Mauss actually attributes a lot of importance to the subconscious. But, here too, he made an important breakthrough by removing magic from the domain of the arbitrary. Or is it itself produced by the world, by “nature”—not in the sense of a set of concepts that define what is natural, but in the sense of something that is the actual condition for conceptualization, but that also escapes it? The evolution of the concept of the person, which up to the nineteenth century was identified with rational and cognizant activities, is now reacquiring its more vast archaic meaning. As Roger Bastide (1964) has noted, the concept of praxis emerging from Marxism is still actually ethnocentric, as it limits itself to the praxis of the western man. His most famous work is The Gift (1925). “In society there are not merely ideas and rules, but also men and groups and their behaviors” (Mauss 1969: 78). In this sense, we are rediscovering a problem that is vaster than the person itself. », Everything that has been is eternal: the sea will cast it up again. And this is because the categories of the European observer of European social facts belong to the same order as the objects being studied, while the same cannot be said of the anthropologist, who constantly has to exercise “anthropological doubt”: This “anthropological doubt” does not only consist of knowing that one knows nothing, but of resolutely exposing that which one thought one knew, and indeed one’s very ignorance, to the insults and contradictions which are directed at one’s most cherished ideas and habits by those who can contradict them to the highest degree. A hypothesis on the relationship between the two groups can be derived from these essays. “It is natural for society to express itself symbolically in its customs and its institutions; normal modes of individual behaviour are, on the contrary, never symbolic in themselves: they are elements out of which a symbolic system, which can only be collective, builds itself. If the fact needs to be reconstructed in all its dimensions, bridging the gap between social and physiological facts, then it will be necessary to see how representations and social relationships condition man’s corporeal being and how the latter, in turn, makes the former possible. Why are poetry, myth, magic, at different levels and each in its own field, dominated in such impressive ways by the same themes? Evidence of this can be found in the last three essays in Sociologie et Anthropologie: “The physical effect on the individual of the idea of death suggested by the collectivity” (1926); “A category of the human mind: The notion of person, the notion of self” (1938) and especially “Techniques of the body” (1934).13. the ethnologist, unlike the philosopher, does not feel obliged to take the conditions in which his own thought operates, or the science peculiar to his society and his period, as a fundamental subject of reflection in order to extend these local findings into a form of understanding, the universality of which can never be more than hypothetical and potential. Taking the issue even further, are psychopathological phenomena exclusively individual? Firstly, as regards phenomena of shamanism, psychiatrists have ruled out that these can be considered identical to our psychopathological states, as this would be too simplistic. Rather, religion and magic should be postulated as two opposite poles with a whole range of often difficult to distinguish phenomena appearing between them. ( Log Out / 7. One just needs to think of the ways in which some societies—particularly in moments of crisis—have idealized illness as a privileged and eccentric state of being with respect to a system increasingly felt as profoundly unsatisfactory for individual needs. Mauss points out that previous systems of giving were at the heart of highly developed ancient civilizations, and that it was the whole society who gave and received as a collective, tied together by hierarchy in obligation to neighboring civilizations. “Mauss knows everything,” his students used to say. Lévi-Strauss (1987: 53) suggests that mana might be “a function of a certain way that the mind situates itself in the presence of things,” which must therefore make an appearance “whenever that mental situation is given.” Mana is one of those indeterminate terms like truc, coso, whose function is to fill in the gap between signifier and signified. One sets oneself as a problem only by considering all men, and thus all the living manifestations of man. INTRODUCTION THE GIFT, AND ESPECIALLY THE OBLIGATION TO RETURN IT Epigraph Below we give a few stanzas from the Havamal, one of the old poems of the Scandinavian Edda.