The Gift of The Nation: Marcel Mauss and the Intersocial Turn of Sociology. Issue 1 (1st December 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Callegaro, Francesco
• Is Part Of: Durkheimian studies. Volume 25:Issue 1(2021)
• Page Start: 49
• Page End: 77
• Publication Date: 2021-12-01
• Subjects: gift -- intersocial -- Marcel Mauss -- nationalism -- socialism -- society; Durkheimian school of sociology -- Periodicals; Periodicals; 301
• DOI: 10.3167/ds.2021.250103
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1752-2307

Abstract

Abstract: In order to question the modernist common sense of mainstream sociology, epitomised today by the charge of methodological nationalism, this article offers an overall reading of Marcel Mauss's The Nation . Conceived during the Great War and written mainly in 1920, Mauss's work radically re-examined both the nation and nationalism from a regenerated sociological viewpoint centered on the relations between societies. Distinguishing between partial relations of exchange and total relations of encounter, Mauss came to discover the gift as a total social fact, seeing it as the traditional unconscious spring of the federative dynamics that had to be reactivated in Europe to associate its nations in a great 'Inter-nation' and avoid the risk of a new total war. The Nation, by reviving the original ambition of Émile Durkheim's sociology to be a way rethinking and reshaping the concepts and institutions of modernity, helps us explore the contradictions and pathologies involved in the concept and history of the nation, in a situation currently marked by the return of nationalism and the quest for a social Europe.