Mauss était un philosophe, un théoricien, qui s’était tourné vers le concret, qui avait appris que c’est seulement au contact étroit des données que la sociologie peut progresser.
Louis Dumont
In a strict sense, this is the eighth1 in a series of translations intended to make available to a wider public the more important essays of the school of the Année sociologique. In the early 1950s, Professor E. E. Evans-Pritchard, together with colleagues and students of the Institute of Social Anthropology at Oxford,2 conceived of this undertaking in the conviction that various essays of the Année sociologique represent a valuable portion of the ‘theoretical capital’ of modern anthropology. Individually, each of these essays has unquestionably contributed to the formation of anthropology and, as such, each can be read for historical interest as well as for a wealth of ideas that has, by no means, been exhausted. Yet the original intention, as Evans-Pritchard insisted, was to produce ‘not just translations of unconnected essays but of essays which have a close theoretical relationship, each illustrating in the discussion of a particular topic a common point of view’.3 Thus, as a whole, these translations offer a glimpse of the unique – and all too brief – conjunction of young scholars whom Émile Durkheim gathered together to work on a common intellectual programme: the publication of an annual periodical devoted to nothing less than the systematic review, elaboration and analysis of the resources of the social sciences.4
A significant feature of this series of translations is, however, its focus on the work of Marcel Mauss. This is itself indicative of the fact that so much of Mauss’s life’s work was inextricably linked with the Année sociologique, both with the original series which ran from 1898 to 1913 and with the new series which Mauss attempted, unsuccessfully, to revive in 1925. Four of the eight translations that have so far appeared are of collaborative works by Mauss published in the Année sociologique. These include his essay on Sacrifice, written with Hubert (1899), on Primitive Classification written with Durkheim (1903), on A General Theory of Magic written with Hubert (1904) and on The Gift (1925) – undoubtedly Mauss’s best-known essay – which is no less the result of a collaborative effort than Mauss’s other studies, since it forms part of an investigation that Mauss undertook with his colleague, Georges Davy.5
This present translation, Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: a Study in Social Morphology, is a further important essay by Mauss, this time written in collaboration with Henri Beuchat.6 As its title suggests, it is both a case study and a theoretical disquisition. As a case study, it is an attempt to sort out and make intelligible a large, scattered but reasonably comprehensive body of ethnographic information on a single culture. As such, the essay is still regarded by specialists in the field as an ‘illuminating’ source on the Eskimo7 and has even been recommended by Edmund Leach as a possible ‘prototype for what every British social anthropologist would like to do with the ethnographic data which fill his notebooks’.8
The theoretical implications of the essay are far more various. Mauss saw the essay as a demonstration of the tenet, derived from Mill, that a single case study, well-conceived and well-executed, is sufficient to establish a general social principle. The principle here concerns the effects of seasonal variations within society, for which the Eskimo offered ‘a privileged field of study’ because of the extreme prominence of such variations among them. This initial perception of seasonal variations has since been reconfirmed and documented by many anthropologists, not just among the Eskimo, but in other societies, on which there is now a considerable literature. Richard B. Lee, for example, in summarizing some of this literature, cites Mauss’s ‘classic paper’ as the first formal description of this phenomenon which remains a topic of continuing research.9 For Mauss, however, the critical feature was not merely the recognition of this phenomenon but the establishment of a principle. For this reason, the essay is subtitled: ‘A Study in Social Morphology’.
The plan of the Année sociologique was to encompass the social sciences, and its review ‘sections’ were therefore intended to embody a general outline of sociology. Most of these review sections retained the same rubric throughout the period of Année’s publication: (I) ‘General Sociology’, (II) ‘Religious Sociology’, (III) ‘Moral and Legal Sociology’, (IV) ‘Criminal Sociology’ (in volume 4, retitled to include ‘Moral Statistics’), and (V) ‘Economic Sociology’. But, in volume 2, the sixth section, which had previously been labelled ‘Diverse’ items,10 was reorganized as ‘Social Morphology’ and provided with an introduction by Durkheim. In this introduction, Durkheim describes the ‘science’ of social morphology in these rather general terms:11
Social life rests on a substratum which is determined in its size as in its form. This includes the mass of individuals who compose the society, the way in which they occupy the land, and the nature and configuration of objects of every sort which affect collective relations … The constitution of this substratum affects, directly or indirectly, all social phenomena in the same way that psychological phenomena are, directly or indirectly, related to the state of the brain. These therefore represent a set of problems which are of evident interest to sociology, relate to one and the same object, and ought to belong to the same science. It is this science which we propose to call social morphology.
To complicate matters, despite misgivings expressed in his introduction and in the first review of the new section – an eleven-page assessment of Friedrich Ratzel’s Politische Geographie, Durkheim invited Ratzel to contribute to the Année. Ratzel responded to this request, in the following year, with a short essay on ‘Land, Society and the State’,12 but the preponderant geographical emphasis in this ‘outside’ contribution was hardly in keeping with Durkheim’s views. And a few years later, Durkheim alluded to it as an instance of an ‘electism’ that harmed the impression of the Année as a whole.13 Whatever else it may have done, it did not clarify what was meant by the ‘science of social morphology’; nor did subsequent sections on social morphology in later volumes of the Année contribute to a coherent conception of this intended science. Many of its subsections changed from year to year and were either too general or too varied to give a clear idea of how they were related to one another. The section on social morphology gave the appearance of having been created as an afterthought, put together from various subjects, and left to occupy an odd position within the Année sociologique – a situation which Mauss recognized but did not comment upon until some years later.
From the beginning, Mauss assumed a prominent position within the Année group and his role became even more crucial after the loss of many of the younger members and the death of Durkheim. Mauss felt a vital obligation to continue the work of his colleagues but, as time went on, he faced the dilemma of developing a common stock of ideas without altering, too radically, the tradition from which they had emerged. In this, he remained consistently loyal to a Durkheimian inheritance which he attempted to transform. His treatment of the subject of social morphology provides an excellent example of this.
To volume 2 of the new series of the Année sociologique, which appeared in 1927, Mauss contributed a long article on the ‘divisions’ of sociology14 – his first major statement of this kind since the article on ‘Sociology’ in La Grande Encyclopédie which he wrote with Fauconnet in 1901. He begins his discussion with an attempt to justify the arrangement of the new series which preserved the same organization as the previous volumes: ‘We are altering nothing in the outline that Durkheim had slowly elaborated.’15 He admits, however, that one reason for this is that the ‘task of renovation’ is ‘certainly too great for the handful of Durkheim’s students who remain’.16 Yet, having said this, he can be critical of the existing arrangement and he focuses primarily on the category of ‘social morphology’:17
Social morphology unites various sciences that are ordinarily but unduly separated, poorly defined, and when joined, are still even more poorly arranged as a group, as is the case with demography and anthropogeography … Morphology is a part of sociology, virtually its primordial half, and it is also one of its most independent parts … Morphological phenomena have an exceptionally marked material aspect which can be quantified and graphically represented (by charts and diagrams). These phenomena are dependent on one another to such a degree that they seem to form a distinct domain within the social domain. Their theory ought to be, in our view, either the first or the last of our categories of data. The first, if one considers the material form of each society as it presents itself in time and space: the number of individuals, the movement and stability of the population, the succession of generations, the circulation of individuals, the limitation of an area, geographical conditions and adaptation to the land – all of these ought to be, from this point of view, the primary object of our studies, both specialized and general. Or, if one studies the geographical distribution and the demography of different social organizations … this aspect of morphology ought to come later. In any case, morphology is poorly placed where it stands in the Année sociologique.
Mauss reverts to a discussion of social morphology at several junctures in this same article, insisting that such considerations are methodologically essential and reflect the importance of the study of morphology in his own thinking. But this insistence only highlights the essential ambiguity of his position in retaining a framework whose limitations he is so clearly able to point out. As Mauss notes, the concept of social morphology rests on a dichotomy of social phenomena into ‘morphology’ and ‘physiology’ – a distinction that Durkheim borrowed from nineteenth-century biology. On this analogy, social morphology is supposedly the study of ‘material structures’ and social physiology the study of their ‘functioning’. Yet even when this ‘primary division’ is purged of its vitalistic antecedents, it still involves a distinction that should not be too sharply drawn since the notion of ‘structure’, as Mauss insists, cannot be confined to the study of material structures.18
It would be tempting to see in Mauss’s discussion of morphology signs of an emergent structuralism or hints of that ‘modernity’ of mind for which Claude Lévi-Strauss has praised him, but the fact is that despite his qualifications and critical comments, Mauss retained this primary distinction to the end of his teaching career.19 It was never the cause for a break in the traditions of sociology which he was committed to uphold.
If, however, we take Mauss as seriously as he intended, and realize the special importance that social morphology had for him as sociology’s ‘primordial half’ and ‘first category’ of inquiry and if, at the same time, we attend less to his choice of general terminology and more to the specific way in which he himself carried out his only study in social morphology, his essay on the Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo takes on a special, and indeed a central, significance. The essay can then be recognized for what it is: the first ethnographic attempt to adopt a holistic, ecological approach to the analysis of a society. As Victor Karady – Mauss’s most astute commentator – has already indicated, the idea of a ‘total’ study of society is implicit throughout the argument of the essay and this links it most closely to his celebrated essay, The Gift.20
We know that Mauss spent over two years on the preparation and publication of his essay on the Eskimo. He began his research, in all probability, shortly after the completion of his essay on A General Theory of Magic with Hubert. From 1903 to 1905 he devoted his seminars at the École Pratique des Hautes Études to an ‘examination of texts’ on the Eskimo21 and there is no doubt that his aim was to present a comprehensive view of this population. His footnotes and bibliography comprise nearly half of the total text of the essay and his references come to more than two hundred titles in four principal languages – Danish, English, German and French. It is possible also to detect elements of Mauss’s eventual argument in his earlier reviews of Boas’s monograph on the Eskimo of Baffin Land and Nelson’s study of Bering Strait which appeared in volume 7 of the Année.22 But these and other scattered references to the Eskimo give no hint of the presentation of Mauss’s general argument and it is this that deserves special consideration.
In his introduction, Mauss is concerned mainly to state his purpose and to distinguish his study from the ‘anthropogeography’ of Ratzel. Responding to Ratzel’s views was of particular importance to the members of the Année as a group and Mauss’s reply, succinctly stated, is that ‘the land factor must be considered in relation to a social context in all its complex totality.’
Chapter 1 sets forth Mauss’s basic orientation which is, essentially, ecological. He examines the ‘general morphology’ of the Eskimo: those invariant features of the society to which a seasonal morphology can later be related. He defines a specific environmental niche – namely, a northern coastal fringe, and he identifies the Eskimo in relation to this niche. The ‘settlement’ Mauss sees as the territorial unit of a group of assembled families, and he defines this as ‘a concentration of houses, a collection of tent sites’, with ‘grounds for hunting and fishing on land and sea’ and an entire ‘system of paths, passages and harbours’ that connect these grounds. This is not, therefore, an absolute space but a complexly contoured, somewhat permeable but none the less bounded landscape which, Mauss argues, must possess a specific configuration of minimal requirements to allow the Eskimo to pursue their seasonally variable activities. Since the Eskimo live from hunting and fishing, their way of life reflects a ‘necessary symbiotic relation among animal species’. Hence their population density, distribution and even the characteristic composition of Eskimo groups – the result of a low birth-rate and high adult male mortality – are related to a delicate balance of environmental factors.
Mauss, however, concludes this chapter with what appears to be a non sequitur. He asserts that ‘the limitation on Eskimo settlements depends on the way in which the environment acts, not on the individual, but on the group as a whole.’ This is a reasonable statement if one interprets it as a further affirmation of the importance of social factors, but it seems curiously illogical if it is interpreted to imply a kind of group selection, since the data that Mauss has marshalled to make his case clearly show how environmental factors operate on groups via individuals. The latter interpretation seems the more warranted in that Mauss adds a footnote in which he attributes a decisive agency to the ‘group’ in the abstract. ‘Moreover’, he writes, ‘the group intervenes forcibly, as a group, to limit the number of members in its charge’. Such assertions, while they reflect Mauss’s theoretical background, do not necessarily hamper the development of his argument and in some cases, as in this one, they appear to be merely appended to it.
In the next chapter, Mauss begins to elaborate his celebrated contrast between the two seasonal morphologies of the Eskimo. This involves a detailed discussion of various forms of dwellings, regional house types and their internal arrangements. This explicit examination of dwellings as the reflection of particular forms of social organization is intended to substantiate a single, major observation. In summer, individual Eskimo families live in tents, dispersed and scattered over an immense area; in winter, these families congregate in concentrated settlements composed of multi-family houses, often linked to one or more communal houses or kashim, where collective ceremonies are performed. It is essential for Mauss to show that ‘the two seasons present two entirely different appearances’ and that these appearances correspond to two distinct social morphologies.
The remarkable feature of Mauss’s discussion is its historical, resource-oriented view of regional variation among the Eskimo, which is all the more remarkable given the scattered and uneven literature on which it is based and the time when it was written. In this view, house forms vary according to the different materials available for their construction, just as the patterns of the settlement in which these houses are found vary according to changing resources and their locations. Frequent references to archaeological data underline the importance of time as a factor in any evaluation.23 But this variation is not without limits and, in fact, Mauss offers a generalization to encompass certain of its features: ‘while the internal density of each separate house varies, as we have shown, according to the region, the density of an entire settlement is always as high as subsistence factors permit. The social volume of a settlement – the area actually occupied and exploited by the group – is kept to a minimum.’
At the same time, Mauss makes it very clear that he does not see the twofold seasonal morphology of the Eskimo as merely the product of environmental conditions, for he notes that this dual morphology persists even in those parts of Alaska where ‘the group remains in one place and the reasons for its summer dispersion have disappeared.’ He goes on, in the following chapter, to discuss the ‘causes’ of these seasonal variations. He is not, as he states quite explicitly, interested in all such causes, which would be impossible to reconstruct, but rather in those factors in which one can distinguish social from physical causes. He rejects certain simplistic explanations and in their place notes that, by means of its specific technology, ‘Eskimo social life becomes a veritable phenomenon of symbiosis that forces the group to live like the animals they hunt. These animals concentrate and disperse according to the seasons … This alternation provides the rhythm of concentration and dispersion for the morphological organization of Eskimo society.’ But having made this statement, Mauss immediately qualifies it. Although biological and technological factors are extremely important, ‘they are insufficient to account for the total phenomenon.’ These factors may account for the onset, duration, succession and even the marked opposition of the periods of concentration and dispersion, but Mauss’s concern with a total social phenomenon will not allow him to accept these factors as an adequate explanation of the characteristic cultural features of these different periods.
The whole of the next chapter is taken up with an examination of this ‘total phenomenon’. The effects of seasonal variations can be seen, according to Mauss, in all aspects of Eskimo life – on systems of classification, naming procedures, ritual prohibitions, ceremonial activities, kinship and family organization, property rights, sexual relations and moral life in general. But on the verge of grossly over-emphasizing the dichotomy between the seasons, Mauss also indicates some of the mutual influences of one season on the other. These final observations effectively conclude Mauss’s description of Eskimo life but this description is itself the occasion for observations of a more general nature.
Thus, Mauss’s short, seemingly unobtrusive concluding chapter is a dense concatenation of different ideas. He argues (1) that the qualitative differences in the pattern of Eskimo life are related to quantitative differences in its relative intensity; (2) that winter, as a period of intense social interaction, is the time when individuals become conscious of themselves as a group whereas summer is the time when such social bonds slacken; (3) that this alternation in social life, so evident among the Eskimo, is common to many different societies although there exist ‘no absolutely necessary biological or technological reasons’ for it and (4) that this, therefore, suggests ‘a law that is probably of considerable generality’, namely (5) that ‘social life does not continue at the same level throughout the year; it goes through regular, successive phases of increased and decreased intensity, of activity and repose, of exertion and recuperation.’24 Mauss links these propositions to two further propositions which he claims his essay has established. The first is that ‘the climacteric conditions of Eskimo life can be accounted for only by the contrast between the two phases of the year and the clearness of their opposition’; the second that because social life is dependent on its material substratum, Eskimo societies offer a special ‘test case’ for ‘at the very moment when the form of the group changes, one can observe the simultaneous transformation of religion, law and moral life.’ And it is on the establishment of these propositions that Mauss rests his epistemological claim that ‘the analysis of one clearly defined case can establish a general law better than the accumulation of facts or endless deduction.’
Mauss’s essay, whose argument we have now considered in some detail, is unquestionably both subtle and persuasive, but it is not entirely free of ambiguities and indeed it contains one major contradiction which has given rise to radically different interpretations of its significance. Thus, for example, the first critical review of the essay, published in 1906 by the distinguished Hungarian sociologist, Oscar Jaszi, hailed the work as ‘an inductive vindication of historical materialism’ for its demonstration of the ‘primary importance’ of an economic system and a production pattern. For Jaszi, the essay showed that the ‘collocation of populations is primarily determined by the economic opportunities of the environment and the state of technology’.25 Jaszi’s view is by no means a unique judgment. More recently Claude Dubar has similarly argued that this study ‘is nothing else but a particular confirmation of the essential relation in Marxist theory between infrastructure and superstructures within a particular social formation’.26 In contrast to these views, the opposite interpretation of this essay has perhaps best been stated by Mary Douglas.27 For her, Seasonal Variations …
is an explicit attack on geographical or technological determinism in interpreting domestic organization. It demands an ecological approach in which the structure of ideas and of society, the mode of gaining a livelihood and the domestic architecture are interpreted as a single interacting whole in which no one element can be said to determine the others.
Of these two interpretations, the latter is substantially more in keeping with what Mauss seems to have intended and it can be confirmed by reference to numerous passages throughout the essay; the former – Jaszi’s interpretation in particular – is none the less a valid extrapolation of the implications of certain of Mauss’s statements, especially when these statements are viewed, as Jaszi saw them, in connection with some of Durkheim’s statements on social morphology. In general terms, it is possible to trace the ambiguities in Seasonal Variations to their source in the three principal texts that Mauss cites to bolster his own argument, namely Durkheim’s Division of Labour, Rules of Sociological Method and Suicide. The uncertainties over ‘explanatory priorities’ in these books has been lucidly analysed by Steven Lukes in his study of Durkheim28 and need not concern us here. In specific terms, the contradiction in the essay can be posed succinctly: if the alternation of the seasons merely provides the opportunity for a change in morphology and if, as Mauss indicates, summer dispersion persists in areas where the environmental reasons for it have ceased to exist and winter congregation recurs in summer under favourable conditions, then there can be no question of a simple determination of Eskimo social life by its material substratum. If, on the other hand, as Mauss also argues in his concluding paragraph, the Eskimo present a special test case precisely because when the form of the group changes, there is a simultaneous transformation of their social life and this occurs ‘every year with absolute invariability’, a strict determination, rather than a complex dependency, is clearly attributed to the material substratum of the society.
Neither its various ambiguities, especially on the nature of social morphology, nor the contradiction with which it ends have seriously affected the importance of this essay. Although it still betrays hints of a quest for some kind of simple, unitary explanation of social phenomena, which the whole of Mauss’s later work belies, and although it exhibits a tendency to overstructure its analysis to develop its argument, Seasonal Variations remains as a remarkable first attempt to develop an ecological approach within which to consider a whole range of complex social phenomena. Its influence has, therefore, been limited neither to a consideration of the details of its argument nor to its case study of the Eskimo.
It frequently happens that a particular study has its greatest influence beyond its intended realm of analysis. It is perhaps, therefore, not altogether surprising that Seasonal Variations did not have a major influence on the development of Eskimo studies, especially since Beuchat who was chosen to advance these studies died, most tragically, at the very beginning of his fieldwork in the Arctic. On the other hand, as a model of ethnographic description, Seasonal Variations has had considerable influence. A clear and unmistakable example of this influence can be seen in Evans-Pritchard’s classic study, The Nuer, published in 1940. Evans-Pritchard himself left no doubt about his intellectual allegiance to the school of the Année sociologique,29 and his colleague, Godfrey Lienhardt, has already admirably sketched the relations between these two seemingly unrelated ethnographic analyses.30
The Nuer, some 400,000 people divided into various tribes, are cattle herders who occupy an area quite unlike that of the Eskimo. Instead of a northern coast fringe, Nuerland is a vast plain in the southern Sudan, intersected by three great rivers whose seasonal flooding sets a pattern for the year. In summer, the rains fall and the rivers rise flooding all of the countryside except for scattered areas of elevated land; in winter, the waters recede to form an immense, increasingly dry savannah. In the wet season, the Nuer must move to high ground to plant their crops and raise their cattle until the rivers subside and they can move out onto the plain where they gradually congregate with their herds in large camps along river banks. This mixed economy which combines horticulture, fishing and cattle husbandry, nevertheless follows a pattern which, as Evans-Pritchard describes it, is like that described by Mauss for the Eskimo. Not merely the model, but the very language which Evans-Pritchard uses, recalls Mauss’s essay. In the conclusion to this discussion of Nuer ecology, he writes:31
The oecological rhythm divides the Nuer year into two divisions, the wet season when they live in villages and the dry season when they live in camps, and camp life falls into two parts, the earlier period of small, temporary camps and the later period of large concentrations in sites occupied every year.
As a comparable case study, however, The Nuer can hardly be seen to confirm all of Mauss’s conclusions. The chief Nuer ceremonies of initiation are not held at the time of maximum concentration but almost invariably at the end of the rainy season when the Nuer are still living in their separate villages and have plenty of food for their festivities. But a consideration of The Nuer makes clear the fact that it is, by no means, a piece of naive ethnographic description; it is part of a tradition of ethnographic writing, whose sources are as important to recognize as the social phenomena they report.
In tracing these sources, it is equally important to recognize some of the more prominent influences on Mauss. Seasonal Variations, for example, refers to no less than seventeen separate articles or monographs written by ethnographers associated with the Smithsonian Institution or the Bureau of American Ethnology. The work of many of these ethnographers, as Mauss explicitly notes, was closely related to the attempt at ecological analysis in Seasonal Variations. In particular, Mauss cites the series of related ethnographic lectures by McGee, Mason, Powell, Hubbard and Fewkes delivered at the United States National Museum in 1896 ‘with the view of illustrating the relations of life to environment, especially on the American continent’.32 And behind the stentorian rhetoric of these lectures, one can glimpse some of the ideas that Mauss may have found congenial and which contributed to a common ecological perspective within anthropology.
Mauss wrote of Beuchat, his student and collaborator, that ‘he knew a great many things and he knew them well’. Apart from his work with Mauss on Seasonal Variations, Beuchat contributed only one other piece to the Année sociologique, a short review of Bowditch’s book on the Mayan calendar for volume 12 of the Année. His main work was his Manuel d’archéologie américaine, an 800-page encyclopedic survey of the discovery of the Americas and of the prehistory and development of major Indian cultures, published in Paris in 1912; he also wrote a number of articles with Paul Rivet on the linguistic classification of Indian languages in South America. Beuchat’s chief interests seem to have been in working out connections between populations, their movements and cultural developments. An early interest in the Eskimo and the opportunity to take part in one of the largest and best-equipped scientific explorations of its kind undoubtedly prompted him to join Vilhjálmar Stefánsson’s Canadian Arctic expedition of 1913. This expedition, with a scientific staff of fifteen including another anthropologist, Diamond Jenness (who together with Beuchat and Stefansson was assigned to the study of Eskimo life), set sail in three ships from Nome, Alaska, in July 1913. Of these three ships, the Karluk, with the main contingent of the expedition, became locked in ice on 13 August and drifted erratically in a north-westerly direction for several months until, under mounting ice pressure, it broke and sank on the afternoon of 11 January 1914. The members of the expedition faced an enormously complex logistic problem of moving themselves and their supplies in stages from their shipwreck camp on an ice-floe in the Arctic Ocean to Wrangel Island, the closest land in their vicinity. It was during this operation that Beuchat and three other men decided on an attempt to reach land on their own. This meant trekking, via Wrangel Island, to the Siberian mainland. They left the main camp on 5 February, and they were encountered four days later by two members of the expedition who were moving supplies in advance of the main party. Beuchat’s hands and feet were severely frozen; he was partly delirious; but he refused to return to the main camp. Thereafter his party was never seen or heard of again and no trace of them was ever found.33 In Mauss’s words: ‘In the wreckage, all the notes that Beuchat had begun to take were lost along with the many studies he had brought with him to finish during the long Artic winters.’34
Lévi-Strauss has written of the remarkable ‘modernity’ of Mauss’s thought. The evidence of Seasonal Variations, I believe, supports this claim and is sufficient justification for the present translation. But this modernity also poses its own problems. So many of Mauss’s ideas have borne fruit that there is a temptation to render them in a language and terminology of a later date. This would be a disservice to Mauss, whose ideas at the time were still in a crucial formative phase. Therefore, as translator, I have endeavoured to keep as close to Mauss’s own terminology and mode of phrasing as the demands of fluent English allow. In Mauss’s writing, one can detect a certain tension – a subtle combination of assertion and qualification – that is as evident in the phrasing of his sentences as in the ordering of his argument. I interpret this as an indication of what Dumont has described as Mauss’s chief quality – that of a theoretician with a superb speculative mind who was committed to the concrete analysis of social phenomena.
To appreciate this aspect of Mauss, one must also give close attention to the notes to Seasonal Variations which comprise a considerable portion of the essay. In the original, these notes were located at the bottom of each page and were thus perceptibly an integral part of the argument. Unfortunately, however, they were set forth in a style of scholarship that seems to have intended that they be interpreted as memoranda rather than as precise references. Although these notes demonstrate a formidable erudition and greatly enhance an understanding of Mauss’s interpretation of his sources, they abound in ambiguities and inaccuracies. A major task in the preparation of this edition has been to establish a reasonably complete and accurate bibliography and to use this bibliography to correct references throughout the notes. Only about five, from more than two hundred references, have proved impossible to trace. In some cases, this has meant reconstructing the way Mauss created nonexistent sources (see n. 3 to the Introduction), how he confused different authors with the same last name (see n. 25 to chapter 1), or how he seems to have conflated similar titles of separate books (see n. 112 to chapter 2).
The notes in this edition are linked to the bibliography. Authors are identified by name and their works by date of publication. I have attempted to identify authors of several books or papers who were referred to, in the original, by name only, according to the work which Mauss seems to have had in mind. I have also tried to locate the exact source of all direct quotations and to provide, in the notes, the original version where there appears to be some discrepancy. On the other hand, the checking of all specific page references in cited works was beyond my capacity and I have left these precisely as they appear in the original. Undoubtedly there remain inaccuracies in certain of these notes and minor inconsistencies in the spelling of some proper names due to the various languages of the original sources, but preparation of this work has already taken far longer than I initially contemplated. Moreover, at this date, the importance of an English translation of Seasonal Variations lies primarily in the presentation of Mauss’s ideas rather than in the correction of particular aspects of his scholarship.
Here I wish to thank various individuals who have helped me in the preparation of this work: Dr Steven Lukes of Balliol College, Oxford, for supplying me with a personal copy of an obscure article which I might otherwise have been unable to obtain; Henny Fokker-Bakker of the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra, for assistance in the initial phase of my bibliographic searches; and colleagues and staff of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Wassenaar – where this work was finally completed – in particular, Dinny Young and Simon Andriesen of the Library staff and Marina Voerman who had the task of typing the manuscript. Finally, and above all, I must express special thanks to my wife, Irmgard, who assisted in all stages of the preparation of the notes and bibliography.
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