Malinowski and Mauss Exchanging Knowledge in Interwar Europe

Lessons in Internationalism

in Durkheimian Studies
Author:
Leo Coleman Hunter College, The Graduate Center, CUNY, USA leo.coleman@hunter.cuny.edu

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DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3167/ds.2021.250104
Keywords:
Bronisław Malinowski; ethnography; gift exchange; indirect rule; internationalism; intersocial exchange; Marcel Mauss; sovereignty
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Abstract

Bronisław Malinowski sought throughout his career to make a scientific contribution to understanding and reforming the international order by making analogies with ‘primitive’ societies. His ethnographic material was important to Marcel Mauss's internationalist project in The Gift, and can still provide lessons in internationalism. This article examines Malinowski's ethnographic figuration of ‘the evolution of primitive international law’, and documents a set of intellectual exchanges between him and Mauss. This illuminates an unexpected avenue of Durkheimian influence on British social anthropology and situates Malinowski in contemporary imperial and internationalist debates. Despite Malinowski's early criticism of Émile Durkheim's account of ‘collective ideas’, his later writing shows the (unacknowledged) influence of Mauss's understandings of obligation and intersocial exchange. Unearthing the terms of this exchange between Malinowski and Mauss helps to recover the central normative lesson of the former's final book and his ethnographic work as a whole – namely, that sovereignty should be dethroned as an organising principle of international order in favour of intersocial exchange and the obligations it produces.

Contributor Notes

Leo Coleman teaches anthropology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi (Cornell University Press, 2017) and a contributor to Ethnographies of Power: A Political Anthropology of Energy (Berghahn Books, 2021). E-mail: leo.coleman@hunter.cuny.edu

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Durkheimian Studies

Études Durkheimiennes

Cover Durkheimian Studies
Article Category:
Research Article
Page Count:
29
Keywords:
Bronisław Malinowski; ethnography; gift exchange; indirect rule; internationalism; intersocial exchange; Marcel Mauss; sovereignty
Print Publication Date:
01 Dec 2021
Online Publication Date:
01 Dec 2021
Copyright:
© Durkheim Press 2021

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