Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) never completed his Doctoral thesis on prayer. Yet his scarcely mentioned introduction (Books I and II) of 176 pages and privately printed in 1909, can be seen as some of his most important work. His argument that much of prayer is a social act will be of great interest to anthropologists, sociologists and theologians.
Here, the first English translation to be published, is preceded by a general introduction by W.S.F.Pickering and finally a specific commentary on Mauss’s use of ethnographic material.
Table of Content
Frontispiece
Acknowledgements
Presentation, Notes and Referencing
Introduction to an Unfinished Work
W.S.F. Pickering
Marcel Mauss: On Prayer
Translated by Susan Leslie
Book I
Chapter 1. General Introduction
Chapter 2.
Chapter 3. Initial Definition
Book II The Nature of Elementary Oral Rites
Chapter 1. The History of the Question and Delineation of the Subject
Chapter 2. Do Prayers Exist in Australia?
Chapter 3. The Formulae of the Intichiuma
Notes
Edited by Robert Parkin
Mauss’s Review of Segond’s book on Prayer
Translated by Susan Leslie
Some Concluding Anthropological Reflections
Howard Morphy
Index
About the author
W. S. F. Pickering (1922-2016), was a retired Lecturer in sociology from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1991, he helped found the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford.
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