Notes on the translation - Marion Breteau - June 2020

This translation is part of the lecture "Anthropology of Emotions", Department of Social

and Behavioral Sciences of the American University of Kuwait, fall semester 2020-2021.

I leaned on the original "Obligatory expression of feelings" online version realised by Jean-
Marie Tremblay, Professor of sociology, Cégep, Chicoutimi, retrieved from: http://
classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/mauss_marcel/essais_de_socio/T3_expression_sentiments/
expression_sentiments.pdf

More than a pedagogic tool, this document has been thought to enrich the English-
written academic corpus with crucial French references in the field of feelings and emotions.

Marcel Mauss, considered as the father of the modern French anthropological thought, has
been one of the first, if not the only one, to lean towards the issue of emotions in this discipline. The
absence of translation, as well as the historical context of his work, are sufficient to remind the
long, still current, lack of interest for emotions in Anthropology. In France particularly, the
discipline has known divided currents that hushed up the possibility of such
interest. Indeed, anthropologists were influenced by the imposing effervescence of
positivism, following the founding-fathers of this discipline-to-be.

Although the "Obligatory expression of feelings" shows signs of such classical understandings, and
as the nephew and student of Durkheim, Mauss's article marks an exception. Later, litterature-
like approaches and the rise of structuralism as observed through Lévi-Strauss's work, for
whom "pulsions and emotions don’t explain anything" (Lévi-Strauss, Le Totémisme
aujourd'hui, 1962, p. 103), might have been another war horse for any possible
emergence of interest for emotions. This attempt of translation aims at replacing the
importance of Mauss's article in the larger history of one can now call Anthropology of
emotions, affects or feelings (its denomination giving another interesting food for thought).

Reflecting this particular historical context, my main concern was to preserve the author's
writing style. The article, in which the first person plural, often interrupted by comas, long
sentences, and double negation prevail, is written in a kind of disjointed, sometimes letter-writing
style. This aspect shows an invitation to debate, as Mauss even explicits in the text. This
also demonstrates a capacity to put assumptions into question, with a constant desire for
interdisciplinarity. Even though some parts of sentences have been inversed or reduced for a better
comprehension, I had my heart set on transcribe these different aspects as best as I could.

As surprising as the absence of translation of this text can be, the version I offer has been
written before the discovery of Chris Garces and Alexander Jones's article "Mauss Redux: From
Warfare’s Human Toll to L’homme total" (2009, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 1, pp.
279–310). Addressing the first World War's impact on Mauss's work, this paper ends with a
translation of "The Obligatory expression of feelings". I subsequently followed some choices of
vocabulary for the sake of mutual understanding, such as the use of "greetings by tears" for "salut par
les larmes".

As for the vocabulary of emotions, "sentiments" has been replaced by "feelings"; "pleurs" by
"tears" and "weeping"; "cris", "hurlements" by "cries" and "howls", according to the context
of their evocation. In the original version, "émotions" is distinguished from
"sentiments" (feelings) twice, but with no particular explanation. This differenciation needs to be
explored in more depth.
 Marcel Mauss, « The obligatory expression of feelings » (1921) 1

Translation realised by Marion Breteau, Assistant Professor of Anthropology,

American University of Kuwait

The obligatory expression of feelings 1

(1921)

This communication is related to M. G. Dumas's work on the Larmes 2 , and to the

note I sent him on this subject. I was suggesting him to observe the extreme
generality of this obligatory and moral use of tears. These are used
particularly as a way of greeting. Indeed, one can find this very spread use in
what is convenient to call the primitive populations, above all

in Australia, in Polynesia; as studied in Northern and Southern America by M.

Friederici, who called it the Tränengruss, or greeting by tears.3

I intend to demonstrate through the study of Australian funeral oral ritual that, in
numerous, sufficiently homogeneous, and sufficiently primitive in the full sense of the
term, groups of populations, M. Dumas's indications and mine have given about
weeping, are valid for many other expressions of feelings. These are not only
weeping, but many other kinds of oral expressions of feelings that are essentially, not
exclusively psychological, or physiological, but social phenomenons, and highly
charged with a sign of non-spontaneity, and the most perfect obligation. We will stay
here, if you do not mind, in the field of funerary oral ritual, including howls,
conversations, songs. Although we could extend our research to all types of
other rites, manual in particular, in the same funerary cults and among the
same Australian. Some indications, to terminate, will suffice however to prolong
the question in a larger domain. It has actually already been studied by our late
Robert Hertz4 and Émile Durkheim5 about the same funerary cults that the
first tried to explain, while the other used to demonstrate the collective
aspect of the expiatory ritual. Durkheim even argued, in opposition to

1 « L'expression obligatoire des sentiments (rituels oraux funéraires australiens) », Journal de

psychologie, 18, 1921.
2 Journal de psychologie , 1920; cf. « Le rire », Journal de psychologie , 1921, p. 47 « Le langage du
rire. »
3
Der Tränengruss der Indianer, Leipzig, 1907. Cf. Durkheim, Année sociologique, 11, p. 469.
4
« Représentation collective de la mort », Année sociologique, X, p. 18 s.
5 Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse , p. 567 s.
 Marcel Mauss, « The obligatory expression of feelings » (1921) 2

M. F.-B. Jevons1, that the mourning rule is not the spontaneous expression of
individual emotions. We will take up this demonstration with some details, and
about oral rites.

Oral funerary rites in Australia are composed of:

1. weepings and howls, often melodic and rhythmed;

2. often sung voceros ;
3. real spiritism sessions;
4. conversations with the the dead

Let us set aside the two last categories for a moment. This negligence is
without inconvenience. Such death cults beginnings are quite evolved facts, and
quite few typical. Besides, their collective aspect is extraordinarily striking; these
are public, well settled ceremonies, related to the vendetta ritual and to
the determination of responsabilities2. Thus, among the Tully river tribes3, this
very ritual takes place in funerary dances accompanied by a long
chanted developemnt. The dead is assisting to it, in person, through his dried
corpse that is object to a kind of primitive necropsy. And a considerable
audience, all the camp, even all the part of the tribe, gathers and sings
indefinitely to give rhythm to the dances:
Yakai! ngga wingir, Winge
ngenu na chaimban,
Kunapanditi warre marigo.

Translation: « I wonder where he [the koi, bad spirit] met you, we will extract
your viscera and see. » Particurlary, on this melody and with dancing steps, four
magicians have a old man recognize - and extract from the corpse - the enchanted
reason that led to death. These rituals are repeated indefinitely, until divination,
ending by other series of dancing steps, including one in which the widow, making a
step to the right and one to the left, waving branches, hunts the koi over her
husband's corpse4. In the meanwhile, the rest of the audience ensures the dead that
vengeance will be carried out. This is just one example. One only has to look, to
conclude on these extremely developed rites, on the way they result in extremely
interesting practices for the sociologist as well as for the psychologist. In a very
wide range of Central, Southern, Northern and North-Eastern Australian tribes, the
dead does not only give an illusory answer to this tribal conclave that interrogates
him: the collectivity does hear him

1 Introduction to the History of Religion, p. 46 s. - Sir J. G Frazer, The Belief in Immortality and the
Worship of the Dead, 1913, p. 147, sees well that these rites are regulated by custom, although
he gives them a purely animist, intellectualist explanation.
2 Cf. Fauconnet, La Responsabilité, 1920, p. 236 s.
3 W. Roth, Bulletin (Queensland Ethnography) 9, p. 390, 391. Cf. « Superstition, Magie, and
Medicine », Bulletin 3, p. 26, n˚ 99, s.
4 The word Ka! refers either to a spirit, either to all of the wicked spirits, including male magicians
and demons.
 Marcel Mauss, « The obligatory expression of feelings » (1921) 3

answer physically1; some other times, it is veritably about an experience as one

might call in our discipline, that of the collective pendulum: carried on the shoulders
of the soothsayers or the coming avengers of blood, the corpse answers their
questions by leading them towards the murderer. As sufficiently illustrated in these
examples, these complex and evolved oral rites only show feelings and collective
ideas at play, they even have the extreme advantage to show the group, the
collectivity in action, even in interaction.

The simpler rites we will adress now, such as weepings and chants, do not
hold the the same exact public and social aspect, as they lack any aspect of
individual expression of a feeling apparently felt as purely individual. The
question of their spontaneity has been raised by the observers for a long time so
much that it almost became an ethnographic cliché among them. They always
have stories on how the group - especially that of the women - begins howling,
weeping, chanting, invectiving on the evil-one and conjuring the dead's soul,
among trivial occupations, ordinary conversations, suddenly, in certain hours, or
dates, or on precise occasions. After this explosion of sorrow and temper, the
camp returns back to normal, except for some grief-holders appointed for this
task.

Firstly, these weepings and chants are issued in group. Generally, they are not
emitted individually but by the camp. The number of facts to mention are
endless. Let us consider one, a bit summarized, for its regularity itself. The "sob to
the dead" is very common in South-Eastern Queensland. It lasts as long as the time
between the first and the second burial. It is assigned to precise hours and times.
During ten minutes approximately at sunrise and sunset, each bereaved camp
howled, cried and lamented. When camps met, a kind of howl and weeping
contest occured in these tribes. These could be heard from kilometers away, on the
occasion of markets, nuts picking (bunya), or initiations.

Not only times and conditions of the collective expression of feelings are
regulated but also the agents of this expression. These do not howl and shout
to translate there anger, or their sorrow solely, but because they are in charge of it
and obliged to do it. First, fact-kinship, as we conceive it, such as father and
son for example, do not govern the manifestation of the bereavement, but
right-kinship. If kinship is based on uterine descent, the father or the son
do not participate much to one another's bereavement. As a curious evidence,
among the Warramunga, a center tribe of mostly masculine descent, the
uterine family is replenished especially for the funeral ritual. As another
striking case, cognates, simple allies, are obliged to express more sorrow,
most often during simple delegates' exchanges or for heritages2.

1 Ex. a very nice description of one of these sessions in Western Victoria. Dawson, Aborigines of
South Austr., p. 663; Yuin (South Eastern New Wales). Howitt, South Eastern Tribes, 422,
to mention old, previously attested facts only.
2 Brothers-in-law howl when they receive the deceased's properties (Warramunga), Spencer
and Gillen, Northern Tribes, p. 522. Cf. Spencer, Tribes of Northern Territory, p. 147,
for a striking case of ritual performanes and economic intertribal exchanges on death
occasions among the
 Marcel Mauss, « The obligatory expression of feelings » (1921) 4

The demontration of this purely obligatory nature of sorrow, anger and fear,
does not go without considering it as not being common to all these siblings. Not
only particular individuals weep, howl and chant, but also do they belong to a
single sex, in right and fact. In opposition to religious cults stricto sensu, that
are reserved to men in Australia, funeral cults are almost entirely devolved to
women1. Authors agree on this point and this fact is established for all Australia.
One does not need to recall endless references about a perfectly described and
established fact. Daughters, sisters from masculine descent, etc. are women
determined by some right relationships, and play this role in the full sense of the
word2. We know that these usually correspond to mothers3 (let us remind
that this is a group-kinship country), sisters4, and the widow above all5.
Most of the time, these weepings, sobs and chants accompany very crual
soakings these women or one of them inflict to themselves, and we know that
these practices are inflicted to nurture the very pain and weepings.
Women, and some in particular, do not merely howl and chant, they also have to
satisfy a certain amount of howls. Taplin tells us there was a «
conventionnal quantity of weepings and howls », among the Narrinyerri. Let us
notice that this conventionnality and this regularity do not exclude sincerity.
Not more than in our own funeral habits. All of this is social and obligatory,
violent and natural at once; research and expression of pain go hand in hand. We
will see why shortly.

Northern Australian Kakadu. Demonstrated sorrow became a simple economic and juridical
matter.
1 It is not worth explaining here why women are the essential agents of the funeral ritual. These
questions are of exclusive sociological matter, this religious division of labour is probably
related to some factors. However, for the sake of clarity, and to make understand the
unprecedented importance of these feelings from social origin, let us indicate some of them: 1.
the woman is a minoris resistentiae being, of whom one is in charge of and who is in charge
of strenuous rites, such as the stranger (cf. Durkheim, Formes élémentaires, p. 572); she is
actually normally considered as a stranger herself, she is in charge of bullying such as the group
used to inflict to all of its members before (see agony collective rites, Warramunga R. Hertz, «
Représentation coll. ... », p. 184 : cf. Strehlow, Aranda Stämme, etc., IV, II, p. 18, p. 25,
where women do not gather in a pile on the dead anymore); 2. the woman is more particularly
an evil-thing related being; her menses, her magic, her mistakes, make her dangerous. She is
somehow held responsible for her husband's death. One will find the curious story of an
Australian woman in Roth, « Structure of the Kokoyimidir Language (Cap Bedford) », Bulletin 3,
p. 24, cf. Bulletin 9, p. 341, inaccurate translation p. 374. Cf. Spencer and Gillen, Native
Tribes, p. 504. 3. in a majority of tribes, it is particularly forbidden for the man and the warrior
to howl under any pretext, especially for pain, moreover in case of ritual tortures.
2 The lists of women have only been completed by the most recent and the best ethnographers:
see Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes, p. 506, 507; Northern Tribes, p. 520; Tribes of Northern
Territory, p. 255. (Mothers, women from a particular matrimonial category) Strehlow, Aranda
Stämme, IV, II, cf. p. 25 (Loritja).
3 This is evidenced by the texts of the previous note.
4 Ex. Grey, Journals of Discovery, II, p. 316, elder women chant « our cadet brother », etc. (W.
Austr.).
5 The widow chants and weeps for months among the Tharumba; the Euahlayi; in the well known
Melbourne's tribe Bunuroug in Yurra, a « dirge » was chanted by the woman during the ten days
of mourning.
 Marcel Mauss, « The obligatory expression of feelings » (1921) 5

Before that, another proof of the social nature of these weepings and feelings
can be extracted from the study of their nature and content.

Firstly, as inarticulate as weepings and howls can be, they still are somehow musical,
rhythmed most of the time, and chanted in unison by women. Stereo, rhythm, unison, all
these things are both physiological and sociological. A melodious, rhytmed and
modulated howl can remain quite primitive. Thus, at least in Center, Eastern and Western
Australia, these are a long, esthetic and consacreted, hence social ejaculation, at least by
these two characteristics. This can also go further and evoluate: these rhytmic howls can
become chorus, or eschylian-like interjections, cutting and rhythming more developed
chants. In other cases, they form alernate choirs, including sometimes men with some
women. However, even if they are not chanted, these howls hold a different signification
than a simple interjection without earshot, because they are sung collectively. These have
their efficiency. We know now that the bàubàu howl, sung in two sharp notes by Arunta
and Loritja female mourners in unison, have the value of a αποτροπαιον, a conjuration,
as one might translate inexactly, or expulsion of maleficence more precisely.

As for the chants; they are of same nature. Needless to mention these are
rhythmed, chanted - they would not be what they are if they were not -, thus
strongly molded into a collective shape. But this is also the case for their content.
Australian, or more precisely Australian women have their own female
"vocerers", mourners and cursers, chanting grief, death, flaming and blasting
and bewitching the enemy who caused death, always magical. We are in possession
of many texts of their chants. Some are quite primitive, they barely surpass
exclamation, affirmation, interrogation: « Where is my nephew the only one
I have. » This one is very widespread. « Why did you abandon me here? » -
then the woman adds: My husband [or my son] is dead! » One can notice two
themes: a kind of interrogation, and a simple affirmation. This litterature has barely
exceed these two limits, the call to or of the dead on one side, the story of the
dead on the other. Even the most beautiful and longest voceros of which we have
the text are limited to this conversation and to this kind of childlike epic.
Nothing elegial or lyrical, barely a touch of feeling, only once in
the description of the land of the dead. However, these are generally simple,
filthy profanity, vulgar cursing against magicians, or ways to deny the
group's responsibility. Overall the feeling is not excluded, but the
description of the facts and juridical ritual themes prevail, even in the most
developed chants.

Two words to conclude, in a psychological, or let us say,

interpsychological point of view.

We demonstrated it above : a considerable category of oral expressions of

feelings and emotions are nothing less than collective, in a very large number of
populations spread over a whole continent. Let us say immediately that this
collective aspect does not adversely affect the intensity of feelings, on the
contrary. Let us remind the pile formed on the dead by the Warramunga, the Kaitish, the
Arunta.

However, all these collective, simultaneous expressions, of moral value and

obligatory force of individual and collective feelings, are more than simple
gestures, these are signs of understood expressions, in short, a language. These
 Marcel Mauss, « The obligatory expression of feelings » (1921) 6

weepings are similar to phrases and words. These have to be said, but if they have
to be said, this is because the whole group understands them.

Hence one does more than demonstrate feelings, one demonstrates them to
the others, since these have to be demonstrated to them. They are demonstrated to
oneself by being expressed to the others and on behalf of the others.

This is essentially a symbolic.

We share here the very delighting and very curious theories that M.
Head, M. Mourgue, and the most knowledgeable psychologists
propose naturally symbolic functions of the mind.

And we have a fieldwork, facts, on which psychologists, physiologists, and

sociologists can and have to find one another.