Social Fact - Mauss's Total Social Fact

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), 76-77

Read more about this topic:  Social Fact

Famous quotes containing the words total, social and/or fact:

    “Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as a measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order in total chaos.... This cannot be an easy life.”
    —J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967)

    “It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no man’s work but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “There are two kinds of men, and only two, and that young man is one kind. He is high-minded, he is pure, he’s the kind of man that the world pretends to look up to, and in fact despises. He is
    the kind of man who breeds unhappiness, particularly in women.”
    —Robert Bolt (1924–1995)