…in anthropology that comes out of this, which tends to assume that everything is a debt. And it comes out of Marcel Mauss, who wrote this famous book called The Gift, which probably most of you have heard of. But it's often misinterpreted. Because…

…I have prepared for him. Hello. Hello. So I read an essay titled Give It Away, which was about the Mousians and Marcel Mauss, who was an older, a radical anthropologist from the early part of the 20th century. And it's interesting. It compared a lot…

…were organized. Is that right word to use? What's the right word to use for that? For what? Well, yes, actually, Marcel Mauss didn't believe in primitives except for Australia. He said they're the only people sufficiently cut off that you can call them…

…questioning, I was interested in talking more about markets or what a market is. In the same essay, Give It Away, Marcel Mauss says, the market couldn't be legislated away. He's talking about... Oh, yes, I was describing his attitude toward Russia, yeah.…

…absurd. And insofar as you do have individual ownership, which you do have of some things, then, well, I think Marcel Mauss was very prescient when he pointed out that even... Ownership is sometimes a secondary consideration because you can have things…

…but a critique of money. And the person that that reminded me of as an anthropologist in the same department is, of course, Marcel Mauss. in the last chapter of his book, The Gift, in which he basically sets out a program for his own politics, which is…

…charity and the morality of one must pay one's debts. Yeah, I find it very interesting that... Well, I'm a great fan of Marcel Mauss, but I think he's been largely misread in very key ways. And one of the points that he makes very interestingly is that…

…of a comment, you know, when I was talking about baseline communism, I was really inspired by something I was reading from Marcel Mauss, where he said... something he threw out, not in the gift, but in all the, everybody reads that one book and nobody…

…And I really set off on this, there were sort of two things that I read that really struck me. One was by Marcel Mauss. Marcel Mauss's theory of civilization, which nobody really talks about nowadays. He lived in a period, he was writing this stuff in…

…try to figure out the sort of paths by which different like cat's cradle patterns would spread from one to the other. And Mauss basically argued this entire project was silly. I guess everyone right now has decided this project is silly. But he came up…

…you can be in doing so. At least you can try to change the commonplace discourse. And in some ways I was inspired by Marcel Mauss. He's the person who sort of opened my eyes to this. Not in The Gift, which everybody reads, but in some of his other…

…Again, it's this guy, Randall White, who's done the seminal work way back in the 1970s, where he actually ends up citing Marcel Mauss on the Inuit and saying, it was a bit like this, because you have these regional aggregation sites, including some of…

…to their abilities to each according to their needs. Nothing to do with Here I'm going back to the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who says, well, a big problem is we assume that when we say communism, it means collective property. They assume one…

…a long time to figure this out. And one way I figured out is Reading an essay by the French anthropologist, actually, Marcel Mauss, about cultural refusal. Basically, a culture is what you won't do, what you refuse to do. We have this idea that cultures…

…minor differences and become so important to them, they completely organize their lives around not being like their neighbors. In fact, Marcel Mauss, the great French anthropologist, was one of the first to point this out, that the simple act of refusal in…

…periods, you might have a very authoritarian kind of political organization. But once it's all over, society changes shape. Marcel Mauss actually used the term social morphology, I think, to describe this. society moves and transforms from these very large,…

…and create a little king or some authoritarian structure, then you disperse in your egalitarian bands. The famous example by Marcel Mauss, seasonal variations of the Eskimo, it came out in 1902, They pointed out that they actually had authoritarian bands.…