Mauss's Total Social Fact
For Marcel Mauss (Durkheim's nephew and sometime collaborator) a total social fact (French fait social total) is "an activity that has implications throughout society, in the economic, legal, political, and religious spheres". Diverse strands of social and psychological life are woven together through what he comes to call 'total social facts'. A total social fact is such that it informs and organizes seemingly quite distinct practices and institutions.
The term was popularized by Marcel Mauss in his classic The Gift:
"These phenomena are at once legal, economic, religious, aesthetic, morphological and so on. They are legal in that they concern individual and collective rights, organized and diffuse morality; they may be entirely obligatory, or subject simply to praise or disapproval. They are at once political and domestic, being of interest both to classes and to clans and families. They are religious; they concern true religion, animism, magic and diffuse religious mentality. They are economic, for the notions of value, utility, interest, luxury, wealth, acquisition, accumulation, consumption and liberal and sumptuous expenditure are all present..." —Mauss (1966), 76-77Read more about this topic: Social Fact
Famous quotes containing the words total, social and/or fact:
“When I turned into a parent, I experienced a real and total personality change that slowly shifted back to the “normal” me, yet has not completely vanished. I believe the two levels are now superimposed, with an additional sprinkling of mortality intimations.”
—Sonia Taitz (20th century)
“[When asked: “Will not woman suffrage make the black woman the political equal of the white woman and does not political equality mean social equality?”:] If it does then men by keeping both white and black women disfranchised have already established social equality!”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)
“Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults, or there is no incentive to grow up.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)