The gift as colonial ideology? Marcel Mauss and the solidarist colonial policy in the interwar era
| Author | Grégoire Mallard |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088217751515 |
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088217751515
Journal of International Political Theory
2018, Vol. 14(2) 183 –202
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088217751515
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The gift as colonial ideology?
Marcel Mauss and the
solidarist colonial policy
in the interwar era
Grégoire Mallard
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Switzerland
Abstract
Marcel Mauss published his essay The Gift (1925) in the context of debates about the
European sovereign debt crises and the economic growth experienced by the colonies.
This article traces the discursive associations between Mauss’ anthropological concepts
(“gift,” “exchanges of prestations,” and “generosity”) and the reformist program of
French socialists who pushed for an “altruistic” colonial policy in the interwar period.
This article demonstrates that the three obligations which Mauss identified as the basis
of a customary law of international economic relations (i.e. the duty to give, the duty to
receive, and the duty to give back) served as key references in the French debate about
the relationships between metropolises and colonies in the interwar period. Mauss
made this relation between colonial policy and the ethnology of the gift explicit in
his book, The Nation. Moving beyond Mauss’ interwar writings, the article traces the
genealogy of his later reflections to his involvement in prewar debates about chartered
companies.
Keywords
Chartered companies, colonial trade, concessions, Congo, gift, Marcel Mauss
Introduction
The Gift, the best-known essay by a French anthropologist, was published by Emile
Durkheim’s nephew Marcel Mauss in 1925. The universal theory of gift-giving practices
it provides has been at the center of many postwar disputes between French social
Corresponding author:
Grégoire Mallard, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Graduate Institute of International and
Development Studies, Maison de la paix, P1-531, Chemin Eugène-Rigot 2, 1211 Geneva 21, Switzerland.
Email: gregoire.mallard@graduateinstitute.ch
751515IPT0010.1177/1755088217751515Journal of International Political TheoryMallard
research-article2018
Article
184 Journal of International Political Theory 14(2)
theorists, from Claude Lévi-Strauss (1950) to Pierre Bourdieu (1994: 174–175). At the
same time, as Lygia Sigaud (2002: 335–336) has demonstrated, there are many “discon-
tinuities in the interpretation of The Gift.” In particular, she notices a “general indiffer-
ence to Mauss’s preoccupations with rights and obligations,” despite the fact that Mauss
conceived of his essay as the coronation of a decade-long interest in the “history of
obligations” in general and “contractual obligations” in particular, as the latter manifest
themselves in the “voluntary character of what he called prestations, apparently freely
given, yet coercive and interested.”
As Mauss famously wrote, the gift is a “system of total prestations” (Mauss, 1990
[1925]: 7) or what has typically been translated in English as a system of exchange of
gifts and rendering of other services, and the reciprocating or return of these gifts and
services. For Mauss, this system of services given and exchanged partakes in economic
logics as much as it belongs to the realms of law, morality, and politics, and it develops
in the interstices of all of the latter fields (Steiner, 2005). Thus, it is not a surprise that
Mauss found examples of gift exchanges (like the potlatch) mostly in the realm of “inter-
societal” relations (or international relations, although the latter is more restrictive),1
where law, politics, economic, and even religious logics are sometimes hard to
disentangle.
When Mauss (1990 [1925]: 47) underlined the formal differences between various
kinds of “primitive” forms of international gift exchanges, like the Pacific kula or the
North American potlatch, he also noticed that all these systems of gift exchanges were
practiced to reaffirm the existence of solidarity between and across political societies:
the first one, along cooperative and horizontal lines of inter-tribal solidarity; the second
one, along more antagonistic lines, as the tribes practicing the potlatch avoided a (real)
“war of men” by engaging in a “war of properties,” which created both solidarity and
suzerainty between partners.
Mauss’ interest in international or, more broadly conceived, “inter-societal” relations
and gift exchanges had in fact two dimensions: one empirical (as manifested in his
attempt to catalogue all gift exchanges among various kinds of nations) and one norma-
tive (as seen in his willingness to promote a model of gift exchanges that was not purely
based on the short-term calculation of each nation’s individual utility). At the end of his
1925 essay, Mauss proposed a bold (and optimistic) conclusion: that a “system of total
services” (in the translation of Halls), or a system of reciprocal exchanges of “presta-
tions” (to use Mauss’ specific French term), always leads to the creation of solidarity, as
manifested by an obligation to give back. This was true even in the case of the antagonis-
tic North American potlatch. Indeed, even the “regime of contractual law and system of
economic prestations” known as potlatch actually articulated a set of legal duties, “the
obligation to give, […] the obligation to receive and reciprocate” (Mauss, 1990 [1925]:
50). As Mauss wrote, “to contract debts on the one hand, to pay them on the other, this is
what constitutes the potlatch” (Mauss, 1990 [1925]: 139). Thus, the potlatch did not
erase the debt, nor did it erase the social bond, between creditor and debtor nations—
rather, it strengthened its significance.
Mauss went even as far as claiming that his normative conclusion was true not only
for “primitive societies” but also for modern “nations”: in his political essays on European
sovereign debts in the context of the reparations debate, Mauss also asserted the
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