Person, Ego, Human Spirit in Marcel Mauss: Comments

To Marcel Mauss, humanity is the unitary object of ethnological investigation in its universality, and he has so conceived this object in his deservedly well-known essays on gift-exchange and magic.1 In the essay which we have translated here, he has surveyed the development of the person and the ego in both nonliterate and literate civilizations, embracing the entire world of man in space, and by implication, in time. It is not the development of the idea of the person, but the phenomenon itself as an objectively existent reality, which is at once a universal category of the human spirit, that he has taken up. The person is the individual human being who emerges as such, in Mauss's presentation, from its locus extrinsic to the individual in primitive social relations, their names and rites; the person develops therefrom into an independent center of moral identity, thought, and social action, both public and private within each of us.

In Mauss's theory, the person has evolved as society has evolved, from the simple to the complex levels. His archaeological and ethnographic data have to show that the person is an innate property of man, but not a property at a uniform state of development everywhere. It is not that our thinkers have independently devised and developed this idea for purposes of their own, but that Marcus Aurelius, Tertullian, Spinoza, Hume, Kant and Fichte are the agency of an abstract movement of the human spirit as an organic growth. Mauss is not a materialist, and has not conceived this idea as the development of a particular culture or group of cultures in its concrete reality,