ANT207H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Social Fact, Marcel Mauss, Mechanical And Organic Solidarity
Document Summary
Critical of the state-led model of communism. Never went to all the places he wrote about, depended on ethnographies of others: armchair anthropologists. Gift giving: you represent your family through social pressure. Trobrian islands: differentiation of social roles in modern society. Gifts and economic actions are embedded in the social world: potlatch. Must return the same goods from 30% to 100% interest rate: hau among maori. Another way to define total social phenomenon: social fact - durkheim talks about it. Related to discussion on suicide, critique of the individual. How socially, suicide occurs as a phenomenon. Aspects of social life become compartmentalized: multi-dimensional phenomena. Can see all kinds of institutions appear. Society is about a constant give and take. Takes place in all societies, in all times and in all places. Objects being exchanged are pieces of the person and when given to someone else, links those two. Copper is a living being in the potlatch.
