix–xxii.Gowlett J (2010) Firing up the social brain. In: Dunbar R, Gamble C, and Gowlett J (eds) Social

Brain: Distributed Mind. (Proceedings of the British Academy 158.) Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 341–366.

Graeber D (2014) On the moral grounds of economic relations: A Maussian approach. Journal of Classical Sociology 14(1): 65–77.

Hart K (2014) Marcel Mauss’s economic vision, 1920–1925: Anthropology, politics, journalism. Journal of Classical Sociology 14(1): 34–44.

Hastrup K (2004) Studying Action: Anthropology in the Company of Shakespeare. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.

Howell S and Willis R (eds) (1989) Societies at Peace: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Routledge.

Hutcheson F (2006 [1730]) De Naturali Hominum Socialitate. Oratio Inauguralis. Glasgow: The University Press. Inaugural Oration included in Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociabil-ity of Mankind, eds Moore J and Silverthorne M, trans. Silverthorne M. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Available at: http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1723&chapter=80693&layout=html&Itemid=27 (accessed 28 June 2013).

Hyland R (2014) Gift and danger. Journal of Classical Sociology 14(1): 45–53.James W (2003) The Ceremonial Animal: A New Portrait of Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press.


http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1723&chapter=80693&layout=html&Itemid=27



James W (2007) Choreography and ceremony: The artful side of action. Human Affairs: A Postdis-ciplinary Journal for Humanities & Social Sciences 17(2): 126–137.

Karsenti B (1997) L’homme total: sociologie, anthropologie et philosophie chez Marcel Mauss. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Karsenti B (1998) The Maussian shift: A second foundation for sociology in France? In: James W and Allen NJ (eds) Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute. New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 71–82.

Lee A (1927) Sociality: The Art of Living Together. London: Holborn Publishing House.Long N and Moore H (eds) (2012) Sociality: New Directions. Oxford/New York: Berghahn.Mauss M (1979a [1924]) Real and practical relations between psychology and sociology. In: Soci-

ology and Psychology: Essays by Marcel Mauss, trans. Brewster B. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1–33.

Mauss M (1979b [1935]) Body techniques. In: Sociology and Psychology: Essays by Marcel Mauss, trans. Brewster B. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 97–123.

Mauss M (1985 [1938]) A category of the human mind: The notion of person; the notion of self (trans. Halls WD). In: Carrithers M, Collins S, and Lukes S (eds) The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–25.

Mauss M (1990 [1925]) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Halls WD. London: Routledge.

Mauss M (2003 [1909]) On Prayer, ed. Pickering WSF, trans. Leslie S. Oxford/New York: Berghahn/Durkheim Press.

Mauss M (2007 [1947]) Manual of Ethnography, ed. Allen NJ, trans. Lussier D. Oxford/New York: Berghahn/Durkheim Press.

Mauss M and Beuchat H (1979 [1904–1905]) Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social Morphology, trans. Fox JJ. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Mauss M and Fauconnet P (2005 [1901]) Sociology. In: The Nature of Sociology: Two Essays, trans. Jeffrey W. Oxford/New York: Berghahn/Durkheim Press, 1–30.

Mauss M and Hubert H (1964 [1899]) Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, trans. Halls WD. Lon-don: Cohen & West.

Strathern M (1988) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley/London: University of California Press.

Trevarthen C and Logotheti K (1989) Child in society, and society in children: The nature of basic trust. In: Howell S and Willis R (eds) Societies at Peace: Anthropological Perspectives. Lon-don: Routledge, 165–186.

Watts I (2009) Red ochre, body painting, and language: Interpreting the Blombos ochre. In: Botha R and Knight C (eds) The Cradle of Language. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 62–92.

Author biography

Wendy James’s primary ethnographic research has been in Northeastern Africa; she taught in Khartoum University and in Scandinavia before returning to Oxford. In addition to her African research, she has published on aspects of theory in anthropology and the history of the discipline. Relevant publications include Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute (Berghahn, 1998; ed. with N.J. Allen); The Ceremonial Animal: A New Portrait of Anthropology (Oxford University Press, 2003); The Philosophy of Enchantment: Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism and Anthropology, by R.G. Collingwood (Clarendon Press, 2005; ed. with D. Boucher and P. Smallwood); and Early Human Kinship: From Sex to Social Reproduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008; ed. with N.J. Allen, H. Callan, and R. Dunbar).



Life as Drama - About MAUSS

Documents

Transcript of Life as Drama - About MAUSS