Mauss Seasonal variations of the Eskimo: a study in social morphology

Mauss, Marcel 1979 [c1950] Seasonal variations of the Eskimo: a study in social morphology, Translated, by James J. Fox. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Mauss is interested in societies seasonal variations in order to think the intensity of social interactions can be maintained equally at all times. To do this he proposes to study the seasonal variations and make a detailed analysis of a case a study that manifests this in an extreme way (following the idea of Mills that a good case analysis can point to a better understanding of general processes than a repetition of superficial observations). He analyses inuit seasonal variation not as a result of the environmental conditions (in thie he is critiquing environmental determinism) and even he takes this into account as an affecting factor. He shows how the social life of inuit, even though it has some general social patterns that are maintained through the year, changes dramatically form one season to the other. Not just the economic structure and the demographic organization of groups in space changes in the seasons but mostly the social activities involved in each period, if winter is a time of gathering of different groups in long houses it is also a time of intense religious activity, of interaction among family units. This also implies that winter has particular social regulations, kinship reorganization, that differ form the one in the summer when family units disperse in order to hunt, intergroup contact is rare and ritual activity declines. In a way that seems even more modern than structuralism, Mauss recognizes that this society has no one single pattern of organization and not an homogeneous set of interactions in which each person has a stable role throughout time, but rather that the groups as a collective have moments of intensity and moments of dispersion. In this the territory of the unit cannot be simply mapped in space but has to be temporalyzed in two overlapping forms of disposition.This corresponds no just to environmental patterns but to use contemporary concepts, with the way social space is differently produced here is not one single organization of space neither complementary uses, but rather a social recreation of space in different moments. There is something of a structural organization at each moment, and some functionalism in the way each season is a particular social organization responding to environmental constraints. There is also a tension between economic determinism and the complexity and multicausality of particular social configurations, however the very question about sociality intensity poses very contemporary problematic in which social activity could be regarded more of a constant becoming than of something stable.

In this model movement is not a centre of interest, of course the shift form one type of organization to the other implies translation and also hunting trips make people travel around very long distances. He mentions the impressive knowledge people have of the vast extension of territory that can go beyond the limits of the places where a person has personally traveled. He also mentions works that have concentrated in the traveling technology of the inuits.