The French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) is best known as an ethnologist and historian of religion.

Marcel Mauss was born in Épinal on May 10, 1872, to a pious Jewish family against whose traditions he rebelled as a young man. He attended the University of Bordeaux, where he studied philosophy; one of his professors was his uncle, the sociologist Émile Durkheim. Although Mauss did not receive a degree, he placed high in the national Agrégation competition in 1895. He then studied history, philology, and religion at the University of Paris and, in 1897-1898, took a study tour including Oxford, where he met Edward Tylor, who was considered to be the founder of anthropology.

Mauss taught Hindu and Buddhist philosophy at the University of Paris from 1900 to 1902, when he succeeded to a chair in the history of religion of primitive peoples. He taught there until 1930 and...