Société des Amis du Centre d'Études Sociologiques (SACES) · CC0

Mauss, nephew and collaborator of Émile Durkheim, is remembered as the father of French ethnology for The Gift (1925), which argued that no exchange between people or societies is ever truly free — every gift creates an obligation to reciprocate, binding givers and receivers together. That idea, drawn from his comparative study of potlatch and exchange rituals across cultures, reshaped how anthropologists after him understood social bonds, influencing Claude Lévi-Strauss directly. He was also a committed socialist, active in the Dreyfus affair-era left-wing press.