marcelmauss.com is an international platform dedicated to the study of the Durkheimian school and its impact. Our aim is to develop a comprehensive, interdisciplinary perspective on the Durkheimians and the consequences of their theory for the conceptualisation of society, practice and technology. In doing so, we show that Émile Durkheim, his nephew Marcel Mauss, and their colleagues and students played an outstanding role in the development of contemporary humanities and social science theory – be it the »ontological«, »sensory«, or »praxeological« »turn« – that has so far been insufficiently explored. In pursuing this aim, we are committed to analysing the colonial conditions of the project and to applying the Durkheimians’ claim to decentring Western reason to current, decolonial approaches.
The Durkheim School’s category project was, in the eyes of the Durkheimians (Émile Durkheim himself, Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, Stefan Czarnowski, Marcel Granet, Celestin Bouglé, Antoine Bianconi, and others), a philosophical collaborative project that was designed to update Aristotle’s theory of categories, which was understood purely heuristically, on the one hand, and to provide an alternative to Kant’s theory of categories, which was limited to the personal subject, on the other.
Although the major works of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss are well known and have been widely discussed, an examination of their shared philosophical project and (rediscovered) legacy remains the preserve of a few specialists and is not reflected in either philosophy or the social sciences. This tendency to neglect the school’s work has repeatedly led to misunderstandings in the reinterpretation of the writings of members of the Durkheim school. Our joint project aims to correct this trend, which is due not least to the overemphasis on the importance of individual researchers. The publication of an anthology of the central texts of the Durkheim school is intended to shed light on this collective experiment, which is unique in the history of philosophy. This selection will present the most powerful and effective texts on the individual categories (genus, causality, quantity, time, space, duality, totality, substance, person) for the first time in German, as well as in a synoptic overview, and will be published by the publishing house Matthes & Seitz Berlin.
In this framework, we will use marcelmauss.com to present and introduce individual positions, texts and the long overdue edition of the category project.
Our common theoretical starting point is that French sociology and its ethnological turn to social anthropology emerged from Émile Durkheim’s philosophical project, which in its constitutive phase explicitly declared itself to be a philosophical undertaking to replace philosophy. The project, in particular through Marcel Mauss, committed itself to an ethnographic implementation – with debates in social anthropology, sociology of knowledge and science and technology studies that continue to this day. The debates about the status of sociology in relation to philosophy were characterised in their early days at the beginning of the 20th century by fundamental questions that are still being discussed controversially today: Are the categories of the human mind given a priori or do they change historically and in exchange with the cultural other? Is human intelligence originally social or technical? How do we encounter the cultural other? What is the starting point of philosophical work: praxis or theoria? How do science, society and technology relate to each other?