MAUSS INTERNATIONAL
Anti-Utilitarian Interventions in Social Sciences
Digital Journal
N°1 | “Opening Gift”
Available on Cairn : https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-mauss-international-2021-1.htm
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For four decades now, the MAUSS (Mouvement anti-utilitariste en sciences sociales) has been at the heart of the debates in social sciences in France and in French-speaking countries. While this landmass of works has found resonance and relays in Latin countries such as Italy as well as across South America, it has barely percolated across the language and cultural barrier into English – and therefore international – scholarship. For those of us who do, within the MAUSS, publish in English, how often have we been obliged to disappoint interest in this perspective because of the unfortunate unavailability of core MAUSS texts ? This is the aim of the MAUSS International journal : To bring MAUSS-branded scholarship to a truly international audience and thereby partake more forcefully in the important debates in social sciences today.
Greeted early on by scholars such as Mary Douglas, Albert O. Hirschman, Marshall Sahlins, and Annette Weiner, the MAUSS was founded in 1981 by Alain Caillé and collaborators to resist the growing encroachment of neo-classical economics and other utilitarian approaches in the social sciences. It is interesting how what is often called “French theory” continues to be at the heart of social sciences and philosophy today in English language scholarship. Yet what is intriguing from a French perspective is how this felicitous reception has excluded the critiques and debates that have occurred over the last decades within French scholarship, creating what are sometimes serious problems of interpretation and application of these theories. This continued reliance on heavyweights such as Foucault, Derrida, and Bourdieu is a sign that novel theoretical insights have failed (at least to some extent) to impose themselves within English language scholarship in the last decades. It also gives the impression that French language scholarship has dried up since these heydays and that nothing of similar or significant value has emerged since. This is not true.
The globalization of academia, meanwhile, has brought a diversity of national and regional traditions in contact with each other and has promoted certain issues as common concerns. This process is accelerated by the enmeshing of social realities as a result of these same globalizing trends. As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, the world today is inextricably woven into a whole, to the extent that a pangolin or a bat in a market in inland China (or some other cause) has the potential to initiate a snowball effect that can reach remote areas of Africa or South America in a matter of weeks. In other words, many of the pressing issues of the day are shared ones, and we are better off if we address them from a plurality of communicating standpoints rather than in isolation.
The MAUSS International wants to act as a crucible for such transnational communicative processes and act as a cultural and intellectual broker for anti-utilitarian perspectives on both sides of the linguistic divide in order to better address today’s important issues.
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Table of Contents – Mauss international n°1
Presentation
Moving Beyond : Mission Statement of the MAUSS International
Presentation of Contributions
Opening Gifts
Give it away ! The New MAUSSqueteers
David Graeber
The Dismal Science
Marshall Sahlins
Our Gift Paradigm
Mary Douglas
Lineages of the Gift
Preface to the Chinese Translation of Marcel Mauss’ The Gift
Alain Caillé
Dialogical Bridges and Anti-Utilitarian Alliances
Ilana F. Silber
Giving Care
Elena Pulcini
Heidegger and the Gift of Being : Denken is Danken
Stephen Fuchs
Of RATs, Birds and MAUSSes
Are you Ready to Extract Yourself from the Economy ?
Bruno Latour
What’s wrong with the RAT’S ? Interest, Rationality and Culture in American Sociology”
C. Calhoun & L. Wacquant
Anti-Utilitarian Theory From Durkheim to Parsons and Cultural Sociology
Jeffrey Alexander
The Bird in Hand : Rational Choice – The Default Mode of Social Theorizing
Peter Wagner
Self, Objects and Actions as Products of Reciprocity and Cooperation in Constitutive Practices
Anne Rawls
The Gift of Laughter
David Le Breton
Another Social Science is Possible
For another world history of sociology
Stéphane Dufoix
The Fate of Institutions in the Social Sciences
Christian Laval
Connecting Sociology to Moral Philosophy in the Post-Secularity Framework
Sari Hanafi
An Unfinished Dialogue
Marcel Hénaff, philosopher and anthropologist
Francesco Fistetti
Marcel Hénaff and the Heterogeneity of Gift Practices
Olli Pyythinen
Public Sociology à la française
“For a Radical Moderationism and a Maussian Ethic of Discussion”
Alain Caillé
A Literary Accomplice
“Note from the Underground”
Fyodor Dostoïevski
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The Authors
Jeffrey Alexander, Sociology, Yale University
Alain Caillé, Sociology, University of Paris Nanterre
Craig Calhoun, Sociology, Arizona State University
Mary Douglas (1921-2007), Anthropology, Princeton University
Stéphane Dufoix, Sociology, University of Paris-Nanterre
Francesco Fistetti, Philosophy, Bari University
Stephan Fuchs, Sociology, University of Virginia
David Graeber (1961-2020) Anthropology, London School of Economics
Sari Hanafi, Sociology, the American University of Beirut
Bruno Latour, Sociology, Sciences Po, Paris
Christian Laval, Sociology, University of Paris-Nanterre
David Le Breton, Sociology and Anthropology, University of Strasbourg
Olli Pyyhtinen, Sociology, University of Tampere
Elena Pulcini (1950-2021) Philosophy, University of Florence
Anne Warfield Rawls, Sociology, Bentley University.
Marshall Sahlins (1930-2021), Anthropology, Chicago University
Ilana Silber, Sociology, Bar-Ilan University
Loïc Wacquant, Sociology, University of California at Berkeley
Peter Wagner, Sociology, University of Barcelona
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MAUSS INTERNATIONAL
Anti-Utilitarian Interventions in Social Sciences
Founding Director : Alain Caillé
Director : Philippe Chanial
Editors-in-Chief : François Gauthier, Ilana F. Silber, Frédéric Vandenberghe
Editorial Advisory Board : Margaret Archer, Johann Arnason, Jeffrey Alexander, Christian Arnsperger, Luigino Bruni, Craig Calhoun, Elisabeth S. Clemens, Rebecca Colesworthy, Randall Collins, Catherine Colliot-Thélène, Raewyn Connel, Gerard Delanty, Pierpaolo Donati, François Dubet, Ezzine Abdelfattah, Nancy Fraser, Philip S. Gorski, Sari Hanafi, Michael Hudson, Eva Illouz, Zhe Ji, Hans Joas, Steve Keen, Farhad Khosrokavar, David Le Breton, Gus Massiah, Edgar Morin, Jonathan Parry, Michael Puett, Olli Pyyhtinen, Jingdong Qu, Ann W. Rawls, Richard Sennett, Don Slater, James V. Spickard, Iddo Tavory, Peter Wagner, Mingming Wang, Björn Wittrock, Viviana Zelizer
Friends of the MAUSS : Frank Adloff, Mark Anspach, Rigas Arvanitis, Geneviève Azam, Yolande Benarrosh, Gérald Berthoud, Daniel Cefaï, Genauto Carvalho de França Filho, Stéphane Dufoix, Jacques T. Godbout, Francesco Fistetti, Roberte Hamayon, Keith Hart, Marc Humbert, Ahmet Insel, Laurence Kauffman, Christian Laval, Jean-Louis Laville, Christian Lazzeri, Paulo Henrique Martins, Chantal Mouffe, Lucien Scubla, Jean-Michel Servet, François Vatin.