Rhuthmos

Rhythm as Form of Individuation Process (part 2)

Pascal Michon — 2025-08-18T05:00:00Z

Rhythms of Archaic Individuation: The Kwakiutl (Mauss – 1924)

Mauss' essay The Gift. The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1924), which is often read separately from the rest of his work, was in fact strictly in line with his pre-WW1 study on Seasonal Variations... It was clearly an extension of his reflection on social rhythms.

The relay was taken from the very first pages where Mauss outlined the concept of “system of total prestations [système de prestations totales]” through the example of the Indian Potlatch in the American North-West [1]. As already pointed out in Seasonal Variations..., a fair number of Indian tribes of this region, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian and Kwakiutl, who provided a great deal of the material for The Gift, experienced a double seasonal morphology. Dispersed during summer, these populations concentrated during winter.

Their winter life, even with the southern tribes, is very different from their summer life. The tribes have a two-fold structure [double morphologie]: at the end of spring they disperse and go hunting, collect berries from the hillsides and fish the rivers for salmon; while in winter they concentrate in what are known as “towns.” (The Gift, 1924, p. 32, trans. Ian Cunnison)

In winter, after one or two seasons spent accumulating goods, these tribes attended large and long gatherings called potlatches.

During this period of concentration they are in a perpetual state of effervescence. The social life becomes intense in the extreme, even more so than in the concentrations of tribes that manage to form in the summer. This life consists of continual movement. There are constant visits of whole tribes to others, of clans to clans and families to families. There is feast upon feast, some of long duration. On the occasion of a marriage, on various ritual occasions, and on social advancement, there is reckless consumption of everything which has been amassed with great industry from some of the richest coasts of the world during the course of summer and autumn. (The Gift, 1924, p. 32-33, trans. Ian Cunnison)

The potlatch was a “total social phenomenon [fait social total]” which was inserted—this is unfortunately often forgotten in favor of considering only the circulation of gifts and counter-gifts—into the annual morphological alternation and which marked the peak of the social gathering period. It was therefore a rhythmic phenomenon.

After having been dispersed and enjoyed subdued social relations during the whole summer, the social life in these tribes dramatically intensified during winter.

The Tlingit and Haida inhabit the islands, the coast, and the land between the coast and the Rockies; they are very rich, and pass their winters in continuous festival, in banquets, fairs and markets which at the same time are solemn tribal gatherings. The tribes place themselves hierarchically in their fraternities and secret societies. On these occasions are practiced marriages, initiations, shamanistic seances, and the cults of the great gods, totems, and group or individual ancestors. [These are all accompanied by a complex network of rituals, jural and economic prestations, political rankings within sub-groups, tribes, tribal confederations and nations.] (The Gift, 1924, p. 32-33, trans. Ian Cunnison, my mod.)

These exchanges, even when only individuals faced each other, always concerned whole groups. Mauss distinguished four major types.

First, potlatch where the phratries and chiefs' families alone take part (Tlingit); second, potlatches in which phratries, clans, families and chiefs take more or less similar roles (Haida); third, potlatch with chiefs and their clans confronting each other (Tsimshian); and fourth, potlatch of chiefs and fraternities (Kwakiutl). (The Gift, 1924, p. 37, trans. Ian Cunnison)

Strikingly, in many of those archaic societies, the “total prestations” that took place during these rhythmic peaks of social life were accompanied by a surge of conflictuality. Trading meant also fighting. Exchanges constituted “agonistic prestations.”

But the remarkable thing about these tribes is the spirit of rivalry and antagonism which dominates all their activities. [A man is not afraid to challenge an opposing chief or nobleman [and to kill him]. Nor does one stop at the purely sumptuous destruction of accumulated wealth in order to eclipse a rival [although associated] chief [who may be a close relative, grandfather, father-in-law or son-in-law]. (The Gift, 1924, p. 4, trans. Ian Cunnison, my mod.)

Just as he had noted the almost universal extension of the rhythmic variations of sociality, Mauss underlined the very wide diffusion of the agonistic prestations, even in our own societies.

So far [we] had found few examples of this institution outside North-West America [he cited in a footnote Alaska Eskimo], Melanesia, and Papua. Everywhere else—in Africa, Polynesia, and Malaya, in South America and the rest of North America—the basis of exchange seemed to us to be a simpler type of total prestation. However, further research brings to light a number of forms intermediate between exchanges marked by exaggerated rivalry like those of the American north-west and Melanesia, and others more moderate where the contracting parties rival each other with gifts: for instance, the French compete with each other in their ceremonial gifts, parties, weddings, and invitations, and feel bound, as the Germans say, to revanchieren themselves. We find some of these intermediate forms in the Indo-European world, notably in Thrace. (The Gift, 1924, p. 5, trans. Ian Cunnison, my mod.)

Throughout the essay, Mauss sought to highlight, in the archaic societies he studied, some constants that were still valid today.

We contend that the same morality and economy are at work, albeit less noticeably, in our own societies, and we believe that in them we have discovered one of [the human rocky bases] [un des rocs humains] of social life; and thus we may draw conclusions of a moral nature about some of the problems confronting us in our present economic crisis. (The Gift, 1924, p. 2, trans. Ian Cunnison, my mod.)

I cannot here dwell on Mauss' analysis of the causes of these phenomena. He saw in them mainly effects of a couple of magico-religious beliefs: the magical force attached to given objects (hau) and the necessity to sacrifice to the spirits of nature and ancestors. Mauss' interpretation, which at first sight does not seem absurd, has been subject to a harsh criticism by Levi-Strauss who saw in it a remnant of substantialist way of thinking [2]. In this section, I will limit myself to its consequences which seem sufficient to ensure the rhythmological interest of the essay on The Gift. While Mauss still remained, in his study on the Eskimo, deeply influenced by the somewhat simplistic psychological concepts drawn from Durkheim and the crowd psychology (effervescence, influence, disappearance of self-consciousness and invasion of the latter by collective consciousness), the study of the potlatch provided him with the opportunity to establish an innovative interpretation of the singular and collective phenomena related to periods of social concentration. The peculiar agonistic prestations performed during these periods had consequences on the individuation both of the whole groups involved and of the nobles and chiefs who directed them.

Concerning the groups, the potlatches provided occasions to reshuffle the status and identity of each group within the tribal system. They offered the framework where the subgroups of these segmented and archaic-type societies could overlap and become ever-more interwoven, through a series of prestations and counter-prestations, in constantly changing configurations and hierarchies.

We are here confronted with total prestation in the sense that the whole clan, through the intermediacy of its chiefs, makes contracts involving all its members and everything it possesses. But the agonistic character of the prestation is pronounced. Essentially usurious and extravagant, it is above all a struggle among nobles to determine their position in the hierarchy to the ultimate benefit, if they are successful, of their own clan. (The Gift, 1924, p. 4-5, trans. Ian Cunnison)

Simultaneously, the potlatches and similar phases of intensification of social life were periods of regeneration of the groups and of their internal order and institutions. Mauss insisted on this point in two important theoretical texts written in the 1930s.

It is now indisputable that new institutions emerge [naissent] in periods of collective life, that they spring up [se forment] more particularly in states of crisis, and that they function [fonctionnent] in tradition, routine, regular gatherings. (M. Mauss, “La cohésion sociale dans les sociétés polysegmentaires” (1931), Œuvres, t. III, 1969, p. 14, my trans.)

Total phenomena assemble, as a matter of fact, all men of a society and even [all] things of the society in every respect and for ever [...]. During these events, societies, groups and subgroups, together and separately, come back to life, regain form and strength; they provide the occasion to start afresh; some institutions are rejuvenated, others purified, others replaced or forgotten. It is during this particular time that all traditions—even the literary ones, even those which will be as temporary as fashion for us—are established and transmitted: the great Australian international assemblies are held mainly to transmit dramatic art works and a few objects. (M. Mauss, “Fragment d'un plan de sociologie générale descriptive” (1934), Œuvres, t. III, 1969, p. 329, my trans.)

Concerning the individuals, the potlatches had similar and simultaneous consequences. They operated a redistribution of the “persons” between the dominant individuals of the tribal or clan group. The term “person” here referred to the legal status (in the clan, brotherhoods, age groups and sexes) as well as the religious status (as reincarnation of the person of an ancestor). [3]

Nowhere else is the prestige of an individual as closely bound up with expenditure, and with the duty of returning with interest gifts received in such a way that the creditor becomes the debtor. [...] Political and individual status in associations and clans, and rank of every kind, are determined by the “war of property,” as well as by armed hostilities, by chance, inheritance, alliance or marriage. But everything is conceived as if it were a war of wealth. Marriage of one's children and one's position at gatherings are determined solely in the course of the potlatch given and returned. Position is also lost as in war, gambling, hunting and wrestling. [...] Progress up the social ladder is made in this way not only for oneself but also for one's family. [...] A chief must give a potlatch for himself, his son, his son-in-law or daughter and for the dead. He can keep his authority in his tribe, village and family, and maintain his position with the chiefs inside and outside his nation, only if he can prove that he is favorably regarded by the spirits, that he possesses fortune and that he is possessed by it. [...] It is said of one of the great mythical chiefs who gave no feast that he had a “rotten face.” The expression is more apt than it is even in China; for to lose one's face is to lose one's spirit, which is truly the “face,” the dancing mask, the right to incarnate a spirit and wear an emblem or totem. It is the veritable persona which is at stake, and it can be lost in the potlatch just as it can be lost in the game of gift-giving, in war, or through some error in ritual. [...] The potlatch—the distribution of goods—is the fundamental act of public recognition in all spheres, military, legal, economic and religious. The chief or his son is recognized and acknowledged by the people. (The Gift, 1924, p. 35-39, trans. Ian Cunnison)

Since this double aspect was present almost everywhere—in the American North-West but also in the Eskimo, in Samoa and Trobriand, and we understand in societies that operated on egalitarian basis as well—Mauss was driven to the following conclusion: singular and collective individuation depended on the exchanges and conflicts that took place during periods of intensification of sociality.

The processes that occurred during the periods of strong sociality could no longer be reduced to a mere psychic excitement or a dissolution of the ego within a collective and encompassing self. These processes were indissociably singular and collective individuation phenomena that operated through two closely interwoven movements. The agonistic exchanges of gifts and counter-gifts had the same double effect on social groups and on individuals. On the one hand, they increased entropy: accumulated wealth disappeared and the structure of power, as well as the organization of people, was shaken. Some chiefs, who had not been able to return gifts, lost their face and had to retire. Some warriors lost their “person” which consequently became available to others. Some groups regressed in the social hierarchy and had to submit to others. As Alain Testart pointed out, the potlatch periodically broke hierarchies and roles [4]. But, at the same time, the internal tension in the group and the individuals increased strongly under the action of these struggles of generosity. There were outbursts of symbolic violence that could go as far as real murder.

Consumption and destruction are virtually unlimited. In some potlatch systems one is constrained to expend everything one possesses and to keep nothing. The rich man who shows his wealth by spending recklessly is the man who wins prestige. The principles of rivalry and antagonism are basic. [...] But everything is conceived as if it were a “war of wealth.” [...] Sometimes there is no question of receiving return; one destroys simply in order to give the appearance that one has no desire to receive anything back. Whole cases of candlefish or whale oil, houses, and blankets by the thousand are burnt; the most valuable coppers are broken and thrown into the sea to level and crush a rival. [...] The only way to demonstrate his fortune is by expending it to the humiliation of others, by putting them “in the shadow of his name.” (The Gift, 1924, p. 35-38, trans. Ian Cunnison)

The dedifferentiation of the social group and the individual psyche was thus accompanied by their repotentialization. The concomitance of these two phenomena was indicated by Mauss through a series of oxymoronic figures that anticipated the logic that was highlighted a few years later by Evans-Pritchard among the Nuer.

The potlatch is also a phenomenon of social morphology; the reunion of tribes, clans, families and nations produces great excitement. People fraternize but at the same time remain strangers; community of interest and opposition are revealed constantly in a great whirl of business. (The Gift, 1924, p. 36-37, trans. Ian Cunnison)

Only when the social group and the individuals had reached, through a controlled exercise of violence, this very particular state of simultaneous dedifferentiation and tension, a singular and collective re-individuation occurred, which resulted either in the confirmation or the augmentation of existing positions, possibly in the emergence of other chiefs, other dominant warriors and groups. Once individual as well as collective identities were re-generated, a new, more relaxed, less confrontational period, in which these identities were no longer in danger, could begin.

Let us now sum up the main points of this second study on social rhythms. First, I must say that I have deliberately left out all evidence concerning the Trobriand Islands Kula ring collected by Malinowski and plainly taken into account by Mauss. Malinowski had carefully traced the network of exchanges of bracelets and necklaces across the Trobriand Islands, and established that they were part of a huge circular system of exchange. This new body of evidence introduced significant variations in the model, firstly because the agôn was somehow diluted in time by the expectation for the moment when gifts would be returned (with interest), and secondly because the gifts were sexed and travelled from island to island in reverse geographical directions, so that male bracelets and female necklaces— and therefore the two sexes in the groups that traded—would meet in the Kula ring “like dogs which come to sniff” or “attracted towards each other like male and the female” (p. 183). There was in the Trobriand Kula ring a sexual topic that was absent from the Kwakiutl potlatch and that was reminiscent of archaic dualistic organizations such as those of Australian or ancient Chinese described by Granet (see below). But this body of evidence did not add anything decisive to the Kwakiutl model. The Kula ring was also the occasion to reshuffle and re-rank chiefs and groups relatively to one another.

In his 1905 essay on Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo Mauss had given a definition of the concept of social rhythm which had obvious shortcomings—it was still accounted for by reintroducing psychological motives—but which was essentially derived from anthropological field observation. Since it was possible to observe more or less important morphological variations in many societies living in different environments and with varying levels of technological development, it was clear that these variations were sui generis, i.e. relatively independent of the natural environment and subject to a dynamics of their own. By separating the concept of morphological alternation from that of bio-climatic cycle but also from that of technological progress, which by contrast was from Aftalion to Schumpeter at the center of economists' attention, Mauss had cleared the ground for a historical-anthropological study of social rhythms, defined as forms of the process of singular and collective individuation.

This is, I believe, the main achievement of the essay on The Gift published in 1924. Rhythm was not any more synonymous of “oscillation” or “periodic variation” of independent functions. It was not thought of from a plain Platonic perspective any more. It designated the temporal form of the social flow by means of which both the groups and the individuals were generated, regenerated, unraveled, and sometimes replaced. The succession and superposition of these qualitatively different times allowed social groups to regularly refurbish their organization, to invent, if necessary, the forms that ensured their internal cohesion, and to redraw their external limits by interweaving with each other through a total system of prestations and counter-prestations. But the succession of heterogeneous times organized as well the process of singular individuation. On the one hand, agents experienced a periodic reshaping of their “person” during the periods of intensification of sociality. On the other hand, once the “persons” had been re-distributed and re-established, the agents lived in the freest and most individual way during periods of dispersion.

It is equally indisputable that in all the oldest known societies as in ours, there is a kind of retraction of the individual and the family from these states of more or less intense collective life. (M. Mauss, “La cohésion sociale dans les sociétés polysegmentaires” (1931), Œuvres, t. III, 1969, p. 14, my trans.)

Rhythms organized the global process of singular and collective individuation.

The fact remains that all these Indians, and in particular the Kwakiutl, installed in their settlements a whole social and religious system where, in a vast exchange of rights, goods and services, property, dances, ceremonies, privileges and ranks, persons as well as groups [pay off their debts to one another] [se satisfont les personnes en même temps que les groupes sociaux]. We see very clearly how, from classes and clans, human “persons” adjust [s'agencent] to one another and how, from these, the gestures of the actors in a drama fit together [s'agencent]. (M. Mauss “Une catégorie de l'esprit humain. La notion de personne. Celle de ‘moi' – A Category of the Human Mind: the Notion of Person; the Notion of Self,” (1938), trans. W. D. Halls, p. 7, my mod.)

[1] As W. D. Halls noticed, in his new translation, “the French terms “prestations” and “contre-prestations” have no direct English equivalents. They represent respectively the actual act of exchange of gifts and rendering of services, and the reciprocating or return of these gifts and services” (The Gift, trans. W. D. Halls, 1990, p. vii). Consequently, he proposed to translate them as “total services” and “total counter-services.” However, the French term “prestation” has another meaning: as Ian Cunnison, the first translator of the essay, rightly noticed, it also means “any thing or series of things given freely or obligatorily as a gift or in exchange; and includes services, entertainments, etc., as well as material things” (The Gift, trans. Ian Cunnison, 1954, p. xi). As a matter of fact, “prestation” designates the thing that is exchanged as well as the act of exchanging, a double meaning which sheds some light on Mauss' choice of the word, since for him things do exist only as part of a general circulation or exchange that rhythmically re-generate the persons as well as the society. For this reason, I will keep using the translations proposed by Ian Cunnison as “prestation” and “counter-prestation.”

[2] C. Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction à l'œuvre de Marcel Mauss” dans M. Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie, Paris, PUF, 1950.

[3] On this conception, see M. Mauss, “A category of the human mind; the notion of person, that of 'me'” (1938), in Sociology and Anthropology, Paris, PUF, 1950 and my reconstruction of the successive Maussian conceptions of the person in P. Michon, Marcel Mauss retrouvé. Origines de l'anthropologie du rythme, Paris, Rhuthmos, 2015.

[4] This interpretation is close but probably more accurate than that of Georges Bataille, who insisted only on the question of expenditure. See G. Bataille, The Accursed Share, 1949. A. Testart, Les chasseurs-cueilleurs et l'origine des inégalités – The Hunter-gatherers and the origin of inequalities, PhD Dissertation, Paris, Institute of Ethnology of the University of Paris X, 1981. It is, as a matter of fact, as we saw above, a point that Mauss already noticed in his essay on Seasonal variations...

Rhythm as Form of Individuation Process (part 1)

Pascal Michon — 2025-08-15T05:00:00Z

Sommaire

Previous chapter

In the 1900s emerged a new way to address the fluidization of the world which was based on a quite different rhythmological ground. Unlike the economists, who were—at least most of them—using a naturalistic paradigm of rhythm partly derived from life science and medicine and greatly indebted to Plato, the sociologists and anthropologists rejected any continuity between nature and society and therefore developed a concept of rhythm that was and still is of a much greater interest to us. This chapter will be devoted to analyze and discuss this particular concept.

Rhythm of Duration or Individuation? (Durkheim and his Followers – 1904-1912)

In 1904, Henri Hubert (1872-1927) published a study on “The Representation of Time in Religion and Magic.” His aim was to show how each society builds, in a particular way, the category of time through its calendar of festivals, ceremonies and rituals. Time was not a frame that was simply produced by the succession of states of consciousness. It was an impersonal form, a “rhythm,” that enveloped our intimate existence and was borrowed from social life.

Divisions in days, weeks, months, years, etc., correspond to the periodicity of rites, festivals, public ceremonies. A calendar expresses the rhythm of the collective activity and, at the same time, its function is to ensure its regularity. (The Representation of Time..., 1904, my trans.)

In 1904-1905, Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) published his famous study on Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social Morphology. Although it seemed apparently very close to Hubert's contribution, its object was, in fact, significantly different. Mauss, as we shall see below in detail, was not primarily interested in the Eskimo's ritual or religious calendar, but in the morphological variation of their societies during the year. As he indicated in the introduction to his study, he defined their “morphology” as

the material substratum of societies: this includes the form that societies assume in their patterns of residence, the volume and density of the population, the way in which the population is distributed, as well as the entire range of objects that serve as a focus for collective life. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 19, trans. James J. Fox)

Its explicit aim was to understand, by taking advantage of the exceptional amplitude of the variations of Eskimo societies, the way in which,

the material form of human groups—the very nature and composition of their substratum—affects the different modes of collective activity. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 20, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

Hence, the cycle of ritual life appeared as a simple element—alongside alternations concerning the legal and technological life—of the more global cycle of the forms of society. And that was the reason why, for Mauss, the alternations of the social life of the Eskimo did not only provide the basis for a collective construction of the category of time, but also and mainly the re-production of the group as well as the individuals who composed it. The social rhythm, which for Hubert gave its form and organization to duration, ensured in Mauss, first and foremost, a socio- and psychogenetic function.

In 1912, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) integrated, synthesized, but also arbitrated between the works of his disciples. On the one hand, like Mauss, he pointed out that sociogenesis was rhythmically organized. He described, in terms close to those used by Mauss concerning the Eskimo, the morphological variations of Aboriginal societies.

The life of the Australian societies passes alternately through two distinct phases. Sometimes the population is broken up into little groups who wander about independently of one another, in their various occupations; each family lives by itself, hunting and fishing, and in a word, trying to procure its indispensable food by all the means in its power. Sometimes, on the contrary, the population concentrates and gathers at determined points for a length of time varying from several days to several months. This concentration takes place when a clan or a part of the tribe is summoned to the gathering, and on this occasion they celebrate a religious ceremony, or else hold what is called a corrobbori in the usual ethnological language. (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912, p. 215, trans. Joseph Ward Swain)

On the other hand, his interpretation of these morphological data was quite different from Mauss.' After having very briefly shown that individuals enjoyed alternately a fairly “independent” life and a more “collective” life, Durkheim insisted on the very dissimilar psychological atmosphere of the respective phases: asthenia, monotony, on one side ; enthusiasm, effervescence, of the other. What the most interested him was the particular psychic state into which the participants entered during the phases of social concentration. The description was then almost explicitly based on the notions of imitation and influence and the anthropological dualism, peculiar to the crowd psychology of Le Bon and the first Tarde—which he yet sharply criticized. When in the group, the “Primitive” was under the influence of “passions,” “emotions,” “enthusiasm,” “exaltation,” and “collective suggestion.” He behaved like a “madman”—Le Bon, who followed this line of argument to its ultimate conclusion, added “like a woman and a child”—and it was from this madness that religion was born.

These two phases are contrasted with each other in the sharpest way. In the first, economic activity is the preponderating one, and it is generally of a very mediocre intensity. Gathering the grains or herbs that are necessary for food, or hunting and fishing are not occupations to awaken very lively passions. The dispersed condition in which the society finds itself results in making its life uniform, languishing and dull. But when a corrobbori takes place, everything changes. Since the emotional and passional faculties of the Primitive are only imperfectly placed under the control of his reason and will, he easily loses control of himself. Any event of some importance puts him quite outside himself. Does he receive good news? There are at once transports of enthusiasm. In the contrary conditions, he is to be seen running here and there like a madman, giving himself up to all sorts of immoderate movements, crying, shrieking, rolling in the dust, throwing it in every direction, biting himself, brandishing his arms in a furious manner, etc. The very fact of the concentration acts as an exceptionally powerful stimulant. When they are once come together, a sort of electricity is formed by their collecting which quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation. Every sentiment expressed finds a place without resistance in all the minds, which are very open to outside impressions; each re-echoes the others, and is re-echoed by the others. The initial impulse thus proceeds, growing as it goes, as an avalanche grows in its advance. (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912, p. 215-216, trans. Joseph Ward Swain)

Such was the argument by which Durkheim arrived at his famous thesis on the origin of religion. Moments of social concentration were moments of “effervescence” which, through reciprocal influence, transformed the psyche of individuals and made them collectively aware that something dominated them.

One can readily conceive how, when arrived at this state of exaltation, a man does not recognize himself any longer. Feeling himself dominated and carried away by some sort of an external power which makes him think and act differently than in normal times, he naturally has the impression of being himself no longer. It seems to him that he has become a new being : the decorations he puts on and the masks that cover his face figure materially in this interior transformation, and to a still greater extent, they aid in determining its nature. And as at the same time all his companions feel themselves transformed in the same way and express this sentiment by their cries, their gestures and their general attitude, everything is just as though he really were transported into a special world, entirely different from the one where he ordinarily lives, and into an environment filled with exceptionally intense forces that take hold of him and metamorphose him. How could such experiences as these, especially when they are repeated every day for weeks, fail to leave in him the conviction that there really exist two heterogeneous and mutually incomparable worlds? One is that where his daily life drags wearily along; but he cannot penetrate into the other without at once entering into relations with extraordinary powers that excite him to the point of frenzy. The first is the profane world, the second, that of sacred things. So it is in the midst of these effervescent social environments and out of this effervescence itself that the religious idea seems to be born. (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912, p. 218-219, trans. Joseph Ward Swain)

This something that imposed itself upon them was only society as an all-encompassing totality, but the individuals interpreted it as a sacred principle, separated from the profane and the everyday life by a set of interdicts, a principle that they would figure in many ways and whose manifestations they would take great care to respect.

In fact, we have seen that if collective life awakens religious thought on reaching a certain degree of intensity, it is because it brings about a state of effervescence which changes the conditions of psychic activity. Vital energies are excited, passions more active, sensations stronger; there are even some which are produced only at this moment. (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912, p. 422, trans. Joseph Ward Swain)

In lectures presented near the end of his life, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) gave many counterexamples drawn from ethnographic observations that contradict most of Durkheimian claims. But he also noted the methodological difficulty that I have just mentioned. Durkheim actually constructed his entire theory of religion and, more broadly, of the sacred, that is, de facto his entire theory of society, on an argument drawn directly from the crowd psychology.

It contravenes his own rules of sociological method, for fundamentally it offers a psychological explanation of social facts, and he himself has laid it down that such explanations are invariably wrong. It was all very well for him to pour contempt on others for deriving religion from motor hallucination, but I contend that this is precisely what he does himself. No amount of juggling with words like “intensity” and “effervescence” can hide the fact that he derives the totemic religion of the Blackfellows from the emotional excitement of individuals brought together in a small crowd, from what is a sort of crowd hysteria. (Theories of Primitive Religions, 1965, p. 67-68)

Starting from the well-known descriptions of morphological rhythms—those by Mauss on the Eskimo or those by the Anglo-Saxon anthropologists who studied the Aboriginal Australians—Durkheim framed them into an interpretation marred by the vicious circles of collective psychology.

What is the evidence that the Blackfellows are in any particular emotional state during the performance of their ceremonies? And if they are, then it is evident that the emotion is produced, as Durkheim himself claimed, by the rites and the beliefs which occasion them, so the rites and beliefs which occasion them cannot convincingly be adduced as a product of the emotions. Therefore heightened emotion, whatever it may be, and if there is any particular emotional state associated with the ritual, could indeed be an important element in the rites, giving them a deeper significance for the individual, but it can hardly be an adequate causal explanation of them as a social phenomenon. The argument, like so many sociological arguments, is a circular one—the chicken and the egg. The rites create the effervescence, which creates the beliefs, which cause the rites to be performed; or does the mere coming together generate them? Fundamentally Durkheim elicits a social fact from crowd psychology. (Theories of Primitive Religions, 1965, p. 68)

This little detour by the Durkheimian theory of the sacred explains, in my opinion, why the interest for rhythm, as a form of the movement of singular and collective individuation, was finally covered in Dukheim's thought by the conception, already expressed by Hubert, who defined the rhythm as simple organization of the duration. It combined a psychological description with a neo-Kantian goal. His primary concern was to determine the “basic forms of religion,” that is, to provide a description of the historical as well as systemic origins of the sacred, which was for him the image and foundation of all society. Thus, in the conclusion of The Elementary Forms..., the rhythm retained a certain sociogenetic dimension that allowed for “collective renewal,” but it supported above all the social construction of the category of time through which the group coordinated its actions and individuals organized their intimate “duration.”

It is the rhythm of social life which is at the basis of the category of time. (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912, p. 440, trans. Joseph Ward Swain)

The rhythm of collective life dominates and embraces the varied rhythms of all the elementary lives from which it results; consequently the time which it expresses dominates and embraces all particular durations. It is time in general. [...] This impersonal and total duration is measured, and the guide-lines in relation to which it is divided and organized are fixed by the movements of concentration or dispersion of society; or, more generally, the periodical necessities for a collective renewal. If these critical instants are generally attached to some material phenomenon, such as the regular recurrence of such or such a star or the alternation of the seasons, it is because objective signs are necessary to make this essentially social organization intelligible to all. (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912, p. 442, trans. Joseph Ward Swain)

I have shown in a previous study (Michon, 2015b) how Mauss eventually broke with this sociological neo-Kantianism and tried to build, based on the notion of rhythm, a “physiology” of society, that, by accounting for society's permanent historical movement, would complete or even replace the quite unsatisfactory “anatomy” that was practiced until then. But, apart from Marcel Granet, of whom I will speak below, most Durkheimians have for their part been keen to continue what Durkheim's deeper research program was. Studies on rhythms have been integrated in the School's many studies aimed at showing that the categories of perception (space, time) or thought (whole, genus, cause, substance, soul, person) are not innate but from social origin. The rhythm has been defined therefore as the more or less rapid movement of people and material objects within a group and in its relations with external groups—viz. as a tempo. Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) has shown that there is “as many collective times as separate groups” and that the depth of the “collective memory” varies according to these “rhythms” (1950, p. 148, my trans.). Georges Gurvitch (1894-1965), explicitly referring to Halbwachs, emphasized that some groups have a “slow pace [cadences lentes],” while others have a “medium or precipitous pace [cadences moyennes ou précipitées]” and that it explains the diversity of their “experience of time [temps vécu]” (1950, p. 317, my trans.). Leroi-Gourhan, who culminated this tradition, affirmed that “rhythms are creators of space and time, at least for the individual; space and time are experienced [vécus] only to the extent that they are materialized in a rhythmic envelope” (1965, p. 135, my trans.). In all these cases, the rhythm constituted the framework of the social activity and formed a set of markers making it possible to give consistency to the individual time that was otherwise entirely devoid of form. Rhythm was a means both of coordinating social interactions and organizing psychic duration.

For my part, I think that we should resume with the question of rhythm where Mauss left it, which seems much more adequate to the radically historical anthropology we badly need. By way of consequence, I will put aside the question of the multiple ways of organizing the internal duration as well as the external interactions in favor of the one, mostly forgotten today, of the forms of the many processes by which the collective as well as the individual are produced and re-produced—the fundamental question of the “singular and collective individuation.”

Rhythms of Archaic Societies: The Eskimo (Mauss – 1904-1905)

To enter the gigantic work of Marcel Mauss, we can start from the few lines that Evans-Pritchard devoted to him. According to the latter, Mauss, in his essay on the Eskimo, aimed at demonstrating, from a thoroughly studied example, the veracity of Durkheim's theses on the determining character of ritual rhythms for religion.

The general theme of this essay was a demonstration of Durkheim's thesis that religion is a product of social concentration kept alive by periodic gregariousness, so that time, like things, has sacred and secular dimensions. (Theories of Primitive Religions, 1965, p. 69)

But this criticism seems much less justified than that directed towards Durkheim. It is true that, in his lectures, Evans-Pritchard was interested only in the theories of religion. But this perspective led him to be quite unfair to Mauss, or at least to oversimplify his approach of the Eskimo and to neglect all subsequent studies that revealed, in retrospect, how far he already was from a simple application of Durkheim's theories on religion. In his study of the seasonal morphological variations of Eskimo societies, Mauss naturally appropriated a certain number of Durkheimian ideas, especially those concerning the close link between social morphology and the forms of law, enunciated in The Division of Labour in Society (1893). However, the whole study seemed to be going in a very different direction from that indicated by Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). Without being entirely erased, the questions of sacred, ritual calendar and category of time became secondary. The questions that came to the fore were those of singular and collective individuation. Whereas, guided, at first, by the postulate that religion was of social nature, Durkheim ended up by reversing his original perspective and making the ritual calendar the true cause of social alternation, Mauss postulated the primacy of the morphological alternation and made the cycle of religious life one of the expressions of this alternation among others—like those of legal life or technological life. One may find this opposition a bit farfetched, and it depends, admittedly, only on a difference of emphasis in symmetrical interactions, but this difference exists and I allow myself to ask the skeptical reader to re-read the texts.

For Durkheim, “the religious life of the Australian passes through successive phases of complete lull and of superexcitation, and social life oscillates in the same rhythm” (The Elementary Forms..., p. 219, trans. Joseph W. Swain), whereas, for Mauss, the argument was exactly the opposite: “The religion of the Eskimo has the same rhythm as their social organization” (Seasonal Variations..., p. 57, trans. James J. Fox).

I apologize for here again recapitulating the content of the essay on the Eskimo, but it is so often cited second-hand and abusively simplified, that this little effort of patience required from the reader should not be useless. He or she will better appreciate what distinguished or brought Mauss closer to Durkheim before him, or to Evans-Pritchard or Granet after him.

The Eskimo lived and still live in regions characterized by a clear climatic opposition between summer and winter. In summer, the sunlight lasts for a very long time, the temperature rises above zero, the seas are no longer covered with ice, sea animals (seals and walrus in particular) but also the terrestrial animals (wild reindeer, polar bears, musk oxen, etc.) are scattered throughout the territory. In winter, the sunlight is very short, the temperature drops below zero, the ice is re-forming, the animals become inaccessible except those that concentrate on certain spots of the coast.

Following these climatic and biotopic variations, the small Eskimo societies which, at the end of the 19^th century, were installed along the coasts in series of independent and sometimes rival “settlements,” regularly took entirely opposite social forms. In the summer months, they lived scattered in small family groups independent of each other. They lived in isolated tents and nomadized on huge stretches of coast in pursuit of game and fish. During the winter, all families gathered in one station. They lived in houses made of stone, skin or snow (igloo) which were close to one another and which always sheltered several related families—that is, combined in a very large family extended to all collaterals. The number of these families could sometimes rise to ten. In some cases, all members of a settlement lived in a single long-house. In the center of the resort, there was also a common house, the kashim, which served as a meeting and ceremony venue for the entire community.

Mauss showed that this morphological opposition had an “impact” on the ritual life, the representations and the legal life (personal and real)—he also mentioned consequences on technology, without however developing them (Seasonal Variations..., p. 57, n. 1). In summer, the religious life was minimal.

The religion of the Eskimo has the same rhythm as their social organization. There is, as it were, a summer religion and a winter religion; or rather, there is no religion during the summer. The only rites that are practiced are private, domestic rituals: everything is reduced to the rituals of birth and death and to the observation of certain prohibitions. All the myths that (as we shall see) fill the consciousness of the Eskimo during the winter appear to be forgotten during the summer. Life is that of the layman. Even magic, which is often a purely private matter, hardly appears except as a rather simple sort of medical science whose rituals are minimal. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 57, trans. James J. Fox)

The jural life was organized on an individualistic basis. Weapons, tools, clothing, amulets, kayaks were clearly identified as individual properties. In the same way, each woman owned the family lamp, the pots and all the household instruments.

All these household objects are identified, in a magico-religious way, with the person. Eskimo are reluctant to lend, give or exchange objects that have already been used. They are buried with the dead. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 71, trans. James J. Fox)

The personal law was characterized by a patriarchal power, which gave the head of the family all authority, but women were so important in the domestic economy that they actually enjoyed a great deal of freedom. Heads of family had almost absolute independence. Except for the whale, they hunted alone or with their children.

Each daring fisherman or adventurous hunter brings his prize to his tent or stores it in his “cache” without having to consider anyone else. The individual is therefore as sharply distinguished as the small family. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 70, trans. James J. Fox)

In winter, everything changed. First, the religious life came back alive.

By contrast, the winter settlement lives in a state of continuous religious exaltation. This is the time when myths and legends are transmitted from generation to generation. The slightest event requires the more or less solemn intervention of magicians, angekok. A minor taboo can be lifted only by public ceremonies and by visits to the entire community. At every possible opportunity these events are turned into impressive performances of public shamanism to avert the famine that threatens the group. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 58, trans. James J. Fox)

All these ceremonies and rituals most often took place in the Kashim, but they could also occur in the open air, like the “Bladder Festival” during which the bladders of all the marine animals killed “by the entire group” during the year were thrown into the sea, in the hope that the souls of the animals, which they were believed to contain, would go back to be reincarnated in female seals and walruses. Masked dances were performed before the entire community. In some cases, these ceremonies would give rise to some exchange of women. In Cumberland Sound, a mask representing a divinity coupled men and women regardless of their kinship but by their names, that is to say, as in the past the mythical ancestors after whom present individuals were named and whose persons they were living representatives. The festival of the dead was one of the most important, along with those which bound the group with the wild animals, because it ensured the continuity of the group in time and integrated its dead into it through a complex trade of gifts between the living and the dead.

Since it is customary that the latest child to be born takes the name of the last person who has died, the feast begins with a request to the souls of the dead to become reincarnated for a short time in the namesake which each of the dead has in the settlement. Next, these living namesakes of the dead are laden with presents, gifts are exchanged among all who have assembled, and then the souls are dismissed and they leave their human dwellings to return to the land of the dead. Thus, at this time, the group not only regains its unity but sees itself re-formed, through this same ritual, as an ideal group composed of all successive generations form the earliest times. Mythic and historic ancestors, as well as recent dead, come to mingle with the living and all are in communion through the exchange of gifts. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 59, trans. James J. Fox)

The jural life also changed and took a much more collective, almost communist aspect.

The nuclear family, so clearly individualized during the summer, tends to disappear to some extent within a much wider group [...] the group who together occupies the same igloo or long-house. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 64, trans. James J. Fox)

Property no longer had the individualistic or domestic character particular to summer. Movable objects might be borrowed without any obligation of precise return.

To this narrow individual or family egoism is now opposed a broad collectivism. [...] The long-house is not the property of any of the families who live in it but of the housemates together. It is built and repaired at common expense. It even seems that there is a collective ownership of the land. As far as consumer goods are concerned, collectivism, instead of being restricted to the small family as in summer, extends to the whole house. The game is equally shared among all inhabitants. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 72, my trans.)

Finally, the power was no longer patriarchal and was incarnated in the person of a chief whose powers were very limited and who served only to facilitate the functioning of the group.

The head is designated not by birth but because of certain personal characteristics. He is generally an old man, a good hunter or the father of one; a rich man, often the owner of an umiak; an angekok or magician. His powers are not extensive; his functions are to receive strangers and to distribute places and portions of meat. He is asked to regulate internal differences. But his rights over his companions are, in the end, quite limited. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 66, trans. James J. Fox)

When he existed, this chief was firmly controlled by the community and must redistribute his wealth.

A mystic efficacy is attributed to these exchanges and to this redistribution: they are necessary for success in hunting; for without generosity, there can be no luck. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 73, trans. James J. Fox)

Thus Mauss concluded.

This economic communism of winter is strikingly parallel to the sexual communism during the same season; it shows, once more, the degree of moral unity that the Eskimo community attains at this time. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 73, trans. James J. Fox)

This analysis shows how unfair Evans-Pritchard's criticism was. Mauss did not simply want to confirm the Durkheimian theory of religion by a complete case study. He certainly treated the question of ritual life with care but he did not limit his analysis to it. He was as much interested—I believe, actually much more interested—in Eskimo's beliefs or in their jural life, to which he dedicated three times more pages. In his essay on Seasonal Variations..., Mauss actually achieved the first total monographic and descriptive study of the effects produced by morphological changes on singular and collective individuation. The essay is for this reason seminal and must be taken as such for our reflection on social rhythms.

Of course, Mauss' essay was still fragile in many respects. He seemed to be fascinated by the “communism” that reigned in the station. While expressing a slight distance, his text sometimes took on the appearance of a primitivist utopia.

Beginning with the earliest writers and continuing until Nansen, [who turned his observations into a dithyrambic eulogy], most observers have been struck by the gentleness, intimacy, and general gaiety that reigns in an Eskimo settlement. A kind of affectionate good feeling seems prevalent among everyone. Crimes appear to be relatively rare. Theft is almost nonexistent, though there are few occasions where theft could be committed, given the rules over property. Adultery is almost unknown. One of the characteristic features of a clan is the extreme indulgence shown toward offences or crimes committed by its members: sanctions are principally moral. This same indulgence is found in an Eskimo settlement. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 67, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

Moreover, Mauss also indulged, at least in certain parts of his monograph, to a somewhat summary psychology drawn from the crowd psychology. When they were assembled, the Eskimos seemed to him to entirely lose their individuality and to merge into an undifferentiated “masse.”

This unity is indeed so strong that, inside the kashim, the individuality of families and of particular houses disappears; they call merge in the totality of society [dans la masse totale de la société]. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 58, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

Similarly, the exchange of women, which was culturally prescribed as a regeneration of the alliance with the mythical ancestors, seemed to result in a “fusion of individual personalities.”

These different festivities are always and everywhere accompanied , quite significantly, byt the phenomenon of sexual licence [...]. Communal sex is a form of communion, perhaps the most intimate there is. When it occurs, it produces a fusion of individual personalities—something which we can see is far removed from the state of individualization and isolation in which small family groups live dispersed, during the summer, along enormous extent of coast. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 59-60, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

As for Le Bon and Durkheim, any social gathering led to a contagious “effervescence.”

In winter, the society is highly concentrated and in a continuous state of effervescence and overactivity. Because individuals are closer to each others, social actions and reactions are more numerous, imitated, and continuous; ideas are exchanged, feelings reinforce and mutually enhance each other; the group, always acting, always present in the eyes of all, has more sense of itself and also holds a greater place in the consciousness of individuals. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 76, my trans.)

Yet, his analysis suggested the presence of tensions in the group, that contradicted this unanimist vision. Interestingly, within the community, conflicts were regulated, according to Mauss, through ritualized poetic duels.

[The only punishment that is applied within the station, at least in Greenland, is of a genuine bonhomie: the famous “duel with songs,” which is a drum dance in which alternatively,] two adversaries—plaintiff and defendant—take turn insulting each other using rhymed verse and refrain, until the fertile inventiveness of one of the opponents assures him a victory over the other. The esteem of the onlookers is the only reward, their reproach the only punishment to constitute this peculiar judgment. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 67, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

But he also reported that, in some cases, “chiefs have been assassinated because they were too rich” (p. 73), which suggested that violence was not entirely absent from the Eskimo settlements. Moreover, outside the group, the conflicts seemed pervasive and quite violent: “Place-fellows were obliged to avenge each other's death when the aggressor belonged to another locality.” (p. 68) The vendettas between settlements were, thus, permanent and, as in the case of the Nuer eventually studied by Evans-Pritchard (see below), they probably constituted one of the paradoxical sources of their singular and collective individuation.

Tales are told of numerous vendettas in Greenland between one settlement and another. Sources indicate that throughout Baffin Land and to the north-west of Hudson Bay there used to be actual wars. In eastern Greenland, Holm and Hanserak report a similar hostility and constant enmity between settlements on different fiords. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 68, trans. James J. Fox)

However, Mauss saw sheer exaggeration in Boas's account of a cruel way to settle these conflicts.

It is claimed, undoubtedly with some exaggeration, that when a group visited a neighbouring settlement, the duel or violent game which took place between two chosen champions ended in the death of one of the combatants. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 68, trans. James J. Fox)

Thus, as soon as his essay on the Eskimos, the topic of internal and external conflictuality in the community appeared in Mauss' reflection. Admittedly, it was still embryonic but it was already present, which was sufficient to distinguish it from the denial of conflictuality by the contemporary economists who, almost unanimously, thought of society as a “living organism” which had its own internal law, naturally regulated itself, and was not to be disturbed by state interventionism.

Moreover, the topic of conflictuality was already linked to that of exchange. Gift, in particular, appeared as a mandatory provision that prevented the potential development of conflict.

It is a general rule that a family ought to possess only a certain amount of wealth. Throughout Greenland, when the resources of a house surpass what is considered to be the normal level, this wealth must be given to the poorer individuals. Rink reports that the members of a settlement jealously watch to see that no one possesses more than anyone else. When this occurs, the surplus, which is arbitrarily determined, is [lent – actually given] to those who have less. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 73, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

As he later showed by thoroughly studying the Potlatch phenomenon, the gift was neither gratuitous nor affectionate. It had above all a religious significance and was addressed to the ancestors and to all those, children, current bearers of their names, which represented them.

This abhorrence of possessing too much is also widespread in the central regions. It is especially noticeable in the ritual exchange of presents during the festival of Sedna, when gifts are given to the namesakes of the ancestral dead, to children, and to visitors. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 73, trans. James J. Fox)

Finally, the gift appeared as a means of breaking down any emerging hierarchy and preserving a certain equality between group members.

The combination of this ritual with the Indian customs of the North-West leads, in the Alaskan tribes, to an institution, which is not identical, no doubt, but analogous to the potlatch of the Indian tribes. Most of the villages in this region possess some sort of chiefs, whose authority is not well defined, and in any case a number of rich and influential men. But the community remains jealous of their power; hence, a chief can remain a chief, or rather a rich man can remain rich and influential, only if he distributes his goods periodically. Only the benevolence of his group allows him to accumulate his wealth and, by dispersing this wealth, he triumphs over it. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 73, trans. James J. Fox)

Therefore, it is quite remarkable that Mauss, when thinking of these exchanges and conflicts and the social rhythms they were related to, no longer used the psychological vocabulary of “effervescence” but the strictly sociological terms of “intensity of social life/sociality [intensité de la socialité].”

There is, in short, between these two periods of the year, a tremendous difference due to the passage from an intense to a languishing and depressed sociality. [...] In the Eskimo, the social life follows therefore a kind of regular rhythm. It is not constant in the different seasons of the year. It has a moment of apogee and a moment of perigee. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 79, my trans.)

In 1905 Mauss partly remained under Durkheim's influence, but he began to distance himself from him at least on three accounts.

First, he recognized the need, in order to grasp the phenomenon of society, to make monographic studies that considered all aspects of a single society and not just the religious beliefs that were supposed to provide the group with the consciousness of its unity.

Second, he already perceived the presence at the very heart of society of a gift-conflictuality complex that ruined in advance any unanimist or, as we say today, consensus-based daydream.

Third, he began to discard crowd-psychology vocabulary and to outline instead the concept of a “variation of social life/sociality.” Some milestones were thus laid that were soon to allow him to consider, through an intensive study of the Potlatch of the North-West Indians, the rhythms of singular and collective individuation on entirely different bases than those provided by the crowd psychology and to anticipate Evans-Pritchard's work in the 1930s.

In addition to that, Mauss clarified, by specifying a Durkheimian idea exposed in Suicide (1897), the theoretical status of social rhythms. He showed that the phenomenon of morphological but also technological, religious and legal alternation, was no mere adaptation to climatic and biotopic alternation induced by the poorness of available technology, but a sui generis phenomenon which received its ultimate explanation from the social level only. Social rhythms were not entirely determined nor explicable by geographical and technical conditions. As far as archaic societies were concerned, Mauss of course conceded that the environment and the level of technological development had an impact on morphological variations, but, in his eyes, they played only a secondary role.

On the one hand, at the outset of his essay, he warned against the falsity of absolute geographical determinism, because it was always mediated by the state of society.

[The geographical situation, far from being the essential factor which we have almost exclusively to consider, constitutes only one of the conditions for the material form of human groups.] In most cases it produces its effects only by means of numerous social conditions which it initially affects, and which alone account for the result. [...] So, when we study its effects, we must trace their repercussions on all the categories of collective life. All these questions are not, therefore, geographical questions but proper sociological ones; and in this study we will approach them in a sociological spirit. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 22, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

On the other hand, he emphasized that the technical relation to nature was not the only one nor the most important. The poverty of the Eskimo technology made them very dependent on the animals they hunted of fished, but this explanation was insufficient to account for what was happening, because in reality human beings insert themselves into nature through all aspects of their societies and not only through technology.

[It is because of this technology, which is a social phenomenon, that Eskimo social life becomes a veritable phenomenon of symbiosis that forces the group to live like the animals they hunt or fish]. These animals concentrate and disperse, according to the seasons. [...] In summary, summer opens up an almost unlimited area for hunting and fishing, while winter narrowly restricts this areas. This alternation provides the rhythm of concentration and dispersion for the morphological organization of Eskimo society. The population congregates or scatters like the game. The movement that animates Eskimo society is synchronized with that of the surrounding life. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 55-56, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

Rhythmic phenomena were therefore of a specific nature separated from the cosmos. They were historical phenomena which were brought about by a causality of their own, linked somehow to natural phenomena but not determined by them.

Nevertheless, although biological and technological factors may have an important influence, they are insufficient to account for the total phenomenon. They provide an understanding of how it happens that the Eskimo assemble in winter and disperse in summer. But they do not explain why this concentration attains that degree of intimacy which we have already noted [...]. They explain neither the reason for the kashim nor the close connection that, in some cases, seems to unite it to other houses. Eskimo dwellings could supposedly be grouped together without concentrating [so narrowly] and without giving birth to this intense collective life [...]. [Neither need they be long-houses.] But the state of Eskimo technology can only account for the time of the year when these movements of concentration and dispersion occur, their duration and succession, and their marked opposition to one another. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 56, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

In fact, bio-climatic rhythms represented only “opportunities” that allowed social rhythms to spring up.

Instead of being the necessary and determining cause of an entire system, truly seasonal factors may merely mark the most opportune occasions in the year for theses two phases to occur. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 79, trans. James J. Fox)

Thirty years later, Marcel Granet, commenting on the morphological variations in ancient China, perfectly summarized this point of view.

This rhythm [the seasonal morphological variation] is not directly modeled on seasonal rhythm. If it seems to depend on all natural conditions which control the activity of a society living especially on agriculture, it is because the season during which the Earth does not need human labor offers a time where men can most conveniently deal with interests that are not secular. Nature provides the signal and the opportunity. But the need to seize the opportunity and to perceive the signal has its source in social life itself. (M. Granet, La Pensée chinoise – Chinese Thought, 1934, p. 110, my trans.).

Finally, Mauss indicated, in support of his thesis, many other facts of morphological variations which were not linked to climatic variations or even to a deficient state of technology. He began with a large number of Amerindian populations in the American West. I quote at length because, besides giving us some information that will be needed below, these lines largely anticipate the subsequent work on the Potlatch that eventually led to the essay on The gift and the great theoretical texts of the 1930s.

Although this curious alternation appears most strikingly among the Eskimo, it is not limited to them. The fact that we just observed has a range that we do not suspect at first sight. First of all, there is in Indian America a large group of societies, each by itself quite large, which are living in the same way. These are, first of all, the tribes belonging to the so-called North-West civilization: Tlingit, Haida, Kwakiutl, Aht, Nootka, and even a fair number of Californian tribes, Hupa, Wintu, etc. In all these peoples there is an extreme concentration in winter and an extreme dispersion in summer, although there are no essentially different technological or biological conditions for this double organization; and this double morphology very often corresponds to two different social regimes. This is particularly true with the Kwakiutl; in winter the clan disappears and gives way to groups of a very different kind, secret societies or, more exactly, religious brotherhoods in which all the nobles and free people are hierarchized; the religious life flourishes in winter, the profane life in summer, as in the Eskimo. [...] Many Athapascan societies, ranging from those in the far north such as the Ingalik and Chilcotin, to the Navaho of the New Mexican plateau, also have the same character. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 78, my trans.)

But these examples, which are taken in more or less “archaic” populations, might still seem too close to the Eskimo, so Mauss added to them a series of other examples taken in more complex European and Asian societies.

These American Indian societies are not, however, the only ones that conform to this type. In temperate or extreme climates where the influence of the seasons is clearly evident, there occur innumerable phenomena similar to those we have studied. We can cite two particularly striking cases. First, there are the summer migrations of the pastoral mountain peoples of Europe which almost completely empty whole villages of their male population. Second, there is the seemingly reverse phenomenon that once regulated the life of the Buddhist monk in India and still regulates the lives of itinerant ascetics, now that Buddhist sangha no longer has followers in India: during the rainy season, the mendicant ceases his wandering and re-enters the monastery. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 78, trans. James J. Fox)

Finally, he cited examples taken from the society of his time.

What is more, we have only to observe what goes on around us in our Western societies to discover these same oscillations [les mêmes oscillations]. About the end of July, there occurs a summer dispersion. Urban life enters that period of sustained languor known as vacances, the vacation period, which continues to the end of autumn. [From this time on, it tends to increase steadily until it drops off again in July]. Rural life follows the opposite pattern. In winter, the countryside is plunged into a kind of torpor; the population at this time scatters to specific points of seasonal migration; each small, local, or territorial group, turns in upon itself; there are neither means nor opportunities for gathering together; this is the time of dispersion. By contrast, in summer, everything becomes reanimated; workers return to the fields; people live out of doors in constant contact with on another. This is the time of festivities, of major projects and great revelry. Statistics reflect these regular variations in social life. Suicides, an urban phenomenon, increase from the end of autumn until June, whereas homicides, a rural phenomenon, increase from the beginning of spring until the end of summer, when they become fewer. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 78-79, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

In this instance, Mauss was clearly indebted to Durkheim, who wrote in 1897 the following statement.

For the countryside, Winter is a time of rest approaching stagnation. All life seems to stop; human relations are fewer both because of atmospheric conditions and because they lose their incentive with the general slackening of activity. People seem really asleep. In Spring, however, everything begins to awake; activity is resumed, relations spring up, interchanges increase, whole popular migrations take place to meet the needs of agricultural labor. (É. Durkheim, Suicide (1897), p. 119, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson).

Many years later, Mauss emphasized again the discrete but general presence of social rhythms in modern societies.

I think I have given a good example of this principle of “double morphology” with the Eskimos. But it is almost the same everywhere. We live alternately in a collective life, and a family and individual life. (M. Mauss, “La cohésion sociale dans les sociétés polysegmentaires” (1931), Œuvres, t. III, 1969, p. 14, my trans.)

Societies no longer appeared in these lines as great pots where the social broth periodically returned to boiling, but as sets of “functions” varying according to different rhythms, in short as systems of undulating functions. Furthermore, Mauss did not have a schematic or mechanical vision of social rhythms. The latter were not entirely regular or cyclical and we see that they could sometimes overlap in the same society, as in the example cited above of rural and urban populations of his time.

In short, Mauss sketched a conception of society, which somehow resembled that of the economists, as a set of rhythms, defined as “oscillations,” with different spatial extensions, complexity levels and frequencies. “Each social function probably has a rhythm of its own.”

Among these people [the Eskimos], the phenomenon is so easily observed that it almost springs to view, [so to speak]; but very likely it can be found elsewhere. Furthermore, though this major seasonal rhythm is the most apparent, it may not be the only one; there are probably other lesser rhythms [qui ont une moins grande amplitude], within each season, each month, each week, each day. Each social function probably has a rhythm of its own. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 79, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

But whereas economists were only interested in the succession of prosperity, crisis, depression phases, i.e. the variations of investment, activity, salary, profit and consumption, and compared the society to a living organism, sometimes even directly linked with the cosmos, Mauss on the one hand strongly objected to the reduction of the social to the living and the cosmos, and on the other hand, underlined both the ontogenetic and sociogenetic aspects of social rhythms. His reflection was not about capitalism but “individual life and collective life” and their historical-anthropological results.

However, the explanation he suggested not only failed to answer the questions of work, production and exchange that were addressed by the economists, but it was also ultimately based on an individualistic principle. Societies were indeed driven, each one in a particular way, by a rhythmic law “of considerable generality.” But the main cause of this common rhythmicity was the need for human being, as living “bodies” but also as “minds,” to periodically escape from social pressure. In other words, there was a kind of dialectic between the individuals and the social group they belonged to triggered by the resistance of the former against the latter.

All this suggests that we have come upon a law that is probably of considerable generality. 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. We might almost say that social life does violence to [the bodies and minds] of individuals which they can sustain only for a time; and there comes a point when they must slow down and partially withdraw from it. We have seen examples of this rhythm of dispersion and concentration, of individual life and collective life. (Seasonal Variations..., 1905, p. 79, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

These questions were to be settled only two decades later in Mauss' most famous essay in which he was to propose a full perspective on economics, which was entirely opposed to the Classical Liberal paradigm and in which the generation and regeneration of singular and collective individuals were not subject to the production and circulation of goods but, reversely, commanded over them.

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Chevaucher le lombric. Inférences rythmiques entre les vivants, au Japon

Yoann Moreau & Masumi Oyadomari — 2024-06-01T13:03:13Z

Cet article a déjà été publié dans Techniques & Culture. Revue semestrielle d'anthropologie des techniques, 73 | 2020 – Édition électronique : URL : https://journals.openedition.org/tc/13488. Nous remercions Yoann Moreau pour l'autorisation de reproduire cet article sur RHUTHMOS.

Into this house we're born
Into this world we're thrown
The Doors, Riders on the Storm, 1971

Préambule

Dans ce qui suit nous allons décrire l'agriculture pratiquée par M. Masumi Oyadomari dans le village de Koshimoda, sur la côte ouest de la péninsule d'Izu, à 150 km au sud-est de Tokyo (figure 1). La manière dont Masumi s'inspire du vivant pour informer sa pratique pourra sembler incongrue aux lecteurs accoutumés à séparer le naturel et l'artifice, l'observation (de la vie, de la nature) et la participation (à la vie, à la nature). C'est pourquoi nous plaçons ici un petit préambule.

Dans la tradition japonaise, la vie et la nature ne sont pas considérées comme extérieures aux humains, c'est-à-dire comme des phénomènes que l'on pourrait raisonnablement prétendre mettre à distance, objectiver, maîtriser, administrer. Pour Masumi en particulier, ce que la vie inspire semble relever avant tout de l'expérience sensible et affective, voire spirituelle.

Ce qu'il apprend au contact des autres espèces habitant dans ses parcelles, c'est la manière dont d'innombrables façons d'être au monde s'acculturent, c'est-à-dire vivent en interférences et en inter-inférences les unes à l'égard des autres. Masumi s'inclut dans ce tissu de relations non hiérarchisées entre les vivants.

L'idée d'acculturation réciproque, présente dans la double consonne du terme fermacculture que nous allons employer pour nommer la pratique de Masumi, traduit un processus continuel d'inspiration et de transformation mutuelles entre les formes de vies, processus de « co-suscitation » (engi 縁起) dont les humains sont pleinement partie prenante et qui, au Japon, caractérise le devenir commun des vivants (Imanishi 2015). [...]

Time, temporality and cultural rhythmics : An anthropological case study

Gonzalo Iparraguirre — 2022-02-15T21:09:59Z

This text has already been published in Time & Society, 2016, Vol. 25(3), pp. 613-633. We thank Gonzalo Iparraguirre for the permission to republish it here.

Abstract : This article presents the introduction and the update of an ethnographic research on temporality among indigenous groups, published in 2011 in its full version as a book in Spanish. It seeks to prove the usefulness of the conceptual distinction between time, defined as the phenomenon of becoming in itself, and temporality, defined as the human apprehension of becoming in a cultural context. Furthermore, the existence of non-hegemonic temporalities is exemplified by a case study of originary temporality with Mocovı´ indigenous societies in Argentina's Chaco region. The methodology built for studying temporality in different social groups, termed here as cultural rhythmics, is also introduced. By studying different rhythmic experiences integrated in the participant observation, the rhythmic method enables us to interpret social facts that are implicit in the everyday practices of organisation, in the economic–political relations, and in the group's worldviews.

Keywords : Time, temporality, cultural rhythmics, indigenous Mocovı´ people, anthropology

Introduction

The purpose of carrying out an anthropological research on the concepts of time and temporality, and their practical implications in the everyday life of different social groups through cultural rhythmics methodology, derives from my own interest in establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophical and scientific studies of time. [...]

Rhythm as Form of Social Process (Part 1)

Pascal Michon — 2019-03-12T07:00:00Z

Sommaire

Previous chapter

In the 1900s emerged a new way to address the growing fluidization of the world which was based on a quite different rhythmological ground. Unlike the economists, who were using—at least most of them—a naturalistic paradigm of rhythm partly derived from physiology and life science, the sociologists and anthropologists, who wanted to account for the production and reproduction of the society as a whole, of the various social groups, and their individual members, rejected any continuity between nature and society, and therefore transformed the concept of rhythm in a way that is of a much greater interest to us. This chapter will be devoted to analyze and discuss the main features and consequences of this remarkable conceptual transformation.

Rhythm of Duration, Sociation, or Religion-Making? (The Durkheimian School – 1904-1912)

Divisions in days, weeks, months, years, etc., correspond to the periodicity of rites, festivals, public ceremonies. A calendar expresses the rhythm of the collective activity and, at the same time, its function is to ensure its regularity. (The Representation of Time..., 1904, my trans.)

In 1906, Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) published his famous essay entitled Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social Morphology. [1] Although it seemed apparently very close to Hubert's contribution, its object was, in fact, significantly different. Mauss, as we shall see below in detail, was not primarily interested in the Eskimo's ritual or religious calendar, but in the morphological variation of their social groups during the year. As he indicated in the introduction to his study, he defined their “morphology” as

the material substratum of societies: this includes the form that societies assume in their patterns of residence, the volume and density of the population, the way in which the population is distributed, as well as the entire range of objects that serve as a focus for collective life. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 19, trans. James J. Fox)

Its explicit aim was to understand, by taking advantage of the exceptional amplitude of the variations of Eskimo societies, the way in which,

the material form of human groups—the very nature and composition of their substratum—affects the different modes of collective activity. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 20, trans. James J. Fox)

Based on his painstaking study of the Eskimo societies, the annual cycle of ritual life appeared to Mauss as a mere constituent—alongside the alternations concerning the legal and technological life—of the more global cycle of society functions. The variations of the social life of the Eskimo did not only provide the basis for a collective construction of the category of time, but also and mainly for the production-reproduction of the group as well as the individuals who composed it. The social rhythm, which for Hubert gave its form and organization to duration, ensured in Mauss, first and foremost, a socio- and psychogenetic function.

The life of the Australian societies passes alternately through two distinct phases. Sometimes the population is broken up into little groups who wander about independently of one another, in their various occupations; each family lives by itself, hunting and fishing, and in a word, trying to procure its indispensable food by all the means in its power. Sometimes, on the contrary, the population concentrates and gathers at determined points for a length of time varying from several days to several months. This concentration takes place when a clan or a part of the tribe is summoned to the gathering, and on this occasion they celebrate a religious ceremony, or else hold what is called a corrobbori in the usual ethnological language. (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912, p. 215, trans. Joseph Ward Swain)

On the other hand, his interpretation of these morphological data was quite different from Mauss'. After having very briefly shown that individuals enjoyed alternately a fairly “independent” life and a more “collective” life, Durkheim insisted on the very dissimilar psychological atmosphere of the respective phases: asthenia, monotony, on one side ; enthusiasm, effervescence, of the other. What the most interested him was the particular psychic state into which the participants entered during the phases of social concentration. The description was then almost explicitly based on the notions of imitation and influence and the anthropological dualism, peculiar to the crowd psychology of Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) and the early Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904)—which he yet sharply criticized. When in the group, the “Primitive” was under the influence of “passions,” “emotions,” “enthusiasm,” “exaltation,” and “collective suggestion.” He behaved like a “madman”—Le Bon, who followed this line of argument to its ultimate conclusion, added “like a woman and a child”—and it was from this madness that religion was born.

These two phases are contrasted with each other in the sharpest way. In the first, economic activity is the preponderating one, and it is generally of a very mediocre intensity. Gathering the grains or herbs that are necessary for food, or hunting and fishing are not occupations to awaken very lively passions. The dispersed condition in which the society finds itself results in making its life uniform, languishing and dull. But when a corrobbori takes place, everything changes. Since the emotional and passional faculties of the Primitive are only imperfectly placed under the control of his reason and will, he easily loses control of himself. Any event of some importance puts him quite outside himself. Does he receive good news? There are at once transports of enthusiasm. In the contrary conditions, he is to be seen running here and there like a madman, giving himself up to all sorts of immoderate movements, crying, shrieking, rolling in the dust, throwing it in every direction, biting himself, brandishing his arms in a furious manner, etc. The very fact of the concentration acts as an exceptionally powerful stimulant. When they are once come together, a sort of electricity is formed by their collecting which quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation. Every sentiment expressed finds a place without resistance in all the minds, which are very open to outside impressions; each re-echoes the others, and is re-echoed by the others. The initial impulse thus proceeds, growing as it goes, as an avalanche grows in its advance. (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912, p. 215-216, trans. Joseph Ward Swain)

One can readily conceive how, when arrived at this state of exaltation, a man does not recognize himself any longer. Feeling himself dominated and carried away by some sort of an external power which makes him think and act differently than in normal times, he naturally has the impression of being himself no longer. It seems to him that he has become a new being: the decorations he puts on and the masks that cover his face figure materially in this interior transformation, and to a still greater extent, they aid in determining its nature. And as at the same time all his companions feel themselves transformed in the same way and express this sentiment by their cries, their gestures and their general attitude, everything is just as though he really were transported into a special world, entirely different from the one where he ordinarily lives, and into an environment filled with exceptionally intense forces that take hold of him and metamorphose him. How could such experiences as these, especially when they are repeated every day for weeks, fail to leave in him the conviction that there really exist two heterogeneous and mutually incomparable worlds? One is that where his daily life drags wearily along; but he cannot penetrate into the other without at once entering into relations with extraordinary powers that excite him to the point of frenzy. The first is the profane world, the second, that of sacred things. So it is in the midst of these effervescent social environments and out of this effervescence itself that the religious idea seems to be born. (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912, p. 218-219, trans. Joseph Ward Swain)

This “thing” that imposed itself upon them was only society as an all-encompassing totality, but the individuals interpreted it as a sacred principle, separated from the profane and the everyday life by a set of interdicts, a principle that they would figure in many ways and whose manifestations they would take great care to respect.

In fact, we have seen that if collective life awakens religious thought on reaching a certain degree of intensity, it is because it brings about a state of effervescence which changes the conditions of psychic activity. Vital energies are excited, passions more active, sensations stronger; there are even some which are produced only at this moment. (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912, p. 422, trans. Joseph Ward Swain)

In lectures presented near the end of his life, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) gave many counterexamples drawn from ethnographic observations that contradict most of Durkheim's claims. But he also noted the methodological difficulty that I have just mentioned. Durkheim actually constructed his entire theory of religion and, more broadly, of the sacredness, that is, de facto his entire theory of society, on an argument drawn directly from the crowdpsychology.

It contravenes his own rules of sociological method, for fundamentally it offers a psychological explanation of social facts, and he himself has laid it down that such explanations are invariably wrong. It was all very well for him to pour contempt on others for deriving religion from motor hallucination, but I contend that this is precisely what he does himself. No amount of juggling with words like “intensity” and “effervescence” can hide the fact that he derives the totemic religion of the Blackfellows from the emotional excitement of individuals brought together in a small crowd, from what is a sort of crowd hysteria. (Theories of Primitive Religions, 1965, p. 67-68)

What is the evidence that the Blackfellows are in any particular emotional state during the performance of their ceremonies? And if they are, then it is evident that the emotion is produced, as Durkheim himself claimed, by the rites and the beliefs which occasion them, so the rites and beliefs which occasion them cannot convincingly be adduced as a product of the emotions. Therefore heightened emotion, whatever it may be, and if there is any particular emotional state associated with the ritual, could indeed be an important element in the rites, giving them a deeper significance for the individual, but it can hardly be an adequate causal explanation of them as a social phenomenon. The argument, like so many sociological arguments, is a circular one—the chicken and the egg. The rites create the effervescence, which creates the beliefs, which cause the rites to be performed; or does the mere coming together generate them? Fundamentally Durkheim elicits a social fact from crowd psychology. (Theories of Primitive Religions, 1965, p. 68)

This little detour by the Durkheimian theory of sacredness explains, in my opinion, why the interest for rhythm, as form of the movement of singular and collective sociation, was finally covered in Dukheim's thought by the conception, already expressed by Hubert, who defined the rhythm as simple organization of the duration. It combined a psychological description with a neo-Kantian goal. His primary concern was to determine the “basic forms of religion,” that is, to provide a description of the historical as well as systemic origins of sacredness, which was for him the image and foundation of all society. Thus, in the conclusion of The Elementary Forms..., the rhythm retained a certain sociogenetic dimension that allowed for “collective renewal,” but it supported above all the social construction of the category of time through which the group coordinated its actions and the individuals organized their intimate “duration.”

It is the rhythm of social life which is at the basis of the category of time. [...] The rhythm of collective life dominates and embraces the varied rhythms of all the elementary lives from which it results; consequently the time which it expresses dominates and embraces all particular durations. It is time in general. [...] This impersonal and total duration is measured, and the guide-lines in relation to which it is divided and organized are fixed by the movements of concentration or dispersion of society; or, more generally, the periodical necessities for a collective renewal. If these critical instants are generally attached to some material phenomenon, such as the regular recurrence of such or such a star or the alternation of the seasons, it is because objective signs are necessary to make this essentially social organization intelligible to all. (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912, p. 440-442, trans. Joseph Ward Swain)

Morphological Rhythms in Eskimo Societies (Mauss – 1906)

The general theme of this essay was a demonstration of Durkheim's thesis that religion is a product of social concentration kept alive by periodic gregariousness, so that time, like things, has sacred and secular dimensions. (Theories of Primitive Religions, 1965, p. 69)

However, the whole study seemed to be going in a very different direction from that indicated by Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). Without being entirely erased, the questions of sacredness, ritual calendar and category of time became secondary. The questions that came to the fore were those of singular and collective sociation. Whereas, guided, at first, by the postulate that religion was of social nature, Durkheim ended up by reversing his original perspective and making the ritual calendar the true cause of social alternation, Mauss postulated the primacy of the morphological alternation and made the cycle of religious life one of the expressions of this alternation among others—like those of legal life or technological life. One may find this opposition a bit farfetched, and it depends, admittedly, only on a difference of emphasis in symmetrical interactions, but this difference exists and I allow myself to ask the skeptical reader to re-read the texts.

For Durkheim, “the religious life of the Australian passes through successive phases of complete lull and of superexcitation, and social life oscillates in the same rhythm” (The Elementary Forms..., p. 219, trans. Joseph W. Swain), whereas, for Mauss, the argument was the exact opposite: “The religion of the Eskimo has the same rhythm as their social organization” (Seasonal Variations..., p. 57, trans. James J. Fox).

The religion of the Eskimo has the same rhythm as their social organization. There is, as it were, a summer religion and a winter religion; or rather, there is no religion during the summer. The only rites that are practiced are private, domestic rituals: everything is reduced to the rituals of birth and death and to the observation of certain prohibitions. All the myths that (as we shall see) fill the consciousness of the Eskimo during the winter appear to be forgotten during the summer. Life is that of the layman. Even magic, which is often a purely private matter, hardly appears except as a rather simple sort of medical science whose rituals are minimal. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 57, trans. James J. Fox)

All these household objects are identified, in a magico-religious way, with the person. Eskimo are reluctant to lend, give or exchange objects that have already been used. They are buried with the dead. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 71, trans. James J. Fox)

Each daring fisherman or adventurous hunter brings his prize to his tent or stores it in his “cache” without having to consider anyone else. The individual is therefore as sharply distinguished as the small family. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 70, trans. James J. Fox)

In winter, everything changed. First, religion came back to life.

By contrast, the winter settlement lives in a state of continuous religious exaltation. This is the time when myths and legends are transmitted from generation to generation. The slightest event requires the more or less solemn intervention of magicians, angekok. A minor taboo can be lifted only by public ceremonies and by visits to the entire community. At every possible opportunity these events are turned into impressive performances of public shamanism to avert the famine that threatens the group. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 58, trans. James J. Fox)

Since it is customary that the latest child to be born takes the name of the last person who has died, the feast begins with a request to the souls of the dead to become reincarnated for a short time in the namesake which each of the dead has in the settlement. Next, these living namesakes of the dead are laden with presents, gifts are exchanged among all who have assembled, and then the souls are dismissed and they leave their human dwellings to return to the land of the dead. Thus, at this time, the group not only regains its unity but sees itself re-formed, through this same ritual, as an ideal group composed of all successive generations form the earliest times. Mythic and historic ancestors, as well as recent dead, come to mingle with the living and all are in communion through the exchange of gifts. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 59, trans. James J. Fox)

The jural life also changed and took a much more collective, almost communist aspect.

The nuclear family, so clearly individualized during the summer, tends to disappear to some extent within a much wider group [...] the group who together occupies the same igloo or long-house. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 64, trans. James J. Fox)

Property no longer had the individualistic or domestic character particular to summer. Movable objects might be borrowed without any obligation of precise return.

In contrast to the egoism of the individual or of the nuclear family, a generous collectivism prevails. [...] The long-house belongs to none of the families who live in it; it is the joint property of all the “housemates.” It is built and repaired jointly. Even land appears to be collectively appropriated. Collective rights over food, instead of being limited to the family as in the summer, extend to the entire house. Game is divided equally among all members. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 72, trans. James J. Fox)

Finally, the authority was no longer patriarchal and was incarnated in the person of a chief whose powers were very limited and who served only to facilitate the functioning of the group.

The head is designated not by birth but because of certain personal characteristics. He is generally an old man, a good hunter or the father of one; a rich man, often the owner of an umiak; an angekok or magician. His powers are not extensive; his functions are to receive strangers and to distribute places and portions of meat. He is asked to regulate internal differences. But his rights over his companions are, in the end, quite limited. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 66, trans. James J. Fox)

When he existed, this chief was firmly controlled by the community and must redistribute his wealth.

A mystic efficacy is attributed to these exchanges and to this redistribution: they are necessary for success in hunting; for without generosity, there can be no luck. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 73, trans. James J. Fox)

Thus Mauss concluded.

This economic communism of winter is strikingly parallel to the sexual communism during the same season; it shows, once more, the degree of moral unity that the Eskimo community attains at this time. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 73, trans. James J. Fox)

Next chapter

[1] The text was published in L'Année sociologique under the heading “Année 9 (1904-1905)” but actually printed by Felix Alcan in 1906. I will therefore use this second date. Page references to James J. Fox's translation.

Rhythm as Form of Social Process (Part 2)

Pascal Michon — 2019-03-12T06:00:00Z

Sommaire

Previous chapter

The Law of Rhythmic Social Life (Mauss – 1906)

These descriptions show how unfair Evans-Pritchard's criticism was. Mauss did not simply want to confirm the Durkheimian theory of religion by a case study. He certainly treated the question of ritual life with care but he did not limit his analysis to it. His perspective was much larger and he actually dedicated three times more pages to the Eskimo's jural life than to their religious beliefs.

Mauss' first noticeable achievement was to clarify, by elaborating further an idea borrowed from Durkheim's Suicide (1897), the theoretical status of social rhythms. He showed that the phenomenon of morphological but also technological, religious and legal alternation, was no mere adaptation to climatic and biotopic alternation induced by the poorness of available technology, but a sui generis phenomenon which received its ultimate explanation from the sociohistorical level only. Social rhythms were not entirely determined nor explicable by geographical and technical conditions. As far as archaic societies were concerned, Mauss of course conceded that the environment and the level of technological development had an impact on morphological variations, but, in his eyes, they played only a secondary role.

On the one hand, at the outset of his essay, he warned against the falsity of absolute geographical determinism, because it was always mediated by the state of society.

[The geographical situation, far from being the essential factor which we have almost exclusively to consider, constitutes only one of the conditions for the material form of human groups.] In most cases it produces its effects only by means of numerous social conditions which it initially affects, and which alone account for the result. [...] So, when we study its effects, we must trace their repercussions on all the categories of collective life. All these questions are not, therefore, geographical questions but proper sociological ones; and in this study we will approach them in a sociological spirit. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 22, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

[It is because of this technology, which is a social phenomenon, that Eskimo social life becomes a veritable phenomenon of symbiosis that forces the group to live like the animals they hunt or fish]. These animals concentrate and disperse, according to the seasons. [...] In summary, summer opens up an almost unlimited area for hunting and fishing, while winter narrowly restricts this areas. This alternation provides the rhythm of concentration and dispersion for the morphological organization of Eskimo society. The population congregates or scatters like the game. The movement that animates Eskimo society is synchronized with that of the surrounding life. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 55-56, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

Rhythmic phenomena were therefore of a specific nature, separated from the cosmos. Although they could be observed in human societies all around the world, they were historical phenomena which were brought about by a causality of their own, linked somehow to natural phenomena but not determined by them.

Nevertheless, although biological and technological factors may have an important influence, they are insufficient to account for the total phenomenon. They provide an understanding of how it happens that the Eskimo assemble in winter and disperse in summer. But they do not explain why this concentration attains that degree of intimacy which we have already noted [...]. They explain neither the reason for the kashim nor the close connection that, in some cases, seems to unite it to other houses. Eskimo dwellings could supposedly be grouped together without concentrating [so narrowly] and without giving birth to this intense collective life [...]. [Neither need they be long-houses.] But the state of Eskimo technology can only account for the time of the year when these movements of concentration and dispersion occur, their duration and succession, and their marked opposition to one another. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 56, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

In fact, bio-climatic rhythms did not explain the universal spread of social rhythms; they represented only “opportunities” that allowed them to spring up.

Instead of being the necessary and determining cause of an entire system, truly seasonal factors may merely mark the most opportune occasions in the year for these two phases to occur. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 79, trans. James J. Fox)

Thirty years later, Marcel Granet, commenting on the morphological variations in ancient China, perfectly summarized this viewpoint.

This rhythm [the seasonal morphological variation] is not directly modeled on seasonal rhythm. If it seems to depend on all natural conditions which control the activity of a society living especially on agriculture, it is because the season during which the Earth does not need human labor offers a time where men can most conveniently deal with interests that are not secular. Nature provides the signal and the opportunity. But the need to seize the opportunity and to perceive the signal has its source in social life itself. (M. Granet, La Pensée chinoise – Chinese Thought, 1934, p. 110, my trans.).

Mauss indicated, in support of his thesis, many other facts of morphological variations which were not linked to climatic variations or even to a deficient state of technology. He began with a large number of Amerindian populations in the American West. I quote at length because, besides giving us some noticeable information, these lines largely anticipate the subsequent work on the Potlatch that eventually led to the essay on The gift and the great theoretical texts of the 1930s.

Yet though this curious alternation appears most clearly among the Eskimo, it is by no means confined to this culture. The pattern that we have just noted is more widespread than one would at first suspect. First, among the American Indians, there is an important group of societies, quite considerable in themselves, that live in the same way. These are mainly the tribes of the northwest coast: Tlingit, Haida, Kwakiutl, Aht, Nootka and even a great number of Californian tribes such as the Hupa, and the Wintu. Among all these peoples there is an extreme concentration in winter and an equally extreme dispersion in summer, though there exist no absolutely necessary biological or technological reasons for this twofold organization. In keeping with this twofold morphology there are very often two systems of social life. This is notably the case among the Kwakiutl. In winter, the clan disappears, giving way to groups of an entirely different kind: secret societies or, more exactly, religious confraternities in which nobles and commoners form a hierarchy. Religious life is localized in winter; profane life is exactly like that among the Eskimo in summer. [...] Many Athapascan societies, ranging from those in the far north such as the Ingalik and Chilcotin, to the Navaho of the New Mexican plateau, also have the same character. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 78, trans. James J. Fox)

These American Indian societies are not, however, the only ones that conform to this type. In temperate or extreme climates where the influence of the seasons is clearly evident, there occur innumerable phenomena similar to those we have studied. We can cite two particularly striking cases. First, there are the summer migrations of the pastoral mountain peoples of Europe which almost completely empty whole villages of their male population. Second, there is the seemingly reverse phenomenon that once regulated the life of the Buddhist monk in India and still regulates the lives of itinerant ascetics, now that Buddhist sangha no longer has followers in India: during the rainy season, the mendicant ceases his wandering and re-enters the monastery. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 78, trans. James J. Fox)

Finally, he cited examples taken from European societies of his time. Social rhythms were not limited to archaic societies; they were also pervasive in modern ones.

What is more, we have only to observe what goes on around us in our Western societies to discover these same oscillations [les mêmes oscillations]. About the end of July, there occurs a summer dispersion. Urban life enters that period of sustained languor known as vacances, the vacation period, which continues to the end of autumn. [From this time on, it tends to increase steadily until it drops off again in July]. Rural life follows the opposite pattern. In winter, the countryside is plunged into a kind of torpor; the population at this time scatters to specific points of seasonal migration; each small, local, or territorial group, turns in upon itself; there are neither means nor opportunities for gathering together; this is the time of dispersion. By contrast, in summer, everything becomes reanimated; workers return to the fields; people live out of doors in constant contact with on another. This is the time of festivities, of major projects and great revelry. Statistics reflect these regular variations in social life. Suicides, an urban phenomenon, increase from the end of autumn until June, whereas homicides, a rural phenomenon, increase from the beginning of spring until the end of summer, when they become fewer. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 78-79, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

In this instance, Mauss was clearly indebted to Durkheim, who wrote in 1897 the following statement.

For the countryside, Winter is a time of rest approaching stagnation. All life seems to stop; human relations are fewer both because of atmospheric conditions and because they lose their incentive with the general slackening of activity. People seem really asleep. In Spring, however, everything begins to awake; activity is resumed, relations spring up, interchanges increase, whole popular migrations take place to meet the needs of agricultural labor. (É. Durkheim, Suicide (1897), p. 119, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson).

Many years later, Mauss emphasized again the general presence of social rhythms in modern societies.

I think I have given a good example of this principle of “double morphology” with the Eskimos. But it is almost the same everywhere. We live alternately in a collective life, and a family and individual life. (M. Mauss, “La cohésion sociale dans les sociétés polysegmentaires” (1931), Œuvres, to. III, 1969, p. 14, my trans.)

In the last pages of his essay, Mauss sketched a conception of society, which somehow resembled that of the neoclassical economists. The evidence gathered strongly suggested that society was not a set of fixed groups, nor even of classes, it was a bundle of oscillating entities. The fundamentally rhythmic nature of social life was probably a sociological “law of considerable generality.”

All this suggests that we have come upon a law that is probably of considerable generality. 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. We might almost say that social life does violence to [the bodies and minds] of individuals which they can sustain only for a time; and there comes a point when they must slow down and partially withdraw from it. We have seen examples of this rhythm of dispersion and concentration, of individual life and collective life. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 79, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

Moreover, since “each social function,” had “a rhythm of its own, ” these oscillations had different spatial extensions, complexity levels, and frequencies. They were not entirely regular or cyclical and could sometimes overlap, as in the examples cited above of modern rural and urban populations.

Among these people [the Eskimos], the phenomenon is so easily observed that it almost springs to view, [so to speak]; but very likely it can be found elsewhere. Furthermore, though this major seasonal rhythm is the most apparent, it may not be the only one; there are probably other lesser rhythms [qui ont une moins grande amplitude], within each season, each month, each week, each day. Each social function probably has a rhythm of its own. (Seasonal Variations..., 1906, p. 79, trans. James J. Fox, my mod.)

Apart from the fact that, generally speaking, society was not for Mauss reducible to production, exchange, and consumption, his conception of the sociological rhythms was however quite different from that of the economic rhythms by the economists. Whereas the latter often compared society to a living organism plunged in a natural context called trade, the rhythm of which were consequently not to be disturbed by state intervention, Mauss strongly objected to the reduction of society to a living organism and more generally of economy to nature. Although they remained most of the time unconscious, the social rhythms were entirely historical and therefore could be politically transformed if necessary.

Incantation and Prayer Rhythms (Mauss – 1904-1909)

Mauss' second significant achievement during the 1900s was more surprising. Parallel to his rather traditional use of the notion of rhythm in his anthropological study on the Eskimo, Mauss began to give it a significantly different sense which, despite its immense theoretical interest, has not yet, to my knowledge, attracted academic attention. This new meaning appeared in the researches, which are nowadays wrongly considered as obsolete, that Mauss initiated in the first years of the 20^th century concerning archaic poetry, ritual literature, and prayer.

In 1904, he published with his friend Henri Hubert an important article entitled “Outlines of a General Theory of Magic” [1] and, in 1909, the first part of his PhD thesis on Prayer, which unfortunately he never completed. These texts are rarely mentioned in the contemporary discussions concerning Mauss, which usually limit themselves to the Essay on the gift, but they are of the greatest interest to us because of the rhythmological innovations they introduced. [2]

Most remarkably, Mauss and Hubert immediately realized the importance of the pragmatic aspect of the discourses they were studying. This discovery lay at the heart of the texts written during the 1900s. In the essay on magic, Mauss' and Hubert's attention went to the fact that it was impossible to separate incantation and rite, language and act.

They are not separable from each other. They are so intimately associated that they should be studied concurrently in order to give an exact idea of the magical ceremonies. [...] Words and acts are absolutely equivalent. (Outlines of a General Theory of Magic, 1904, p. 47 and p. 50, my trans.)

The prayer, Mauss noted in the same spirit in 1909, was an integral part of ritual gesture.

In Australia, it would be quite hazardous [...] to treat of prayer in isolation; it is, so to speak, to no degree an autonomous rite. It is not self-sufficient [...]. Most of the time, it is only the accompaniment of another rite [...]. It is therefore impossible here to separate oral acts from manual gestures, which sometimes are performed independently but always contribute to giving the latter their full and true meaning. (The Prayer, 1909, Œuvres, to. I, p. 452, my trans.)

The importance of this idea was so great in Mauss's eyes that he repeated it practically word for word many years later.

As far as we can imagine the so-called primitive mentalities, the difference between the word and the act is not as great as in our Western minds. This is true in both senses. The word is an act [...], but, conversely, the rite is a word. (“Collective Categories of Thought and Freedom,” 1921, Œuvres, to. II, p. 121, my trans.)

In certain Australian tribes, he recalled,

the emission of voice, the breath itself, are rigorously conceived as a gesture [...] But conversely, the gesture in these religions is conceived as a language; the rite is usually a mimed dance or a mime; in any case, at least it is a symbol. (Ibid.)

The anthropological approach thus allowed Mauss to break with the age-old reduction of language to its referential function—and also, by anticipation, with its Levi-Straussian definition as sheer symbolic power. If a speech was equivalent to a gesture, or even an act, then its function was not only to represent ideas or things, but also to produce effects. Prayer was “full of meaning as a myth,” it was “often as rich in ideas and images as a religious narrative,” but it was also “full of strength and efficiency as a rite” and often “as powerfully creative as a sympathetic ceremony.” (1909, p. 359) The representation and the ritual gesture coincided perfectly and constituted a single act.

Here the ritual and mythical sides are, strictly speaking, only two sides of one and the same act. They appear at the same time, they are inseparable. (The Prayer, 1909, Œuvres, to. I, p. 360, my trans.)

Mauss made very clear the anti-representative perspective implied by these statements. He pointed out that ethnographic evidence about the embedment of prayer in the social context forced us to consider it, contrarily to traditional religious history, as a ritual action that had a meaning by itself and not as a discourse of an individual expressing through a conventional language his intimate religious representations.

Whereas, for philosophers and theologians, the ritual is a conventional language by which the interplay of images and intimate feelings imperfectly expresses itself, it becomes for us reality itself. For it contains all that is active and alive in prayer. (The Prayer, 1909, Œuvres, to. I, p. 385, my trans.)

Mauss, instead, sketched a pragmatic theory of language without forgetting yet its semantic side.

This convergence is, moreover, quite natural. Prayer is speech [La prière est une parole]. And language is a movement that has purpose and effect; basically, it is always an instrument of action. But it acts by expressing ideas, feelings that the words translate outside and make concrete. To speak is to act and think at the same time: that's why prayer belongs to faith and worship at the same time. (The Prayer, 1909, Œuvres, to. I, p. 358, my trans.)

Thus, from his earliest texts, language no longer appeared to Mauss as a mere instrument of representation of ideas or things, but primarily as an activity in which meaning and efficiency would go hand in hand. This first result, already remarkable in itself, was completed by another discovery which oriented, with even more strength, Mauss' theory of language in a new direction laying the ground for a entirely novel conception of rhythm.

In their essay on magic, Mauss and Hubert made, with respect to the opposition of sound and meaning which was foundational for the whole dualistic theory of the sign, a series of remarks that have not enough attracted academic attention. Influenced both by the emphasis put at the time by the authors themselves on the much criticized notion of mana, and by the no less debatable phonological reading made posteriorly by Levi-Strauss, we no longer see the novelty of the work on the magical discourse which was then accomplished.

In addition to their multiple attempts at defining the notion of mana, Mauss and Hubert insisted, in an innovative way, on the central role played in the magic system by the incantation, a term “which usually denotes the oral magic rituals” (1904, p. 47). They criticized their predecessors for having missed its significance: “It does not seem that it has ever been given the exact share it deserves.” (p. 47) They emphasized that the mana itself—the magic force—could be conceived from the incantation: “[For the Iroquois] the incantation is the orenda (the magic force) [the mana] par excellence.” (p. 107) Mauss and Hubert noted the frequency of meters and chants (p. 51), the importance of tone (p. 51), but also of onomatopoeia (p. 48), puns (p. 48). They noted that incantations were generally made in “a special language” which everywhere “seeks archaism, foreign or incomprehensible terms” (p. 50). More generally, they noted the importance, in the ritual and magical worldview, of sounds, and in particular, of human phonic production.

Among the Hurons, the orenda is the sound emitted by the things; the animals that cry, the singing birds, the trees that rustle, the wind that blows, all express their orenda. In the same way the voice of the enchanter is made out of orenda. The orenda of things is a kind of incantation. (Outlines of a General Theory of Magic, 1904, p. 106, my trans.)

Thus in magic ritual, the division of sound and meaning was not relevant, because the sounds did not represent ideas that would precede them, but formed a system signifying by itself. In this case, the speech system of sounds prevailed over the “words” (i.e. over the ideas which they represented): “The intonation can have more importance than the word.” (p. 51)

In short, Mauss' early anthropological studies revealed his deep questioning of two of the most important pillars of the dualistic theory of the sign: the primacy of representation over activity and efficiency, and the opposition of sound and meaning. [3] This must be strongly underlined because the theoretical reorientation that resulted from this critique of the semiotic paradigm brought him closer to the rhuthmic intuitions developed from the 18^th century by the string of artists and theoreticians reflecting on the language activity we have studied in volume 2.

Associating the two faces of his critique of the sign, Mauss repeatedly emphasized that the meaning of the magical incantations or prayers, that is to say essentially their effectiveness, resulted from their sounds, especially when the latter took the systematic form of a rhythm. This rhythmic aspect of the incantation pragmatism was particularly evident in magic, of which it constituted the main nucleus. Mauss and Hubert noted, for example, that for the Iroquois, “the cause par excellence is the voice” (1904, p. 107). In the same way, in Vedic India, “the bráhman [the active principle] is what the men and the gods act through, and it is, especially, the voice” (p. 110).

In 1913-1914, Mauss devoted an entire course to “the theory of the origin of the belief in the virtue of formulas,” in which he concluded that all ritual formulas had to be conceived “as deriving from a type of formulary ritual, where the pronunciation of rhythmic words was endowed with a value that is at once practical, suggestive, aesthetic, and moral” (“Cours de 1913-14” in Œuvres, to. II, p. 260).

In 1921, he explicitly attributed the pragmatic and signifying aspects of the magic formularies to their rhythm.

The emission of voice, the breath itself are rigorously conceived as a gesture: the magician enchants by his inspiration and expiration; his breath, the sound of his words, their rhythm, are his strength and his soul, and they are also something material. (“Collective Categories of Thought and Freedom,” 1921, Œuvres, to. II, p. 121, my trans., my emphasis)

In the summary of the course he devoted, the same scholastic year, to “the belief in the effectiveness of [magic and religious] formulas,” Mauss recapitulated his findings.

After a summary of last year's course, we have studied: 1° the magic oral rituals; 2° the funerary oral rituals; 3° the dramatic and cathectic [emotional] oral rituals. The following conclusions have been reached: all these formularies and the other religious oral rituals, in the strict sense, have the same characteristics: [they are] 1° practical; rhythmic words are supposed to have an immediate, practical, magic action; breath and voice are equivalent to notes; 2° moral and obligatory, and not spontaneous; 3° [they] have a cathectic, sentimental nature and effect. (“Résumé du Cours de 1920-1921,” Œuvres, to. II, p. 261, my trans.)

One may realize the importance attributed by Mauss to the pragmatic and signifying aspects of magic and religious formulary rhythm from the mere fact that he devoted to this subject his courses at the École des Hautes Études in 1910-11, 1911-12, 1912-13, and again in 1920-21, and 1922-23. And this long-sustained interest may, in turn, also help us to better assess his subsequent extensive research on archaic ritual and poetic literature, especially the dramatic poetry of the Australian corroboree studied in 1910-11, then again in 1922-23, 1923-24, 1924-25 and probably still in 1929-30 (“Leçons sur l'art et la littérature rituelle archaïques, 1910-1932” Œuvres, to. II, p. 259-263). Unfortunately, only the summaries of these lessons are extant but the list itself shows how much involved Mauss was in studies closely associating anthropology, with poetics, and linguistics.

This long and numerous series of border-crossing studies initiated by Mauss in the pre-war years, and which was continued until late in the 1930s, resulted in giving the language a completely new theoretical status. Mauss' conception of language headed, under the aegis of the concept of rhythm, in the same anti-dualistic direction indicated by philosophers such as Diderot and Nietzsche, poets such as Hölderlin, Goethe, Baudelaire, Hopkins, and Mallarmé, linguists such as Humboldt and Saussure (for Saussure see, Michon, 2010a, chap. 5; for the other authors, see vol. 2). Based on ethnographical data, Mauss operated an empirical critique of the semiotic dualism concerning the opposition of sound and meaning within the sign, as much as, outside the sign, between the latter and the spirit, or the world. Language was no longer taken merely as a means of representing ideas or things, but above all as series of acts that produced effects. Moreover, it was no longer considered as a catalog of words representing elementary meanings that could be combined to form a speech, but as an activity during which multiple levels of signifier were mobilized: lexical, syntactical, but also—and for magic it was essential—sonic, tonal, rhythmic.

This empirical critique of the semiotic dualism tended to remotivate—in the linguistic sense of the word—the notion of rhythm. The latter was no longer, as in the Eskimo studies, thought of as a linear and binary alternation of strong and weak periods of time, or as in the first studies on primitive poetry as mere succession of beats, but—in a manner close to that already envisaged by the poets and thinkers aforementioned and also to that that Meschonnic later developed from similar pragmatic bases—as the system of linguistic or extra-linguistic signifiers, responsible for the pragmatic and semantic effects of magic or religious rituals—as well as, one may say, of literatue (see vol. 2, chap. 8).

From this perspective, magic or ritual incantation as well as prayer should not be reduced to the words, nor even to the inarticulate sounds, they contained. There was, beyond and above the linguistic level proper, a continuous gradation of other signifying levels. To the words, one must also add, on the one hand, the breaths, inspirations and expirations, and on the other, the collective gestures and interactions that accompany them. And it was this rhythmic system, both dynamic and organized—this rhuthmos in the pre-Platonic sense of the term—that was responsible for all the effects of incantation, prayer, or poetry.

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[1] The text was published in L'Année sociologique under the heading “Année 7 (1902-1903)” but actually printed by Felix Alcan in 1904. I will therefore use this second date.

[2] In these last two sections, the page references will be to Hubert, Henri & Mauss, Marcel. 1904. “Esquisse d'une théorie générale de la magie” in Mauss, Marcel. 1950. Anthropologie et sociologie, Paris, PUF and Mauss, Marcel. 1909. “La prière” in Mauss, Marcel. 1968. Œuvres, to. I, Paris, Minuit. Other references in footnotes. All translations mine.

[3] Meschonnic has once pointed out the importance of Mauss' contribution without yet going into details (see Meschonnic, 1982, p. 294-295 et p. 648-651).

Rhythm as Form of Social Process (Part 3)

Pascal Michon — 2019-03-12T05:00:00Z

Previous chapter

Rhythm as Principle of Total Anthropology (Mauss – 1904-1923)

This transformation, or rather this unnoticed shift in the notion of rhythm, sheds some light on the Maussian program, developed after WW1, of a “total anthropology” embodied in the concept of “total social fact.” It also allows us to clearly distinguish it from its subsequent interpretations, particularly from that of Levi-Strauss but also from those developed more recently, still without any mention of the rhythm, by Maurice Godelier, Vincent Descombes, or Alain Caillé. [1]

I will develop this argument in another volume, but for the time being, let us notice that as early as 1904, Mauss and Hubert noted the link between the magic incantation and the body.

Far from being a simple individual expression, magic constantly constrains gestures and phrases. Everything is fixed and exactly determined. It imposes meters and chants. Magic formulas must be whispered or sung in a special tone, on a special rhythm. (Outlines of a General Theory of Magic, 1904, p. 51, my trans.)

In 1909, Mauss emphasized the “musical, rhythmic and melodic character of any archaic ritual formula” (The Prayer, 1909, p. 463). But as for Bücher, the song was “strongly linked to the manual rhythm to which it [was] subjected, since it [had] no other function than to rhythmize it and to direct it” (p. 463). Song and bodily movements could easily continue into each other.

[The song] can go on like a stereotypical gesture when the actor is tired and stops dancing [...]. The beat [la mesure] one keeps giving [battre] with music sticks (tnuma) is certainly a ritual gesture. (The Prayer, 1909, Œuvres, to. I, p. 463, my trans.)

Similarly, Mauss concluded his analysis of the ritual formulas by emphasizing the link between ritual formula and bodily movements through the rhythm.

All the formulas we will meet henceforth are: I. CONCERNING THE RITUAL FORMULA: 1° Musical, that is, melodic and rhythmic; 2° Regulator [Directrice] of gestures, mimes or dances. (The Prayer, 1909, Œuvres, to. I, p. 466, my trans., Mauss' emphasis)

In the course of 1922-23, devoted to the “Austalian oral ritual, and particularly, the artistic ritual,” Mauss extended this relationship even further.

A thorough study of the Australian ‘corrobori' (musical drama) has shown the public character of all its parts; research on the nature of rhythms, on the use of altered or worn words, on the relation between music, words and mimed gestures, or simply dance, has shown not only the social character, but the uniform effect on the organisms of the actors acting in group, and of the listeners participating in the singing. (“Cours de 1922-23,” Œuvres, to. II, p. 261, my trans.)

To these lower levels of the complex set of signifiers which partook in the rhythm, we must add other extralinguistic extensions which were this time concerning the social group. As soon as 1903, reflecting on the origins of poetry, Mauss defined the latter as a community “animated by the rhythmic movements” of ritual singing and dance.

The primitive choir presupposes, not only a group of people, but also a group of people who concentrate their voices as well as their movements, which form a same dancing mass (throng) [in English]. The community animated by rhythmic movements is the immediate, necessary and sufficient condition of the rhythmic expression of the feelings of this community. (“Les débuts de la poésie selon Gummere,” 1903, Œuvres, to. II, p. 252, my trans.)

In 1904, the study on magic came to the same conclusion. The magic rhythm was not limited to verbal and musical individual incantations, but mobilized all bodies in the group and put them together in movement.

At the Dayaks [...] when men are on the hunt, women wear swords [...] the whole village (...) must get up early because in the distance the warrior gets up early [...]. The whole social body is animated by the same movement. There are no more individuals. They are, so to speak, the spokes of a wheel, the ideal image of which would be the dancing and singing magic ring. (Outlines of a General Theory of Magic, 1904, p. 126, my trans.)

In 1909, in the study on prayer, the rhythm of individual prayer expanded to its social context. The ritual song “serve[d] to accompany the dance of an actor or a small number of mimes.” (1909, p. 463) Prayers were “collectively sung” (p. 466).

In 1921, Mauss stated again the same idea. Rhythm was “not simple [individual] words and acts” but a “collective element.”

From another point of view, moreover, the unity of manual ritual and oral ritual is still apparent: formulas and gestures are rhythmized, measured [rythmés, cadencés]. These are not simple words and acts, they are poems and songs and mimes. In the latter as in the former, there is the same collective element: rhythm, unison, repetition. (“Catégories collectives de pensée et liberté,” 1921, Œuvres, to. II, p. 122, my trans.)

In both cases, whether that involving the continuity between rhythm and body, ot that concerning the connection between rhythm and social group, Mauss addressed phenomena that had already been debated extensively by Bücher. But the difference between them may now appear to the reader. Whereas Bücher had taken rhythm as sheer set of sounds, that is from an acoustic and musical perspective, and described its flow through a metric model, Mauss approached rhythm from an anthropological, as well as poetic, and linguistic perspective, which opened the possibility to consider its flow through a rhuthmic model. In human societies, rhythm could not be merely reduced to an ordered sequence of sounds; it had to be considered, even in its mere physical or social sides, as partaking in the language activity, and was therefore observable as an organized flow of signifiers. Naturally, this meant enlarging the notion of language which encompassed not only tongue and speech, as philosophers and linguists had sustained for centuries, but also breath, gesture, and bodily movements; chant, song, and poetry; and social interactions.

By drawing a continuity between bodies, language, and society, this large rhuthmic signifying system participated in the production-reproduction of the human groups formed by these bodies, as well as the production-reproduction of the individuals themselves. Since he concentrated on ethnographical data, Mauss found this role powerfully embodied in the poetry of the primitive groups but he noted—in a prefiguration of Meschonnic's concept of “poetic subject” (see Bourassa, 2015, p. 53 sq.)—that, in modern societies, the rhythm had inherited this onto- and sociogenetic character through the transmission of the experience made in ritual collective singing to our poetic activity.

The rhythm still fulfills, for the individual poet who writes in order to be read, a function analogous to the one it once fulfilled, in the primitive homogeneous mass in which everyone was at once a poet and a listener. It is still a rule, a social thing; it is the very condition of that sympathy which poetry creates in a group of men. (“Les débuts de la poésie selon Gummere,” 1903, in Œuvres, to. II, p. 255, my trans., my emphasis)

Many years later, in a theoretical text about the organization of sociology, Mauss commented on the role of language rhythm in modern societies. The politician, he explained in a sudden but illuminating aside, must also demonstrate “his ability to handle the formulas, to ‘find the rhythms' and the necessary harmonies” (“Divisions et proportions des divisions de la sociologie,” 1927, Œuvres, to. III, p. 235). Thus modern political action was suddenly put in line with that of poetry and ritual song in archaic societies. If it wanted to succeed, it had to create rhythms that were in phase with the social rhythms. Mauss did not elaborate further on this particular subject—yet we will see that he proposed during the inter-war period a full rhythmic theory of society and power—but there is a letter written at the end of the 1930s to Roger Caillois (1913-1978), one of his young students who was fascinated by this idea, that proves that he was strongly suspicious about the rhythmic politics that had already developed in Russia, Italy, and Germany and was then envisaged, in France, by some members of the Collège de Sociologie (1937-1939). [2]

During the 1900s and 1910s, Mauss introduced several decisive innovations which significantly estranged him from his predecessors.

1. As Malinowski, he rapidly recognized the need for anthropologists to elaborate monographic studies that would consider all aspects of a single society, instead of reconstructing grand evolutionist or historicist views out of disparate data severed from their social context. In 1906, the publication of the Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo thus offered the first complete monographic and descriptive study of the effects produced by rhythmic morphological changes on individual and collective production-reproduction.

2. Mauss broke with Durkheim's sociological neo-Kantianism which aimed primarily at showing that categories of perception (space, time) or thought (whole, genus, cause, substance, soul, person) were not innate, as Kant had believed, but from social origin. This resulted in the rejection of the synthesis presented by Durkheim in the conclusion of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, which granted the morphological rhythm a certain sociogenetic power but aimed above all at accounting for the social construction of the category of time, through which the group coordinated its actions and the individuals organized their intimate “duration.”

3. Mauss also discarded the crowd-psychology vocabulary borrowed from Le Bon, which was still used although in a covert manner by Durkheim, and elaborated instead the concept of “variation of social life.” Society no longer appeared as a great pot where the social broth periodically returned to boiling and the individual were regenerated, but as a set of entities varying according to different rhythms, in short as a system of intertwined undulating functions. By doing so, Mauss laid one important foundation of the “physiology” of society that he was to developed after WW1 to account for society's permanent historical dynamism.

4. Yet, Mauss strongly objected to the reduction of society, at the hands of neoclassical economists, to a living organism and more generally to their comparison of economy with nature. The social “functions” he had identified were therefore of an entirely different nature from those postulated by economists. However, one cannot help noticing that despite this sharp ontological difference, there was no divergence in their formal description. In both cases, their dynamism was thought out according to the same neo-metric standard as fluctuation. This limitation made Mauss' last two innovations before WW1 all the more remarkable.

5. In the essays on Magic (1904) and Prayer (1909), as well as in the extensive research work that supported them, Mauss parted from the latest undulatory perspective, which from natural science had penetrated during the last decades into a large number of human and social sciences—and of which he had himself made considerable use. However, instead of using to accomplish this new step, as in the German tradition, the model of music, Mauss drew from his solid philological knowledge, from his meticulous attention to ethnographical data, and maybe from his personal interest in the latest developments in art and poetry, the outlines of a new notion of rhythm that could now be defined as system of signifiers, whatever their linguistic or extra-linguistic level, responsible for the pragmatic and semantic effects of the discourse.

6. In so doing, Mauss introduced into social science, for the first time ever, poetic and linguistic concerns that were close to those expressed by a series of poets, philosophers and linguists since the middle of the 18^th century (see vol. 2). It also largely anticipated the discoveries concerning the pragmatic and poetic functions of language, that were made in the second half of the 20^th century by authors such as Benveniste, Austin, Jakobson, and Meschonnic. Although he still partook, by promoting the concept of “oscillating function,” in the dominant epistemological trend borrowing from natural science, Mauss already indicated an alternative perspective which opened onto a radically historical anthropology. He also firmly opposed any recourse to the Platonic metric model and substituted it with a clear affirmation of the urgent need to utilize concepts pertaining to what we have recognized as the Democritean physical and the Aristotelian poetic paradigm.

Apart from Marcel Granet whose work I will discuss in another volume, most Durkheimians unfortunately did not follow Mauss on this path and continued in the wake of Durkheim's original neo-Kantian research program on the category of time. In their works, the rhythm was defined as the more or less rapid movement of people and material objects within a group as well as in its relations with external groups—viz. as tempo. Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) showed, for instance, that there are “as many collective times as separate groups” and that the depth of the “collective memory” varies according to these “rhythms” (1997, 1^st ed. 1950, p. 148, my trans.). Georges Gurvitch (1894-1965), explicitly referring to Halbwachs, emphasized that some groups have a “slow pace [cadences lentes],” while others have a “medium or accelerated pace [cadences moyennes ou précipitées]” and that it explained the diversity of their “experiences of time [temps vécu]” (1950, vol. 1, p. 317, my trans.). Leroi-Gourhan, who culminated this tradition, affirmed that “rhythms are creators of space and time, at least for the individual; space and time are experienced [vécus] only to the extent that they are materialized in a rhythmic envelope” (1965, p. 135, my trans.). In all these cases, the rhythm, identified to its metric definition as succession of accents, constituted the framework of social activity and formed a set of markers making it possible to give consistency to the individual time that would be otherwise entirely devoid of form. Rhythm was a means both of coordinating social interactions and organizing psychic duration but it had lost its onto- and sociogenetic power.

This trend of thought, with its metic substratum and its tendency to reduce rhythm to tempo or pace, has been revived during the last three decades in numerous studies about “space shrinking” or “time acceleration” (Harvey, 1989; Virilio, 1995; Baier, 2000; Rosa, 2010), the ambiguity of which is not unlike that of their predecessors—whom they actually usually ignore. Although such studies provide interesting insights, they usually miss, due to their lack of knowledge concerning anthropology, poetics and linguistics, a great deal of the current transformations. By contrast, it would certainly be most useful to resume with the rhuthmic question as Mauss has begun to reformulate it and with the radically historical anthropology it motivated.

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[1] Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “Introduction à l'œuvre de Mauss” in Mauss, Marcel. 1950. Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris, P.U.F., p. I-LII. – Godelier, Maurice. 1996. L'Énigme du don, Paris, Fayard. – V. Descombes, 1996. Les Institutions du sens, Paris, Minuit. – Caillé, Alain. 2000. Anthropologie du don. Le tiers paradigme, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer.

[2] Mauss' letter to Caillois was dated June 22, 1938. It is accessible at: http://www.rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article101

Rhythm as Form of Power in Archaic and Ancient Societies (part 3)

Pascal Michon — 2018-03-01T05:00:00Z

Sommaire

Previous chapter

From Society to State Rhythms

Mauss and Evans-Pritchard provided also a few hints concerning the transition from societies in which politics was immanent in trade and conflict rhythms to more complex ones in which an embryo of state power had already emerged. During this intermediary stage, the latter still partly followed the rhythms of society.

Mauss noted that when, in archaic societies, authority was embodied in the form of chieftaincy or kingship, it was not always continuous in time, nor valid everywhere in space, but was most often modeled on social rhythms. He cites, in this regard, the institution of “the war chief and peace chief” or “in Porto-Novo, the king of the day and the king of the night, according to a definition that is inconceivable only to us (the king must always keep watching)” (M. Mauss, “Social Cohesion...”, 1932, p. 22). While already embodied in a distinct bearer, the power performed in an essentially discontinuous and alternating manner modeled on the morphological alternations of society. Mauss also pointed out that in these societies, dancing was an important manifestation of power, as if it the body movements of the king were both reflecting and commanding those of the social body. He cited in this respect the Davidic Hebrew monarchy (1006-966): “King David danced before the ark, followed by Judah, the family of Aaron, the Levites, and even all Israel. Likewise, the chief's dance is often the beginning of the people's dance.” (M. Mauss, “Social Cohesion...”, 1932, p. 25)

Some evidence collected by Evans-Pritchard goes in the same direction. Most probably in relation with wars with neighbors and new invaders, the Nuer have experienced during the end of the 19^th century, an embryo of political unification, which shed some light on the differentiation process of the political function. This process was realized through new social figures called guk “prophets,” who claimed to be sons of the Sky-god or possessed by one of his spirits or by the Sky-god himself, practiced prolonged fasting, cured diseases and sterility, and used to prophesy. In very particular moments in the social life, these characters enjoyed a certain power of command. However, their authority remained entirely personal and their sons generally could not maintain it for their own benefit. Evans-Pritchard interpreted the recent emergence of “prophets” in Nuerland (for about sixty years apparently by the time of writing) as the very beginning of a de-segmentation of the social system, which owed nothing to economy and resulted rather from the increase of conflicts with external peoples.

The only activities of prophets which can truly be called tribal were their initiation of raids against the Dinka and their rallying of opposition to Arab and European aggression, and it is in these actions that we see their structural significance and account for their emergence and the growth of their influence. All the important prophets about whom we have information gained their prestige by directing successful raids on the Dinka [...]. No extensive raids were undertaken without the permission and guidance of prophets, who received instructions from the Sky-gods in dreams and trances about the time and objective of attack, and often they accompanied them in person and performed sacrifices before battle. They took for themselves part of the spoil and to some extent supervised the division of the rest of it. [...] For the first time a single person symbolized, if only to a moderate degree and in a mainly spiritual and uninstitutionalized form, the unity of a tribe, for prophets are tribal figures. But they have a further significance, for their influence extended over tribal boundaries. [...] Some of the Western Nuer prophets had a reputation among a number of neighbouring tribes which united for raids at the direction of their spirits. (The Nuer, 1940, p. 188-189)

Evans-Pritchard's description showed that the authority that had emerged among the Nuer did not develop sufficiently to constantly dominate and unite the society. It was limited to the raids against the Dinka or the wars against the Arab and English invaders. It was not guaranteed to endure after the demise of the bearer of power. As in West Africa where from Mauss had drawn his example, it was still matching very closely the rhythms of society.

Granet's sociological-historical study brought further evidence concerning politics during the transition from segmentary to more complex societies. In ancient China, he noticed, the power had also experienced an intermediary form between the archaic, undifferentiated and immanent operation of society, and a new one which appeared with the differentiation of the state function. This intermediate form was already centralized but it was simultaneously divided in time, remaining therefore very close to the systemic and rhythmic immanence of power proper to segmentary societies. In the most remote antiquity (at the beginning of the second millennium?), the succession of phases of scattering and concentration had apparently been accompanied by a periodic alternation of chiefs.

The inauguration feast for a new era consisted in a ritual fight opposing two chiefs each helped by a second. They represented two complementary groups, two halves of society, which, by rotation, shared the authority. [...] A ritual battle brought the representatives of the two complementary groups to power. A two-beat rhythm, based on simple opposition and simple alternation, then controlled the social organization. (The Chinese Thought, 1934, p. 106)

Given the length of the period involved and the extreme scarcity of extant documentation, this reconstruction was obviously fragile. However, it was not absurd and deserved to be taken into consideration. As a matter of fact, it converged not only with Mauss' but also with Evans-Pritchard's previous remarks.

This short series of evidence was naturally not sufficient to be fully significant, not including the fact that each piece could not prove anything clearly without being reinserted in complete monographs. It nonetheless strongly suggested how power, after having been for ages immanent in the operation of the social body, began to separate from it, without entirely opposing it. Since it kept following the rhythms of society, it remained, at least for a certain period of time, varying and discontinuous in time. Only in a second phase, the power freed itself from its old rhythmic match with society and ensured its own temporal and spatial permanence, opening up one of the major issues that have been raised ever since: what relationship should a state maintain with the rhythms of the society it tries to rule? And conversely, what kind of rhythms should a society expect from the state which dominates her?

Rhythmic Monarchy in Ancient China (Granet – 1934)

Admittedly, Granet's reconstruction of the seasonal morphological variations of the societies in the very ancient Chinese antiquity remained, as we saw, quite hypothetical, but it was a different matter with the social forms of the feudal period, which despite its remoteness were much better known. Ancient Chinese societies experienced, from the middle of the second millennium BC and perhaps even before, radical transformations. In the lower valley of the Huang He – Yellow River, a relatively centralized state appeared, led by a king with priestly functions residing in a walled city-palace (legendary Xia dynasty and Shang dynasty). After that archaic time succeeded between the 10^th and 5^th century BC, a period during which the monarchy had to count more and more with noble, allied or rival principalities (Zhou dynasty which formally lasted until 256 BC). This state was transformed into a feudal state whose constitution is known to us, at least in general terms: the royal territories were situated in the center and surrounded by the domains of the vassals. But after 771, the Zhou were driven from their capital and moved east to Lo Yang. Several great vassals became completely independent, some cities gained importance as new kingdoms appeared all around the Chinese kingdom. The incessant wars between these different political units disorganized the Chinese society and impoverished the nobility. However, as early as the 6^th century BC, there was a general tendency to recreate monarchical institutions: written law, taxes in kind, division into administrative districts. In the second half of the 5^th century BC, China was divided into several kingdoms, leaving only a very small area to the Zhou. The period witnessed the formation of centralized military states, more urbanized and administered by civil servants (Warring States period). The greatest among these kingdoms absorbed piece by piece the smaller ones. Towards the end of the 3^rd century, the most powerful of them finally unified the whole of the Chinese country and founded the first Empire (Qin then Han dynasties in 221 BC and 206 BC).

Granet suggested an interesting hypothesis concerning the various powers during the period of the priestly kings and that of the feudal lords that followed it. These powers, traditionally regarded as simply based on religion (sacrifices to the spirits of nature, oracles, family cults) and matrimonial alliances, patron-client relationship, homage links or even on strength, would also have taken advantage of, and substituted for, the old form of rhythmic cohesion specific to archaic social groups. Their emergence would testify to the differentiation and institutionalization of a political principle hitherto immanent to society. The evolution of categories of thought, as it could be reconstructed from extant documents, suggested that kings and vassals had erected their powers by transforming into a center the axis which, in the equinoctial festivals, separated the two social groups identified by the sets of emblems Yin and Yang, which constituted the principle of order and authority, the rhythmic basis of archaic Chinese societies.

There is no order, indeed, whether liturgical or geographical, temporal or spatial, without assuming that it has, so to speak, as guarantor, an eminent power whose place, seen in Space, seems central. This conception reflects a progress in the social organization which is now oriented towards an ideal of hierarchy and relative stability. The notion of center whose importance is relative to this progress is far from being primitive: it has replaced the notion of axis. (The Chinese Thought, 1934, p. 104, my trans.)

The prehistoric origin of the state power (whether priestly monarchic or feudal) could account for its specific rhythmic nature and finally reveal a dimension of politics mostly ignored by political philosophy, as well as political and social science.

Granet supported this rhythmic redefinition of power by a number of empirical evidence. The first, of which we have already spoken, was that calendars and myths dating back to the feudal period retained the memory of the transition from one type of organization to another. They mix two heterogeneous ways of comprehending reality.

The role played by the latter [the notion of axis] remains perceptible in the calendars of the feudal age in which we see that the days surrounding the two solstices deserve a particular respect. This role is even more noticeable in the various archaic myths. In them is remembered a time when the conception of a hierarchical order of Space and Time tended to replace a representation of the universe and society simply based on the ideas of opposition and alternation. (The Chinese Thought, 1934, p. 104, my trans.)

On the other hand, the texts from the feudal period through which we discerned the symbolic organization of political rituals also showed a multiplication of ancient classifications (four directions, four seasons, four colors, red, green, white, black) and their association with a totally new emblem, which was perhaps itself the cause of their multiplying: the center, represented by the numbers one or five and the yellow color. So quaternary and quinary rhythms may have been superimposed upon the old dual rhythm.

The king was therefore perceived as the one who not only organized Time and Space, by distributing and prioritizing regions and periods, but above all who, thanks to his rhythmic power, made them what they were and allowed them to unfold around him, before and after him. Royal power was, in a way, the I-here-now from which social space-time could rhythmically form.

The political space was conceived as a set of four sectors touching each other by the spikes and generated by their center, or even as a hierarchical space formed of five nested squares.

In the center is the royal domain; on the borders, the barbarian marches. In the three median squares live the vassals, called to the court more or less frequently according to the distance of their domain. (The Chinese Thought, 1934, p. 94, my trans.)

During the enthronement ceremonies,

the vassals of the five nested squares which make up the Empire come back to the capital, where the entire space must be recreated for a time. The King then opens the doors of his square city and, expelling the wicked to the four borders of the world, he receives the guests of the four Directions. Even in the far reaches of the universe, he qualifies the different spaces. In the same way, he distinguishes them by distributing emblems conforming to the different sites, he hierarchizes them by conferring the insignia which reveal the unequal dignities. (The Chinese Thought, 1934, p. 95, my trans.)

Similarly, during public cults

the faithful were formed into a square. The Altar of the Earth, around which large gatherings were usually made, was a square mound; its summit was covered with yellow earth (color of the center); its sides (turned towards the four directions), covered with green, red, white or black earth. This sacred square represents the totality of the Empire. (The Chinese Thought, 1934, p. 91, my trans.)

The ritual journeys of the king in his Empire followed the same pattern.

The King spends four years receiving the visit of the vassals; after which, he renders the visits and goes through the fiefs. He cannot fail to tour the Empire every five years. He sets his course so as to be in the East at the Spring Equinox, in the South at the Summer solstice, in the West in the heart of the Autumn, in the North at the height of Winter. At each of these cardinal stations, the suzerain gives audience to the feudatories of one of the four directions. (The Chinese Thought, 1934, p. 94, my trans.)

Through these rituals the king rhythmically instituted and organized around him a hierarchical spatial order.

The dignity of spaces results from a kind of rhythmic creation [...] The Chief carefully arranges the space by adapting the scopes to the durations [les étendues aux durées], but the reason for its sovereign circulation is first of all in the necessity of a rhythmic reconstitution of the Extension [l'Étendue]. The five-year reconstitution revives the cohesion it inaugurated by taking power [...] By classifying and distributing in regulated time the groups that make up human society, the Chief manages to institute and prolong a certain order in Space. (The Chinese Thought, 1934, p. 94-95, my trans.)

Similarly, time seemed to be set up by the rhythmic power of the King. The old cyclical arrangement in four seasons was still significant but it was now included within the politico-liturgical order of the year and, even more broadly, within the whole history, around the centers constituted by the royal enthronement and its subsequent anniversaries. During these ceremonies, the king not only organized the space, it also distinguished the different periods of history by promulgating a new calendar which divided it into dynasties, reigns, portions of reign. But this ritual, like any other inaugural ritual, created less a beginning than a middle of time that allowed to rhythmize the duration—not, as a matter of fact, in the sense that it divided it into equal periods but in the sense of an organizing movement emanating from the middle.

Although it seems initial, the inaugural rites of birth, marriage, death, have the value of central rites. The power they release seems to expand like a wave. Forward and backward, and marking, so to speak, the peaks of a series of concentric undulations, ceremonies, which separate times of rest, contribute to the same result as the central rite. This kind of rhythmic propagation, which commands the organization of a liturgical ensemble, is indicated by the use of certain numbers. In order to emphasize the wholeness of any liturgy, the number one is the starting point, because it is the emblem of the total. (The Chinese Thought, 1934, p. 97, my trans.)

History itself was experienced as rhythmic.

The termination of the ceremonies distributed around the central gesture are most often indicated by the number 3 (= 30), 5 (= 50) and 7 (= 70) which serve to rhythmize Time. The liturgical periods are not the only ones that are felt as rhythmic and total. Historical time does not appear otherwise. (The Chinese Thought, 1934, p. 98, my trans.)

The sovereign, as it were, did not inaugurate new times but set up a center of Time itself and thus, by rhythmically producing it forwards and backwards, the whole Duration. Consequently, the rituals that were regularly performed by the ruler in the House of the Calendar, the Ming t'ang, had for essential purpose to ensure the center from which the Time developed in both future and past directions.

Built on a square base, because the Earth is square, this house must be covered with a thatched roof, round in the manner of Heaven. Every year and throughout the year, the sovereign circulates under this roof. By placing himself in the proper direction, he successively inaugurates the seasons and the months. [...] But the chief cannot continue indefinitely with its peripheral circulation, under the risk of never wearing the insignia that correspond to the Center and are the prerogatives of the suzerain. Hence, when the third month of the Summer ends, he interrupts the work which enables him to single out the various durations. He then dresses in yellow, and, ceasing to imitate the march of the sun, goes to the center of the Ming t'ang. If he wants to animate Space, he must occupy this royal place and, as soon as he stops there, it is from there that he seems to animate Time: he has provided the year with a center. (The Chinese Thought, 1934, p. 103, my trans.)

Granet's analyses were quite remarkable and opened new paths for political theory. Mauss and Evans-Pritchard had shown that social cohesion and power in archaic societies resulted from the very rhythms of society. They were in a way immanent in them. Thanks to the work of Granet, this phenomenon appeared more general than expected and concerning, in one way or another, any form of power. Through the ancient Chinese monarchy and feudalism, a constitutive phenomenon of politics emerged. Political power had been able to “dissociate” itself from society and ensure its own “continuity” only by concentrating and perpetuating, while making them more complex, the rhythms with which society had been (re)produced until then. The rhythmic nature of the Chinese royal power showed that it had been established by differentiation and institutionalization of the immanent rhythmic functioning of the old segmentary societies.

The Chief or King, who was now considered as the center rhythmically originating Space, Time and the People itself, was in fact the result of a process of social distinction and institutionalization of the axis around which the two series of Yin and Yang emblems formerly interacted in their rhythmic production of the Universe.

Duration and extension seemed to fully exist only where they were socialized: subject to a necessary periodic creation, they seemed to emanate of a kind of center. This allowed the spatial representations to influence the representation of Time which, first, had informed them. The idea that durations as extensions were of varied nature was superimposed on that that they were of unequal value. This progress occurred as soon as the representation of Space was no longer commanded by the sight of two camps lined by bands confronting each other face to face, but by that of a formation in square, the axial line separating the parties having resorbed in a center occupied by a Chief. (The Chinese Thought, 1934, p. 112, my trans.)

With the center appeared a new social organization.

This last distribution implies an increase in the complication of the social structure. The latter is no longer based on a division into two complementary groups that dominate in turns. It is based on a federal organization. Placed in a point of convergence, the suzerain whose virtue governs the confederation seems mainly to be busy unifying the multifariousness. (The Chinese Thought, 1934, p. 112, my trans.)

This sociological interpretation enabled Granet to shed some light on the relationship between Yin, Yang and Tao categories. The latter was probably posterior to the former and could date, in all likelihood, from the period of constitution of the royal power from the 17^th or the 15^th century BC. The infinite games between Yin and Yang did not need any center. They were organized, just like the archaic societies whose functioning they represented, around an immanent axis. The Tao, however, as the King, was the central power which established and made rhythmically unfold the Universe.

If Yin and Yang form a couple and seem jointly to preside over the rhythm that founded the Universal Order, it is because their conception dates from an age of history in which the principle of rotation was sufficient to regulate the social activity distributed between two complementary groups. The Tao's conception goes back to a less archaic era; it could only become explicit at a time when the structure of society was more complicated and in those circles where the authority of chiefs, who legitimately presented themselves as the only authors of the order in the world, was revered: then and only there, the idea of a unique and central power of animation could be imagined. (The Chinese Thought, 1934, p. 262, my trans.)

To be followed

Rhythm as Form of Individuation Process (part 3)

Pascal Michon — 2018-02-23T21:45:00Z

Previous chapter

Rhythms of Archaic Individuation: The Nuer (Evans-Pritchard – 1940)

In his great book The Nuer published in 1940, Evans-Pritchard presented a whole range of new materials concerning the rhythms of individuation. For the first time, modern Europeans had access, through his work, to a complete psycho-sociological portrait of an “archaic” people based on field observation. The result was remarkable. Mauss had already shown that the idea of the inexistence of the individual in archaic societies, which was most common in the 19^th century, was utterly mistaken and that the latter should be seen instead as a rhythmic variation of the level of independence and interdependence of the members of society. For its part, Evans-Pritchard portrayed an “archaic” population, which was in many points comparable to those studied by Mauss but where the individuals' sentiment of their own value and the importance they attached to their autonomy were extremely strong.

The Nuer, as they appeared through the beautiful portrait brushed by Evans-Pritchard, were extremely independent and very jealous of their individual rights.

[The] Nuer is brave and will stand up against aggression and enforce his rights by club and spear [...] he has a keen sense of personal dignity and rights. The notion of right, cuong, is strong. (The Nuer, 1940, p. 171)

Each Nuer was naturally connected to a whole range of other people, but that did not stop him from developing an aloof individual-interest stance. On the contrary, the more the Nuer was subjected to social constraint, the more he opposed it.

Reliant on one another they are loyal and generous to their kinsmen. One might even to some extent attribute their pronounced individualism to resistance to the persistent claims of kinsmen and neighbours against which they have no protection but stubbornness. The qualities which have been mentioned, courage, generosity, patience, pride, loyalty, stubbornness, and independence, are the virtues the Nuer themselves extol. (The Nuer, 1940, p. 90)

These independence and opposition to the demands of relatives were learned very early and they constituted, with equality, one of the fundamental principles of education.

A child soon learns that to maintain his equality with his peers he must stand up for himself against any encroachment on his person and property. This means that he must always be prepared to fight, and his willingness and ability to do so are the only protection of his integrity as a free and independent person against the avarice and bullying of his kinsmen. They protect him against outsiders, but he must resist their demands on himself. The demands made on a man in the name of kinship are incessant and imperious and he resists them to the utmost. (The Nuer, 1940, p. 184)

After the initiation, the Nuer became an adult and began a life composed of a succession of alliances and conflicts with his neighboring fellows but also with members of the neighboring tribal sections against exterior folks.

Boys look forward to the day when they will be able to accompany their elders on these raids against the Dinka, and as soon as youths have been initiated into manhood they begin to plan an attack to enrich themselves and to establish their reputation as warriors. (The Nuer, 1940, p. 126)

Since the political system was not centered on any authority, not even at the level of the village, the Nuer ruled themselves quite independently, in complete freedom and on an equal basis with their neighbors.

According to Evans-Pritchard, archaic societies, in any case the Nuer, were not organized, as it was commonly claimed in the 19^th century according a kind of “primitive communism” but, on the contrary, to an “ordered anarchy.”

The ordered anarchy in which they live accords well with their character, for it is impossible to live among Nuer and conceive of rulers ruling over them. The Nuer is a product of hard and egalitarian upbringing, is deeply democratic, and is easily roused to violence. His turbulent spirit finds any restraint irksome and no man recognizes a superior. Wealth makes no difference. A man with many cattle is envied, but not treated differently from a man with few cattle. Birth makes no difference. (The Nuer, 1940, p. 181)

The Nuer constituted a society of equals and peers.

A man may not be a member of the dominant clan of his tribe, he may even be of Dinka descent [a despised neighboring people], but were another to allude to the fact he would run a grave risk of being clubbed. That every Nuer considers himself as good as his neighbour is evident in their every movement. They strut about like lords of the earth, which, indeed, they consider themselves to be. There is no master and no servant in their society, but only equals who regard themselves as God's noblest creation. (The Nuer, 1940, p. 181-182)

This socio-psychological portrait of the Nuer deserves our attention. It was a fatal blow to the previous conceptions held by Frazer, Tönnies, Le Bon, and Durkheim—which unfortunately are still widespread in today's social science, for instance in Louis Dumont's work—according to which the members of archaic societies were entirely deprived of individuality and freedom, and totally absorbed by the “social body” to which they belonged. The postulate of “primitive communism” collapsed. More generally, this portrait contradicted the evolutionist belief that summarized the whole history of individuation in the passage (progressive for some, catastrophic for others) from a holistic to an individualistic world, from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from Tradition to Modernity. After The Nuer this historical simplism was deeply shaken.

Naturally, this observation raised in turn new questions. How could this “archaic individualism” and “ordered anarchy” be accounted for? How could the existence of such a strong individuation within a segmentary system, deemed until then to absorb and dissolve any desire for autonomy, be explained? To correctly understand Evans-Pritchard's answer to these questions, we need to understand how the Nuer society worked.

Like the Eskimo, the Nuer society followed a seasonal morphological variation partly related to the climatic cycles. During the rainy season (May to October), the Nuer were dispersed in villages perched on the back of knolls and ridges emerging from the waters that flooded the country. The villages, like islands separated from each other by stretches of swamps or running water, comprised from fifty to a few hundred inhabitants. They were often made up of farms gathered in clusters along sandy mounds and covering sometimes two or three kilometers. But as soon as the terrain permitted it, the Nuer scattered their homes as much as possible (p. 111-112): “Nuer prefer to dwell in this greater privacy and show no inclination for true village life” (p. 64). The dominant activity during the rainy season was livestock farming. However, as animals were often locked up in smoky barns to avoid mosquitoes and other insects, the Nuer also practiced horticulture, in family or domestic groups, on very small parcels of garden scattered around the farms (p. 79).

During the dry season (November to April), the dynamics were reversed. The Nuer were gradually regrouping in settlements established along the rivers and water points. These camps witnessed a growing concentration of tribal sections that could reach up to a thousand people (p. 112). The Nuer set up huts or simple windscreens “erected a few yards from water, generally in a semicircle or in lines with their backs to the prevailing wind” (p. 65). Solidarity was maximal as much for stock breeding as for the defense of the common properties (p. 17-18) or for fishing, which replaced, as side activity, the horticulture practiced during the rainy season. The daily activity was entirely collective.

Social ties are narrowed, as it were, and the people of village and camp are drawn closer together, in a moral sense, for they are in consequence highly interdependent and their activities tend to be joint undertakings. This is seen best in the dry season, when the cattle of many families are tethered in a common kraal and driven as a single herd to the grazing grounds and daily activities are co-ordinated into a common rhythm of life. (The Nuer, 1940, p. 89)

All these phenomena were comparable to those described by Mauss in the Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo and—this deserves to be emphasized—had almost similar effects on the alternation of individuation.

We again emphasize that not only are the people of a camp living in a more compact group than the people of a village, but also that in camp life there is more frequent contact between its members and greater co-ordination of their activities. The cattle are herded together, milked at the same time, and so on. In a village each household herds its own cattle, if they are herded at all, and performs its domestic and kraal tasks independently and at different times. (The Nuer, 1940, p. 116)

In quite a Durkheimian way, Evans-Pritchard noted a concordance between “social” and “moral density.”

Drier conditions compel greater concentration and wider seasonal movements, with the result that village communities not only have a greater spatial, and we may say also moral, density in the drought than in the rains. (The Nuer, 1940, p. 118)

However, the situation was a bit more complex than in the cases studied by Mauss. Nuer vocabulary included two major seasons of six-month each but also “two subsidiary seasons included in them, being transitional periods between them” (p. 96). As a result, singular and collective individuation rhythms were a bit more complicated. While in the Eskimo the reshuffling of the individuation was clearly linked with the periods of concentration and its mere enjoyment to the periods of dispersion, these processes appeared much more differentiated in the Nuer.

During the rainy season, the elderly were the first to return to the villages and were not joined by the rest of the population until the second part of the season. Then began a period of three to four months characterized by a fairly strict dispersal of the population on the farms. This period was marked by feeding difficulties and isolation of domestic groups. After a few months, food production was restored with the first harvest of maize and millet. Then—and this differentiated Nuer from Eskimo rhythms—began a fairly short period of religious ceremonies, weddings, initiation rites, sacrifices and feasts, which tended to accumulate towards the end of the season when communications were finally re-established (p. 81-84). Young people could join together at a homestead to slaughter oxen and gorge themselves with meat (p. 26). They spent as much time as possible feasting, walking sometimes for miles to attend weddings at which they danced till well into the morning (p. 84). The quarrels between persons or between tribal sections, which, as we shall see, were decisive for the singular and collective individuation of the Nuer, increased considerably (p. 84). The time seemed to go faster (p. 103).

The dry season was divided too into two periods. In the first few months, only the youngest members of the group moved to water points and set up small temporary camps. Eventually, later in the season, the rest of the population of the village joined the camps and larger concentrations were established on the same sites every year (p. 93). Life in camps, which was nevertheless endowed with a more collective spirit, was, in a general way, much less festive and religious. Feasts were absent and dance “not so attractive” (p. 84). “Personal and community quarrels,” without entirely disappearing, lost much of their ardor (p. 84). Since the activities were repeated each day in a repetitive manner and were not interrupted by any significant event, the time seemed to go slowly (p. 102).

These first observations showed the limit of the Durkheimian idea—inspired both by crowd psychology and thermodynamics—of a direct and mechanical association of social density, religiosity and process of individuation. But they confirmed, on the other hand, while clarifying it, the thesis, developed by Mauss from another Durkheimian suggestion, according to which the individuation was not continuous but followed alternating rhythms, of different frequencies and levels. In the Nuer, singular and collective individuation clearly depended on a superposition of interdependent but asynchronous rhythms.

While the “seasonal contraction” (p. 119) of the tribal sections during the dry season seemed to slow down the daily life and to be less festive, it enabled the Nuer to forge their unity in two ways: by their mere daily collective activity and by their opposition to neighboring tribal sections or folks. Competitor sections or other Nuer tribes were attacked, or the Dinka raided, mainly during the dry season. Partly opposed to these tribal rhythms, the rhythms of village and domestic life reached their highest point in the second half of the rainy season when gatherings were again possible. Finally, these seasonal rhythms were differentiated according to age groups, since young people and older members of society did not move to camps or villages at the same time.

These analyses complexified Mauss's perspective but they also notably added to it a political dimension that had been partly neglected by Mauss. As we shall see below in more details, the crucial factor by which the Nuer's particular individualism, their practical autonomy and their egalitarian values, could be accounted for, involved another kind of alternation, partly inscribed in the seasonal variations which have just been described, but from a different nature: the alternation of alliance and conflict between the different segments of the social group, as well as between the group itself and its neighbors. The individualism of the Nuer was linked to the rhythms of the political life of their society, to the movement of their “ordered anarchy.” With The Nuer, Evans-Pritchard added a capital element to our knowledge of the rhythms of singular and collective individuation: they were not only linked to the alternation of concentration and social dispersion, but also to those of conflict and alliance within and outside a particular society.

Our analysis of the research led by Mauss, Granet and Evans-Pritchard during the inter-war years reveals a series of rather unexpected convergences. Once freed from ulterior Structuralist and Systemic interpretations, all these works reappear in their original dynamics and their shared concern for the question of rhythm. Not only this notion proves essential in describing the functioning of archaic societies, but it also plays a leading role in the first theoretical body derived from it by the ancient Chinese scholars.

1. For Mauss, collective and singular individuation did not constitute linear, homogeneous and continuous processes, driven by a set of stable and synchronically describable forms, but on the contrary, they experienced more or less regular temporal alternations periodically transforming both the morphology of society and the intensity of individuation. In any society there are periods of low sociality—the long, routine periods of everyday life—during which individuals enjoy a certain degree of autonomy. Between these periods of dull sociality occur more intense periods of time, (social concentrations, feasts, potlatches, various ceremonies), during which groups and people enter a process of recasting and regeneration.

2. Evans-Pritchard completed this description by showing that the rhythms that organized the processes of singular and collective individuation were not only defined by the alternation of concentration and social dispersion: they also resulted from that of social alliance and conflict, inside and outside of society, which intersected with the former.

3. Granet's contribution was no less spectacular. The historical depth of the Chinese civilization allowed him to go far back in time and perceive the archaic polysegmental societies through a body of evidence that had been preserved by posterior societies. Everything seems to have happened as if ancient Chinese thought had elaborated, within a much more integrated society, categories related to an earlier socio-morphological stage.

Although some of his suggestions were quite daring, Granet opened several paths for posterior reflection.

1. His work allowed to relate the Chinese culture to a universal prehistoric background that contemporary anthropologists thought to be able to grasp through the last remaining “archaic” societies.

2. It also allowed to contrast the most common Western concept of rhythm with an entirely different one. Whereas, in the West, rhythm usually meant a metric alternation of strong and weak beats, organized according to arithmetic proportions, in ancient China the rhythm was conceived as the Universe's way of flowing—the Tao—and the ceaseless alternation of Yin and Yang, or, to put it differently, as the general form of the continuous processes of individuation and deindividuation that constituted the Universe.

3. In other words, Granet's discovery anticipated, in the East, what Benveniste was to discover in the West a few years later in his famous article on “The notion of ‘rhythm' in its linguistic expression” (1951) (for more details, see. vol. 1, chap. 1).

4. We could even suspect that the pre-Platonic notion of rhuthmós, as we perceive it today through the few extant works of the first materialists, could be legitimately compared with its ancient Chinese counterpart. This is a complex study that remains to be done, but it is very likely that they share common features such as the notion of way of flowing itself but also that of progressive alternation of opposites which also existed in the West, Heraclitus being, as we know, his main proponent.

5. Hence, one of the main philosophical differences between the West and the East could have originated from the persistence, in China, of the most ancient concept of rhythm and its transformation, in Greece and eventually in the Roman Empire at the hands of Plato and his numerous followers, into a metric concept. This difference was particularly obvious in the way to treat of numbers. Whereas, from Pythagoras and Plato, numbers became in Western thought the main theoretical model of rhythm, Chinese thought went the other way by conceiving of them as mere rhythmic categories among others.

6. Finally, Granet's work confirmed what we already noticed while studying Mauss and Evans-Pritchard: social rhythms had a fundamental political dimension. In the North-West American Indian or in the Nuer, singular and collective individuation were not only linked to the alternation between social dispersion and concentration, but also to the endless swing between conflict and alliance inside as well as outside of society. In this instance, the Chinese case was particularly informative because it allowed to carefully observe the transition from a type of society in which the political order was still reproduced through the morphological rhythms, to another type in which it had become autonomous, separate and institutionalized, by concentrating the rhythmic function that previously belonged to society.

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Rhythm as Form of Power in Archaic and Ancient Societies (part 1)

Pascal Michon — 2018-02-22T17:35:00Z

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Rhythmic Solidarity in Polysegmentary Societies (Mauss – 1932)

In 1932, in a famous article entitled “La cohésion sociale dans les sociétés polysegmentaires – Social cohesion in polysegmentary societies,” Mauss addressed, in the very first study specifically devoted to it, the question of “authority and social cohesion” in “archaic” societies. Whereas our modern societies are fairly unified and organized around a state, archaic societies were “polysegmentary,” that is to say composed of clans or tribal segments, which, while being independent of one another and not subservient to any supreme authority, maintained a sufficient solidarity to consider themselves, in certain situations, as belonging to the same social body.

Mauss provided a list of “divisions” that organized this type of societies. Even in the simplest ones like the Australian two-segment societies, there was, first of all, a division by clans or phratries. Each one of them had an independent organic life, but they constituted together a unitary social group, bound by a system of “total prestations” and sometimes by exogamic rules. These clans could themselves be divided into small local groups, in turn divided into a few families. In addition, there were divisions by sex, age (individuals initiated together and forming a brotherhood) and generation, who came to intersect with the former. In the tribe (Mauss used the term to denote the whole containing the segments), there was community and equality within each age group, but in the clan and in the family which were included in the tribe, a solidarity existed in each generation. Likewise, each sex was divided by generation. In these societies, therefore, social cohesion, did not rest, like in ours, on a state apparatus and a system of law, but on a complex interweaving of divisions creating multiple communities of belonging. A photograph of this type of social system would have shown something comparable to a weaving or better to an association of “cohesions” and “oppositions.”

This curious cohesion is realized by adherence and opposition, by friction as in the manufacturing of fabrics or basketry. [...] This is about cutting in different directions a single mass of men and women [...] Oppositions cross cohesions. (“La cohésion sociale dans les sociétés polysegmentaires,” 1932, p. 17-19, my trans.)

Unfortunately, only this first stratum in Mauss' argumentation was retained by his Structuralist followers [1]. According to them, Mauss, as Evans-Pritchard a few years later, had shown that a social system was a set of differential relations, a superposition of associations and divisions, in other words a “structure.”

This interpretation was actually very reductive and cut off the whole Maussian research from its historical dimension. In addition to explicitly rejecting the term “structure”—as Saussure and I think for the same reasons—Mauss considered such a conception of the social system to be quite insufficient to account for the movement and life of society. To this combinatorial and still almost “photographic” vision of social “anatomy,” we must add, he said, a study of its “physiology”: “After having dissected its composition, we can study its life, its physiology, its psychology, and finally the result.” (M. Mauss, “Fragment d'un plan de sociologie générale descriptive” (1934), Œuvres, t. III, 1969, p. 324, my trans.)

This movement of thought was quite comparable to that accomplished a few years before by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Cours de linguistique générale – Course in General Linguistics (1916) when he reinserted his first description of the language in the “passage of time.”

If time is left out [en dehors de la durée], the linguistic facts are incomplete and no conclusion is possible. [...] To represent the actual facts, we must then add to our first drawing a sign to indicate [the] passage of time. (F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, (1916), p. 78, trans. Wade Baskin)

Mauss and Evans-Pritchard have suffered at the hands of the Structuralists the same dehistoricizing reduction as Saussure. We must therefore overcome this reduction in order to rid the various reflections on the ways of flowing developed during the first half of the 20^th century of their structural spatialization.

It is quite remarkable that Mauss conceptualized this “physiological” or “dynamic” perspective from the notion of rhythm. He wanted to observe the totality of the social system in motion, through the rhythmic movements that animated it.

We are concerned with “wholes,” with systems in their entirety. We have not described them as if they were fixed, in a static or skeletal [cadavérique] condition, and still less have we dissected them into the rules and myths and values and so on of which they are composed. It is only by considering them as wholes that we have been able to see their essence, their operation [le mouvement du tout] and their living aspect, and to catch the fleeting moment when the society [is forming] [la société prend] and its members take emotional stock of themselves and their situation as regards others. Only by making such concrete observation of social life is it possible to come upon facts such as those which our study is beginning to reveal. Nothing in our opinion is more urgent or promising than research into “total” social phenomena. (The Gift, 1924, p. 77, trans. Ian Cunnison, my mod.)

Observing a society from a physiological viewpoint meant to describe the rhythms of the singular and collective individuation processes. In fact, a social system was not so much a complex web of intersecting divisions as a continuous weaving process following the temporal rhythm of sociality and exchanges during which “adherences” and “divisions” were alternately loosened and tightened.

While rightly insisting on the fact that groups do not substantially exist by themselves but by opposition to each other within a social system, Structuralists have in turn substantialized these differential relations (attributing them, for example after Levi-Strauss, to “real” anthropological structures), whereas the latter do not exist per se but only through their rhythmic actualizations in the course of exchanges and conflicts. Mauss, however, did not make this mistake and explicitly associated divisions and actual prestations.

Thus all groups fit into each other, organize themselves according to each other by reciprocal services, by entanglements of generations, sexes, clans and by stratifications of ages. (“La cohésion sociale dans les sociétés polysegmentaires,” 1932, p. 20, my trans.)

The fundamental temporality of social systems, without which they could not merely exist, explained the importance for Mauss of “total phenomena” like the potlatch, which constituted the high points in the rhythms of exchanges and antagonisms, i.e. what he called “sociality.”

Hence, Mauss linked the absence, in polysegmentary societies, of any coercive institution and the non-differentiation of a political sphere to their dynamics of fusion and division, antagonisms and exchanges, which both continuously unraveled and rebuilt these social groups. In archaic societies, politics did not express itself through a centralized and superior power, nor through the structure of social relations, but through the rhythmic movement of singular and collective individuation.

Law, morality, religion (in clan, secret societies, etc.) impose rhythm and uniformity within the subgroups, rhythm and unity of movement and spirit among all subgroups. (M. Mauss “Une catégorie de l'esprit humain. La notion de personne. Celle de ‘moi' – A Category of the Human Mind: the Notion of Person; the Notion of Self,” (1938), trans. W. D. Halls, p. 7, my mod.)

The fundamental discipline or cohesion of a social whole was realized, regenerated and perpetuated thanks to the rhythms that organized antagonisms and exchanges inside and outside the group.

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[1] C. Lévi-Strauss, « Introduction à l'œuvre de Marcel Mauss », in M. Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie, Paris, PUF, 1950 ; L. Dumont, « Marcel Mauss : une science en devenir. » (1972), Essais sur l'individualisme. Une perspective sur l'idéologie moderne, Paris, Le Seuil, 1983, p. 167. Idem in his « Préface » to E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Les Nuer…, op. cit., p. I-XVIII.