This book is the first intellectual biography of Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), the father of modern ethnology and a leading early figure in the French school of sociology. Mauss left a rich intellectual legacy in the social sciences, influencing the work of Claude L vi-Strauss and others. His masterpiece, the 1925 essay The Gift, on reciprocity and gift economies among archaic societies, remains required reading in anthropology, and his work...