Joking with Durkheim

After he published The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies , Marcel Mauss wanted to continue his study of “total social phenomena” with a study of joking relationships. Marcel Founier ( Marcel Mauss: A Biography ) writes: “These were fascinating phenomena that had certain similarities to the potlatch since, as Mauss recalled, ‘rivalries of generosity’ were the occasion for insults but also for hospitality. Between relatives and allies there were exchanges of obligations but also of jokes. Taboos and etiquette did not rule out irreverence. These jokes performed obvious functions . . . but it was clear that ‘joking relationships correspond to reciprocal rights and that when these rights are unequal they correspond to a religious inequality” (p. 244).

Like the gift, joking was a way to complicate Uncle Emile Durkheim’s monolithic understanding of society: Mauss “wanted to counter the (Durkheimian) image of a society functioning as a ‘homogeneous mass’ with the image of a more complex collectivity, groups and subgroups that overlap, intersect, and fuse together. These were certainly communities, but there was also a system of reciprocity between them” (245).