Human life as drama: A Maussian insight

Abstract

Recent years have seen the beginning of new conversations between the ‘natural’ and ‘socio-cultural’ sides of the human sciences and the story of our long-term history as a species. Both sociology and the biological sciences, since the mid-twentieth century, have sought to avoid rigid models of individual or collective behaviour and to develop more flexible approaches. A concept finding favour today among very different scholars is ‘sociality’. It is well established in literary English (and French), but has only recently become a technical concept. Mauss was deeply interested in long-term history and in connections with our evolutionary past as it was then understood. He envisaged social life often as a scene in movement, a potentially creative experience of living encounters. He did not use the term ‘sociality’, but he did make frequent reference to the image of ‘drama’, explicitly and implicitly through the way he re-presented ethnographic evidence. This article argues that his insights anticipated our re-thinking of the ‘nature’ of social life today.