Marcel Mauss

(1872 - 1950)

Although his father was a textile merchant, the young Marcel Mauss followed his uncle Émile Durkheim, an eminent sociologist at the University of Bordeaux, into an academic career. A professor of primitive religion and cofounder of the Institute of Ethnology at the University of Paris, Mauss never conducted his own fieldwork; instead he devoted himself to critiquing the culturally specific ethnographies of contemporary scholars, such as the Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski.