Person and relation as categories: Mauss' legacy

Marcel Mauss' classic essay on the person (1938) remains to this day a central point of reference for all social scientists: be they social psychologists, social historians, sociologists, or any kind of anthropologist. Whilst there is no doubt that the notions of person and relation that he proposed are still among our central tools of analysis, his interpretation of their role as categories has changed significantly. One of the principal difficulties we experience today in reading Mauss' unruly essay is what he means when he speaks of categories de l'esprit humain. This paper traces the background of Mauss' use of personhood and relation as categories to the French neo-Kantian school of philosophy (Charles Renouvier and Octave Hamelin in particular), and attempts to situate Mauss' argument by relation to contemporary trends in anthropological thinking concerning relation and embodied cognition.